After the Tsunami

Leading up to the one-year anniversary of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, Justin McCurry and I were asked by Global Post to pitch some ideas for a one-year anniversary package. Video editor Solana Pyne, Asia editor Emily Lodish and GP's editor-in-chief Thomas Mucha told us they wanted something that was different from what the other news sites were doing. Justin and I were both keen to stay away from newsy reports and so suggested putting together an interactive web documentary where we allowed locals to tell their own stories through the video elements with some broader overarching text pieces giving context.

Justin and I had been up to Tohoku both together and separately on several occasions over the 12 months, covering the affected areas from some of the towns furtherest north to the more southern areas in Fukushima prefecture. It's a huge area and some of the coastal areas are only hard to access easily. We didn't have much time to put everything together but we wanted to do something that would paint a broad picture of things in Tohoku without losing the human element. We chose Rikuzentakata in Iwate prefecture, Kesennuma in Miyagi prefecture and Iitate in Fukushima prefecture because we knew we could cover the ground and get back to Tokyo to get the edits done in time for the anniversary. It was pretty tight in the end but we managed to make deadline thanks to some fancy footwork by Solana in NYC and the team in Boston as well as web designer Shane Busato, who did all the Flash.

Also combined in the web doco were interviews and video from previous trips, including footage from Miyagi prefecture shot just after the tsunami and also footage that Justin and I shot inside the Fukushima exclusion zone. The Guardian were good enough to allow us to re-use the footage which was hugely appreciated.

I was really proud of the end result. I think that we were able to provide some windows into people's lives in Tohoku and that's what we set out to do - to provide some snapshots of these people's situations and allow people overseas to understand that people have come a long way but there is still a hell of a way to go.

- Michael Condon

You can check it out here