After The Storm

While you might think the art of letter-writing is sliding into the past tense, imagine if you opened an envelope and out slid a stream of sound and moving pictures and still images, a mix of meteorology, webGL and tree rings.

After the Storm is such letter from Alabama filmmaker Andrew Beck Grace to all those who find themselves emerging from the settling dust to stand blinking in the light of day.

“…like sitting down across from someone and listening to them tell you their story”

Josh Stearns
Associate Director, Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund

This is a story about the markers that divide the way things were and the way things will be. An argument, or a death, a birth or some wanton act of nature, these are all moments that separate ‘before’ from ‘after’.

Andy and his wife Rashmi lived through such a moment on April 27th, 2011, when a tornado touched down on their home city of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, killing, injuring, destroying, and in the process drawing markers for thousands.

Commissioned by ITVS  and released through a partnership between Independent Lens and The Washington Past with generous funding from the MacArthur Foundation, After the Storm is a digital convergence of formerly disparate media such as print journalism, television, radio and documentary filmmaking.

Underscoring this sense of convergence of time, place and media, there’s a segment in the story that uses Google Streetview as a camera that travels through a destroyed Tuscaloosa neighbourhood. This camera can also travel back through time, through an interface that slides back to a point before the storm, when there were trees and houses, and people living there. But this is a camera within a camera: the on-screen interactivity has been captured on video. One has the feeling of using the same physical space as the narrator, the same point of view.

After the Storm is a piece of that story that can only be told this way, in this format, and on this platform, which is why we like to be a part of this type of story-telling.

If you’re interested in how we made After The Storm, you can watch a short case study we presented at the Magnum Foundation below.