Story of a story: How a simple idea developed into an exceptional result

Hello there. It’s Liam Phelan again, filling in for one last week before Bevan gets back from leave.

This week I’d like to tell you the story of a story.

Which is appropriate because this week’s note is centred on an idea that stemmed from Bevan’s busy brain almost two years ago – and was finally delivered this week via our visual stories team.

You can roughly divide the work we journalists do in two. A decent chunk of our time is taken up with reactive information. When a car crashes on the Harbour Bridge and causes traffic chaos, or somebody famous dies, or a war is started, or someone is shot, or arrested – or memorably for me, when I rocked up to work on Boxing Day 2004, feeling relaxed and looking forward to a quiet day, and we got first inklings of a series of waves that became the Indian Ocean tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people across 13 countries.

Incidentally, although I like to think of journalists as rational people, many in the newsroom have a superstitious dread of using the Q word – as it has a habit of unleashing the seven hounds of hell of a breaking news event shortly afterwards.

We have a lot of systems in place so we can react to breaking events quickly, accurately and responsibly. This will always be a key part of what we do.

But the majority of our work is taken up with digging. Digging into ideas, suspicions, trends, cultural shifts, urban curiosities.

And so, back in 2023, Bevan asked a question, possibly related to the opening of a new building – it was so long ago I can’t remember. “Darling Harbour has changed so much in recent times – why don’t we look at what used to be there and what’s there now and the transformation.”

It seemed like an obvious thing to do – and yet when we checked, we noticed that no one had done this before. So state topic editor Kath Wicks (who has a few great ideas of her own, just quietly) asked Megan Gorrey, who was at the time an urban reporter (she has since been promoted to city editor because she is so great), to look into the idea.

The more we dug (sorry, Dad joke), the more we realised the profound extent of this transformation – what had started as a state government concept for a tourist precinct to be completed in time for the 1988 Bicentenary to showcase Sydney to the rest of the country and the world, hadn’t just been tinkered with – it had been pulverised and rebuilt from the ground up.

So, what was the best way to bring this idea to you, our valued subscribers?

While the Herald started its life as a newspaper, our move into the world of online publishing in April 1995 has provided many new ways to tell our stories. From words, to words and pictures, to videos, gifs, graphics – and up into the heady world of customised, animated visual productions that are produced by a visual team of designers and coders.

This last group of stories are produced by our Visual Stories Team, a national resource based in Melbourne and shared between the Herald and The Age. In that great Aussie way, we nickname these most complicated computerised animations “scrollies”, for the obvious reason that you scroll your way through them as text, graphics and photographs appear.

Maybe Darling Harbour would be a good project for this team. Kath spoke to national content director Chris Paine, who among many other tasks, manages this team. Chris has one of the best imaginations in the business and has a quiet but infectious touch of genius in bringing complex visual ideas to life. So it began.

First, there were months and months of painstaking research, interviews, scouring of archives – the information-gathering process by Megan and researcher Ricky Blank was the key part to telling this complex tale.

In the meantime, came wars, fires, elections, Trump. But, quietly, in the background, work continued on the Darling Harbour idea. Finally, about two months ago, all the pieces were available and the Visual Stories Team swung into action.

The key to this idea was coming up with something visual that showed the extent of the change. It was graphic designer Matt Willis who dreamed up the animation of a sort of cartoonish bulldozer scurrying acoss a 3D render of the entire area and tearing into the old Convention Centre – it was a genius idea and instantly became known as “the Games of Thrones” concept, from the memorable opening credits of the HBO show. You can see how the team brought it to life in the video below.

Matt has a background in papercraft and stopmotion animation.

“When I was briefed to design the story, it felt like a natural fit,” he told me. “We needed to show different perspectives and I had an idea to work with our developers to make the stopmotion scroll-activated, which makes the delivery much more immersive.

“The developers (particularly Dan Carter) and I worked heavily on the usability, allowing the audience to control the flow and pace of the various transitions and reveals. So it was a successful build that feels engaging, and we now have new functionality to enhance the presentation team’s delivery.”

Once production started, the project quickly ramped up into a flurry of activity between reporters, editors, designers, photographic. And finally, on August 25, we sent our idea out into the world – just in time for Bevan to read as he returned from his holidays.

We think it’s an important project that documents our changing city and gives you, its residents, an insight into what we have lost – and perhaps, most importantly, what lessons we can learn from the past to build a better future.

Have a great weekend.

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