Inside the Haiti Earthquake – Insidedisaster.com

I went through a very interesting experience this morning when I visited « Insidedisaster.com« , a website where you can actually experience the way Haitians, humanitarians and journalists are dealing with the aftermath of the last earthquake. Produced by PTV Productions‘ Executive producers Andrea Nemtin and Ian Dunbar and by Internet Director Katie McKenna, InsideDisaster.com is neither a news multimedia production, nor a complete corporate assignment but a mix of both enhanced by a simulation game.

The platform is divided into two different part. The first one looks like a traditional website where you can find informations about the earthquake, the response of the humanitarian teams, the recovery process, but also informations humanitarian work and a quiz to evaluate your profile. (here)

The second one is a flash based website, built like a simulation/game, to provide a more immersive experience of what is the life in « Port au Prince » nowadays. As stated on the about page, Insidedisaster.com is

an interactive educational website about the Haiti earthquake and humanitarian work. The website is a companion to the three-part documentary series Inside Disaster, which follows the Red Cross humanitarian response to the January 2010 Haiti earthquake.

InsideDisaster.com combines content and themes from the documentary series with original material shot, photographed, and researched by our web team. The goal of the site is to help users explore the complexities of humanitarian work in the 21st century, as well as the specific challenges and experiences that arose from the aftermath of the Haiti quake.

InsideDisaster.com comes alive before a full documentary which will be aired on tvo in 2011. Here’s the pitch:

Inside Disaster follows international Red Cross disaster relief teams as they mount the largest single-country response in the organization’s history. Six hundred trained humanitarians from over 30 countries are on the ground in Haiti. Embedded in the Red Cross base camp, our camera had unprecedented access to the gripping stories, compelling characters and intense drama that unfolded after Haiti’s horrific quake on January 12 2010. This intense and compelling documentary takes us behind the headlines of a large-scale disaster to document the emergency relief operation from first response to recovery.

The interesting part is not the content itself – although it’s a very deep and well crafted one with a ton of detailed informations – but the sum of these different experiences which, to me, seem to be the first example of a full Transmedia storytelling strategy in the editorial world. We’ll have to wait until the documentary is aired on TVO next year to see if its content is redundant with the online production or not. But if it’s not, the whole experience could be the first of its kind and a strong model for photojournalist considering Transmedia storytelling and Multimedia.

A real Transmedia experience is rare enough to be noticed, and even though « Inside Disaster » would fail to match the Transmedia storytelling criteria, the project would remain nevertheless a significant breakthrough in terms of narrative experience. Sure, some will object that the lack of total objectivity and the blurry frontier between game/information/corporate worlds could be an ethical problem for the journalist and a misguiding information for the public, but I’m not really concerned by that if a clear mention is apposed to the different sections of the website and throughout the narrative line. Judge by yourself and let me know what your reactions are…