More than a Garnish

Someone calls 911 after hearing gunshots. A police officer responds and quickly finds a man in his car in a parking lot. The cop pulls him over, proceeds to the driver's side window, and questions him. As they're talking, the suspect abruptly takes off and the cop engages in a pursuit down winding country lanes in excess of 100 MPH. We know this account is true…it was all captured on the police car's dashboard camera.

The police video shows the pursuit like a made-for-TV cop show. The suspect tries to run the officer off the road a couple of times. They swerve, weaving back and forth. The suspect drives down another road and makes a sudden U-turn. The cop does the same. Eventually, the cop gets stuck in the mud. Moments later, he finds the vehicle but discovers the car's driver has fled on foot. The officer shines his flashlight into a dark field. Where did he go? Now out of range of the video camera, he can't be seen. Then the sound of gunfire rings out…The officer is still not visible at this time, but the firing of seventeen shots from an assault rifle is audible on the tape. Glass is shattered. You hear nothing but gunfire disturbing the otherwise peaceful country night.

Moments later, the cop comes back into view on the video. He's been shot. He calls for backup. When additional officers arrive they find a dying cop; a bullet got past his bulletproof vest. The police eventually catch their suspect, but he claims he was only acting in self-defense. He said the cop had his gun pointed right at him and he was afraid he was going to be shot, so he fired first.

A few months later, lawyers representing the deceased officer hired a company that produces forensic animations, three-dimensional (3D) visualizations of an expert's scientific opinion. They poured over the video and ballistics obtained by the police searching for clues. Using laser scanning and other technologies, they reconstructed the incident. They determined it was the ninth of seventeen bullets that killed the cop. Their high-tech analysis took data, analyzed trajectory paths, and made a 3D model that definitively proved where the suspect and cop were at the time of the shooting. The suspect wasn't facing the cop as he said. He was kneeling beside a house in the dark, hidden from view. An analysis of the lighting and visual range for the officer clearly indicates there is no way the cop could have seen the shooter.

Now, try to explain all that to a jury.

This story is complicated. I reduced the plot to the most essential facts, omitting details without altering the outcome, but a jury would have heard all the facts. That's a lot of information for a group of people not schooled in criminology. Jason Fries, CEO of 3D-Forensic, says, “Trying to get this kind of story across to a jury verbally would have been impossible.”

A computer animation was produced to illustrate exactly what happened. The animators, working together with other experts, reproduced what the officer could see from his vantage point and what the suspect could see from where he crouched. With the use of this new technology, the jury was able to understand the complexities of this case by seeing an accurate reenactment. They came to understand that the officer's death wasn't self-defense, but an execution. The suspect was convicted and now sits on death row.

Using animation software such as 3D Studio Max and Maya, “reconstructionists” put together a visualization of how the shoot-out occurred so judge and jury could make an informed decision by envisioning the facts.⁴ 3D-Forensic shows what would be difficult to explain verbally. The data were made visual and then turned into a multimedia product that told a story.

The visuals made the learning process easier—that's straightforward. If you can see data, instead of just hear or read about it, naturally you're going to understand a topic faster and more effectively. Not only did the animation show the data, but it turned it into a narrative. By developing a reenactment, they visually told the story of how the officer was brutally slain. Stories, as we discovered in Chapter 18, make content more understandable and more memorable. Put stories together with good visuals and you're golden. Talk about a win-win situation for the prosecutors. Not only were they able to “show” rather than just “tell” during the trial, they were able to weave the data into a compelling, plausible narrative that was certain to capture the jury's attention.

GOOD MULTIMEDIA IS MORE THAN A GARNISH

“One of the keys to producing good graphics is to have some sort of focus,” Alberto Cairo, author of The Functional Art, tells me, “Don't treat graphics like a dumpster where you throw a bunch of data…. You have to try somehow to categorize the information and create a proper interface or a narrative. Organize your graphics…as if they were pieces in the story.” Your graphics need just as much structure behind it as does writing. Without a proper backbone, your visuals will waffle without support.

Cairo spoke to me specifically about his work in infographics and visualization, but what he offered holds true for all graphics and similarly with multimedia-driven communication products. Currently teaching information graphics and visualization at the University of Miami's School of Communication, Cairo is a journalist by training. He attributes many of his accomplishments in this growing field to his background. As a journalist, Cairo wants to tell stories with his visuals. His creations just don't hang out there in nothingness. They have a purpose, not to adorn, but to provide a learning opportunity.

The quality and usefulness of graphics and multimedia should be approached with journalistic sensibilities. Unfortunately, new multimedia adopters don't always think out coherent strategies to marry new digital-age tools to their communication efforts. Their attempts to spice up content often results in the inclusion of sparkling features that bring little or no value to the text. Seeing multimedia as a new form of communication—and not just a few supplementary enhancements tacked on to an otherwise conventional piece—is critical to make these new wonder tools more than a “garnish.”

Michael Zimbalist, who founded and runs the New York Times Company's research and development operations, says his organization is moving past using graphics and multimedia like an olive or lime. He regards “Snow Fall,” the now famous series (see Chapter 3), as one of the first news features “that embedded multimedia in a really organic way.” He told me the New York Times had been working hard over the better part of a decade to build the talent and expertise necessary to deliver blockbuster multimedia features. It looks like their efforts are paying dividends.

Zimbalist believes the New York Times is helping originate a distinctive new communications form that gets us past our feeble first attempts at multimedia. “We had brought over digital technologies but were still tethered to the linear format of the print story. They were like garnishes, off to the side. Click here for a slide show…Click here for interactive graphic…Click here for a video…‘Snow Fall at Tunnel Creek’ showed how these new tools could be organically embedded into the linear flow. That's what made it stand out. It felt like a new form.”

For a couple of decades, communicators have been trying to get a handle on how to use new digital tools effectively. Many of our efforts haven't been successful. For multimedia to reach its potential as a dynamic means to educate and decomplicate, we must be more strategic in the ways we use it. Ironically, these tools that we're using to help us make content more interesting are often only a disruption for our audiences.

Distracting visuals and features, adult learning expert Ruth Clark notes, often don't serve much of a function to facilitate learning. Clark found that learners actually do better perusing “basic versions” of documents rather than those that are graphic loaded.⁵ But that's because so many documents are cluttered with visuals that are more decorative than informative. Images we think add value to a document or instructional piece may not be effective and can actually deter audiences from comprehending the message.