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"The road was all ice. And all I could think about was, "How did I ever survive this?" Because I was dressed in the heaviest jacket with sweaters, with hat - and I was freezing! And I was there as a child with a little blanket and thin prison uniform and - and I made it. It's... hard to believe."

That's Judge Thomas Buergenthal describing his return to the site of the concentration camp of Auschwitz, nearly 55 years after he survived the Jewish Holocaust in Europe.

His story--along with the memories of countless other death camp survivors-- will be preserved forever in digital format at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The virtual exhibit includes photographs, audio, text, and Flash illustrations to help new generations remember one of the worst chapters of human history. 

Josh Goldblum (the pioneering writer who founded the design firm, Blue Cadet Interactive) helped design this complex story. Goldblum is our special guest this week, teaching us the fine art of interactive storytelling in my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions.

In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web publishing.

Jason Boog: 

Your "Life After the Holocaust" interactive piece first caught my eye. Can you describe for my readers how that Blue Cadet project evolved? Generally, how can a company like Blue Cadet help writers create more interactive projects?

 
Josh Goldblum:
I first became aware of the “Life After Holocaust” project while I was working with the Holocaust Museum on a separate Ripples of Genocide project. Continue reading...

 

Through the course of the Ripples project I would stop by the museum and meet with their in-house designers and interactive producers. This was a rare luxury for us both, since we were both based in DC, which made face-to-face meetings a possibility.

Since I was the lead bluecadet designer/developer on the project it gave me opportunity to really get to know the museum, their mission and their visual and storytelling aesthetic. For a short while I was even providing some Flash training to the in-house design team; mostly because I enjoyed the company and it broke up the routine of client projects.

During these visits and training I would speak to them about their in-house projects. Joyce Wong, at this time was developing sketches for the “Life After Holocaust” site. I would informally chat with her and we would pass around ideas.

The site was a very ambitious and long running project, and she had been playing with various approaches to presenting the materials. Joyce had a good basis in Flash timeline animation and had a little ActionScript knowledge, but did not really know all of the latest capabilities of the latest version of the program. After bluecadet launched Ripples of Genocide, bluecadet was brought in to help the museum help complete the site.

Since the site was largely based on five 30-minute audio pieces and a good number of historical photographs, we looked to develop ways to reuse the audio and photographs throughout the site. We worked very closely with the Holocaust Museum to shape the story. We also knew what techniques would work best technically and could introduce new methods. We try to keep pretty well apprised of the latest in technology, design and storytelling, and we are always really excited to share what we know.

We can also build tools to make large projects modular and scalable. For instance, in the case of “Life After the Holocaust”, bluecadet developed a custom audio component in Flash to stream the mp3 audio files. We also created a custom captioning tool to easily add captions to the audio segments. This admin exported the captions into an xml document whose content could be easily edited and proofed.

This was really crucial since the audio underwent several edits during our design process. If we had opted to add these captions on the flash timeline, not only would we have had serious file size issues, we would never have been able to adjust the content as quickly and could have gotten bogged down in production.