An Amazing multimedia package — — Hollow Documentary

This media package is mainly about the rise and fall of McDowell County. I found it amazing because it is really different from the websites we usually see. It shows us a complete and fascinating story about the history and people’s living condition in McDowell County using multimedia.
McDowell County is located in the U.S. state of West Virginia. It is famous for its coal mining industry. But in the 1950s, the industry declined and resulted in a huge declination in popularity and also caused serious poverty.
The website divides the whole story into five chapters and presents McDowell County from different angles. Users can scroll down to see the content and also switch between two sections. It uses “scroll down” as a kind of interaction so that users are able to adjust the speed of content switching. As a result, people won’t miss anything though it looks like a video when you keep scrolling.

I think it is indeed a good example of combining different multimedia tools. In this piece we can see data, quotes, animated pictures, audios and short videos working together as a whole with the control of users themselves. For example, the population of McDowell County is showing on the screen during most of the time. Thus people can easily see how the incidents affect the population. What’s more, in order to show details of the living condition in McDowell County, the designer puts links to another short video on the screen. If the readers are interested in that particular parts of the story, they can click it and look for more detailed information.

As for improvements, I think it is a little bit too long to some extends. I understand it is a complicated stories with a lot of details to show, but making people keep scrolling for almost fifteen minutes is not that user-friendly. In addition, sometimes there are too many contents at one page and it might be a little confusing for readers because it is hard to concentrate. Personally I would recommend using masking to make those unimportant backgrounds less stand out.
In general, it is an outstanding piece and I believe that there are lots of ideas I can learn from it.