What is the Efficiency Gap? Part 1
Before animating the story...
During my #DowJones #ChicasPoderosas #ICFJ fellowship at WNYC, I developed a short explainer video using motion graphics. This video was destined to illustrate an upcoming story by one of the reporters based on the formula of calculating wasted votes, also known as the efficiency gap. This is the beginning of the process…
Brief
First things first. We needed to define the main objectives of this animation. By setting up a ‘skeleton’ of the main points we needed to get across, we got a good base before jamming the script together. In journalism specifically, it is a bit tricky to come up with a script destined for motion graphics. Reporters are more familiar with writing stories and sometimes these can be very long; let’s just say some of them are not too keen with summarizing them in a ‘script kinda way’. This is why the brief is very important, so that we can have a strong guideline for designing the animation.
I sat down with Jenny Ye and Rhyne Piggott from the Data News Team at WNYC, and we created a pretty basic google doc, so that we could add notes or edit at any time.
Script
The script is the part where we needed to communicate the most with the person writing the story, in this case, the reporters and editors. The difference between the brief and the script is that the brief is just the basic information of the project and objectives. With the script we are already entering into pre-production mode because we are writing the story in the order it will be animated.
At this stage of the process, we needed to get the most information, data & knowledge about the efficiency gap. It was very important to learn about the story, ask questions, read. I considered myself an outsider on this gerrymandering and efficiency gap story. I was very much out of the loop. I found that reading, watching videos, animations, interviews, discussing with people, looking at diagrams (even watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver), helped me get closer with the subject. But I could say that what helped the most was having an expert alongside to answer your questions and help you out. Teamwork is the answer! For this project, I felt like this part in specific took the longest. Later on, I learned it was because the subject itself is very hard to explain. I mean, we’re talking about a mathematical formula-applied to a political concept. Our challenge was to explain it visually in 90 seconds. Cool :)
Storyboard
I then took each part of the script and deconstructed it, so that it was easier to divide the story by parts and try to visualize each one individually. I hadn’t yet been given the final script at this point, just a rough draft of the way the story was going to develop. In order not to waste any more time waiting for the final script, I started sketching some ideas that I later digitally drew using my tablet and Adobe Photoshop. I continued to organize my sketches in a chronological order and played around with them to explore different ways the images could transition into each other. In my opinion, this sketching stage should be very rough and fast, not putting too much detail into it. Allow yourself to make mistakes and experiment :) I feel like this stage of the process helped me work at a faster pace and allowed me to make adjustments without spending too much time with meticulous details. Being here in the newsroom also helped getting quick feedback about the images I was creating. They also gave me tips on stuff like: use of elements in imagery, if the images were the right ones or if someone could misinterpret them… they even gave me ideas on what illustrations to make for certain parts of the story.
Digitalization
After putting together a decent script, it’s time to work on the animatic. Using the sketches, you can simulate the way all the elements are gonna move around and transition. For this project, time was not in our favor, so I went straight into the digital version of the storyboard. By having illustrations already drawn with my tablet, I was able to work on a basic sequence using the audio to time out each scene’s duration. This is definitely not the ideal, but I found it to be very handy when you don’t have much time, specially because you need to save the most time for animating. Rhyne helped me a lot in editing the illustrations and giving me solutions or ideas when I needed them. He sat by my side and this made the communication and collaboration way easier and faster than sharing emails or chatting online.
