Surviving the Tsunami - Stories of Hope

This time five years ago the Tsunami claimed nearly a quarter of a million lives and left in its wake the greatest reconstruction and recovery challenge since the second world war. Hundreds of millions of ordinary people around the world responded spontaneously in an act of solidarity. For organizations like ours, the Red Cross, this meant an incredible 3 billion dollars in donations of which almost 80% came from the general public. But from this tragedy came stories of hope. Stories of survival that inspire and illuminate. Together with Thomson Reuters Foundation, and the creative guys and girls at Mediastorm, we put together (in less than three months from start to finish) a multimedia piece that we hope pays tribute to these stories of resilience and survival and may contribute to the Tsunami testimony. The multimedia includes a resources section, an animated data map, a comments feature and the centre piece - multimedia documentary portraying four people whose lives were touched by the Tsunami. Embedded here is the trailer - I hope it moves you to explore the full project which can be found at: http://tsunami.trust.org/




This was an amazing project to work in. Massive archival research; dispatching tv crews to four different locations within a two week window, identifying people whose stories might resonate and represent (and who were willing to tell these stories), meticulous multimedia production and, not least, sharing a professional and principled approach with the folks at Reuters and Mediastorm so that we could enable people tell their stories in a dignified manner that will stand the tests of time. We hope you enjoy it and let us know what you think.
/PC