A multimedia project which takes a look at the lives of many Venezuelans and how they haven’t given up hope despite food shortages, power outages, inflation, and a government on the brink of collapse. Video journalist Jon Gerberg and photographer Michael Robinson Chavez captured the strength and resilience seen in so many people from across Venezuela and weaved the stories together through audio, video and photo.

This project explored ways in which we can present the user with video, audio, text and photos all in one. The challenge was to engage the viewer with stunning visuals without overwhelming him/her and preventing technical or user interface issues to become the reason for leaving the story. Throughout the development and design of this project, I came across a few roadblocks as well as some new solutions.

• Roadblock: make a scrolling experience seem natural to user without slowing the browser down from the amount of content.
  • Solution: added lazy loading to each slide. Also added logic to only display the current block along with the previous and next block
• Roadblock: Audio
  • Solution: include an ‘enable audio’ button at the beginning of the story along with a button that lets the user mute or unmute audio at any point in the piece
• Roadblock: Closed captions
  • Solution: implement a VTT parser.