PROCESS

The process of creating the animations for this documentary was far more fluid than on previous projects I’ve worked on. To begin with, there was no storyboard, unusual for me, I know. But the project was too dynamic for this to be achievable within the timeframe. As the case is ongoing and under appeal, new evidence continued to surface, and the deeper the team dug, the more came to light.

One of the key moments for me came when I worked with the three main witness accounts, piecing them together into a single sequence. A life was tragically lost on the night of March 16th, a fact the team kept at the heart of the project throughout. But as far as I could see, the person incarcerated could not have been responsible. By using animation to reconstruct the scene based on witness testimonies, it became apparent that the positions of people, vehicles, and even the timeline of events had either been skewed or potentially rewritten to fit a different narrative. When I presented an animatic mapping everyone’s movement, the inconsistencies were clear to the whole team.

I learned a great deal from this project. More importantly, it underscored something deeply troubling: how narratives around atrocities can be reshaped to serve political agendas rather than justice. It’s a scary reminder that the power of storytelling can both conceal and reveal the truth.