In Practice

Some of the world's most important stories are also the most challenging to document and communicate clearly. Even in a camera-abundant world, countless stories lack documentary evidence of events. In conflict zones and humanitarian crises, the best witnesses are often the most vulnerable people to put on camera.

These are storytelling problems that documentary filmmakers and animators have always faced. The tools change, but the core tension remains: how do you make the invisible visible, protect the vulnerable, counter reductive imagery, and bring clarity to complexity, all while maintaining the trust of an audience that needs to know what they are watching is honest?

Animation has long been a go-to solution for bringing testimony to life and explaining abstract concepts, but budget constraints often limited the visual aesthetic to simple 2D and sketch styles with basic shape animations. Incorporating AI video generation into animation pipelines changes what's achievable. Teams can quickly iterate and align stakeholders around a consistent visual direction from the start. Visual styles that were previously impossible at existing budgets become viable. And it opens up creative approaches to abstract concepts that were previously out of reach.

Some stories are too large, too interconnected, or too multifaceted to fit into a single linear narrative. Global systems, cultural histories, investigative data, and interconnected crises all resist the simplicity of a single thread.

Linear storytelling can force topics and themes into artificial simplicity. The storyteller picks one thread and follows it, leaving the audience with a coherent but incomplete picture. Important context gets cut. Connections between systems go unexplored. The audience receives a story, but not the understanding that would let them engage with the issue on their own terms.

Non-linear and interactive storytelling offers a different model. Instead of choosing the path for the audience, you build the territory and let them explore it. The story still has structure, editorial judgment, and narrative craft. But the audience has agency. They choose what to explore, how deep to go, and which connections matter to them.

AI-assisted development enables early-stage prototyping of non-linear storytelling experiences, creating real feedback loops between creators, stakeholders, and audiences before the financial commitment to a full development cycle. This lowers the barrier for more stories to be approached in the interactive formats best suited to telling them.

The Terror of War: When the AP needed to present the visual evidence of their year-long investigation into questions surrounding the provenance of the famed Terror of War photograph, they faced a near-impossible deadline. There would be only one week between final reviewed content and public launch. To meet that timeline, we used AI-assisted development tools to build a component-based architecture that allowed for swift, flexible implementation once the final content was ready.