2015
ROLE: CREATIVE DIRECTION, USER EXPERIENCE, DESIGN
A series of six Emmy award-winning documentaries tell the story of Ketchikan, Alaska. Karass built a system to enhance these video stories and engage the user by adding access to archival photographs from the local museums, articles from history books, stories from the locals, and hours of additional footage of the region.
We built a custom media player that provides smooth transitions between the film and supplemental materials. Each image or text is embedded as a “beat” — a media packet that is attached to a timestamp. While viewing the film, users receive non-invasive snippets of beats, which invite them to dive deeper into the current topic. They also have the ability to read these beats as a full article and use them as a table-of-contents to navigate through the video footage.
The Ketchikan story experience is also deployed as a mobile app and to a series of kiosks around the city. For the best ease of administration, these all share a common, custom CMS and video hosting solution — a change in one affects all the others.