Watercolor, Animation and the Islamic State
Voice of America’s Heather Murdock, Brian Williamson, Amish Srivastava and Lukman Ahmad
Visual storytelling can be difficult during a brutal war. Often, important visual elements of the story are unavailable. Two teams of VOA journalists explored stories from Iraq while the Islamic State (ISIS) group controlled cities and towns across Iraq and Syria, by integrating illustration and animation into documentaries.

VOA’s Middle East correspondent Heather Murdock led a small team on the ground, interviewing, filming and returning to the town multiple times over the course of a year. She wove the stories of sometimes explosive tension into a 25-minute documentary. Because many of the stories were highly personal and weren’t visually documented during Islamic State’s control, Heather and a team of VOA journalists in Washington decided to combine audio from the interviews with hand drawn animation, to create short, animated vignettes interspersed throughout the documentary. “Shoura: An Experiment in Reconciliation” is the story of one town attempting to heal in the aftermath of the Islamic State.

Instagram Tips and Tricks
POLITICO’s Michelle Bloom and Janay Kingsberry

Let’s talk about easy and tangible ways to start creating better Instagram Stories instantly. We’ll provide tips and tricks on implementing basic design theories while also simplifying your workflow and staying under deadline. We’ll also show the metrics behind our top-performing posts and Stories and talk through how we created them and what we learned.

San Francisco Chronicle: The Throughline Project
Alex Fong, Danielle Mollette-Parks, Robert Morast and Sarah Feldberg

A look into the genesis of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Throughline project, which takes a bold approach to covering an unprecedented moment in American history. The project asks how the San Francisco Bay Area might reshape itself for the better following the pandemic and protests that have rocked the nation. A specially designed limited series, Throughline publishes one full section dedicated to a single topic — from the city’s landscape to the survival of the arts — each week over the course of nine weeks, and illuminates what may lie ahead through reportage, fiction, poetry and visuals in a collaborative effort that has engaged all segments of the newsroom and its surrounding communities.

SND 2020 - Day 13