Cronulla Riots

Exploring new methodologies

During the conception stages of the project, our team developed a unique design language that utilised storyboard sketching and interaction models to explore a wide range of creative and unique approaches to the complex narrative. We quickly prototyped on paper and explored in parallel with the content development from our researchers within the Northern Pictures production team. It was an opportunity to explore unconventional approaches and tools applied to an epic and multifaceted story. The project also explored unconventional relationships between producers, placing a traditional documentary crew within a bold innovation process. Our developers applied Natural Language Processing to datasets, including thousands of pages of official police reports, surfacing editorial ideas that would not have been otherwise possible. Narrative-building applications such as Twine, usually the preserve of game developers, were used to quickly prototype interactive story ideas and communicate to stakeholders the relationships between the core documentary and its interactive moments.