Hamza’s Journey: Storyboards

This week in Video and Sound class, we were asked to come up with an idea for a three to four minute film. We decided to pick the option: Find a short story and re-interpret this narrative visually.

Before settling on our idea, Eve, Adi and I took a few hours to bat ideas around. We started by watching videos that we each liked and some themes emerged. We found interactive video engaging, we were drawn to narration, graphics, and personal story, and we wanted to use on a serious topic.

We had centered on the Syrian refugee crisis, but couldn’t think of a narrative voice for it, so were leaning away from it. But, then we listened to Hamza’s Journey.

Hamza’s Journey by Matthew Price originally aired on the BBC Global News Podcast on Sept. 4, 2015. It tells the story of one family’s arduous journey out of war-torn Syria in hopes of getting to Germany.

We listened to it and knew we had our story. So, we contacted Matthew for permission to use the story (which he graciously granted us) and we got to cutting the audio. The original broadcast was about eight minutes if I remember correctly. We cut it down to about 4 minutes, transcribed and made storyboards.

Our storyboards are divided into six scenes. Each uses a mixture of graphics and live action to illustrate Hamza’s words. Each scene has an interactive element to encourage the user to become more immersed in Hamza’s story.

Here’s the storyboard.