KILLING KENNEDY

THE CASE STUDY

Ambition. Failure. Adversity. Love. Loss. Conviction. What forces drive one man to be president and another to become his assassin? That’s the question we sought to answer when the National Geographic Channel tasked us with creating an online companion site for their new movie, Killing Kennedy. We created a cross-platform, multi-device, scroll-based parallax site that pushed HTML5 to its limits while exploring the two lives at the center of one of America’s most shocking events—the assassination of John F. Kennedy by Lee Harvey Oswald. Featuring hundreds of photos, videos, graphics and statistics, the site tells the life stories of two men whose lives are forever connected by one terrible moment in American history.

THE PROCESS

For KennedyandOswald.com, our goal was to make the dividing line between creativity and technology indistinguishable. We focused on the user experience first, creating an interaction mechanic that’s also a narrative device. A top priority throughout the project was to not just create another parallax site, but a responsive, cross-platform experience where the scrolling functionality actually intertwined with the story.

The process of this project was like no other. From sketches to wires and storyboards, we had to come up with a way to visualize this content. Hence, the "beautiful mind" room-- as it was known in the trenches-- became an experimental, collaboration space where ideas and talents collided. Tears, laughs, a few bloodied knuckles, a couple births, and probably a few break ups, went into this machine.