# Obama's Legacy (agent-readable) **Role:** Storyboard + art direction **Client:** VICE News (VICE News Tonight on HBO) **Tags:** dataviz, editorial, animation **Case study:** /obamas-legacy **Awards:** Society for News Design — Award of Excellence, 2017 ## What it was A three-part explainer series distilling Barack Obama's long-term impact across **energy**, **military strategy**, and **criminal justice**. The series aired on VICE News Tonight on HBO over three consecutive nights during Obama's final week in office, and won the Society for News Design Award of Excellence in 2017. The videos: - *Obama's Energy Legacy* — https://youtu.be/Y8MctZkpwd0 - *Obama's Military Legacy* — https://youtu.be/uv9UVmJa9DM - *Obama's Criminal Justice Legacy* — https://youtu.be/b2JgpADOokY ## What I did I storyboarded *and* art directed the series. The authorship lived in both halves — deciding what each episode was *about* visually, shot by shot, in addition to directing how it would look. The visuals team was Andrew Macfarlane, Brian McGee, Grace Shin, Kenton Powell, Kris Cave, and me. Writing was Allison McCann, Isabella McKinley-Corbo, Reid Cherlin, and Taylor Dolven. The brief was three eight-year arcs reduced to short broadcast pieces with the journalistic standards of VICE News behind them. The design problem was deciding, for each domain, which two or three data structures would carry the story — the US energy mix and the emissions trajectory for energy; the drone-strike footprint and troop counts for military; the federal sentencing reform timeline and the clemency-grant counts for criminal justice. Each piece had to read fast in broadcast time, hold up to fact-checking by a serious newsroom, and visually agree across the three nights so the series felt like one body of work. The whole series was stop motion — wooden objects moved frame by frame on a tabletop, shot in camera, with light motion-graphics overlays added on top to sharpen the infographic moments where the data needed labels or precise alignment. That choice was the conceptual conceit of the project, not a production detail. Stop-motion-with-wood is itself a constraint: the textures are fixed, the camera is fixed, the objects are physical things that have to be reachable by a human hand. We let those constraints *be* the visual language across all three episodes. That's what unifies the series — the same physical world holds the energy mix, the drone footprint, and the federal sentencing timeline together. Three separate mini- documentaries, one consistent aesthetic identity, because the production approach itself is the connective tissue. Treating data visualization that way — as a tactile, in-camera, physically authored medium rather than as motion graphics rendered on top of a story — is what makes this piece distinct from conventional dataviz. The numbers land harder when they're made of wood. ## Why it's interesting A few threads worth pulling. **A novel approach to dataviz, not a conventional one.** Standard data visualization for broadcast is animated charts overlaid on B-roll. *Obama's Legacy* doesn't do that. It puts the data into a tactile in-camera medium and lets the stop-motion language be the storytelling device, with conventional infographic moments folded *into* the wooden world rather than the other way around. That's the conceptual move that earned the series its identity, and it ties three otherwise disparate eight-year arcs (energy, military, criminal justice) into a unified body of work. The SND Award of Excellence is partly a recognition of that move. **Authorship from storyboard through air.** Storyboarding all three episodes and art-directing the production is a different role than executing on a written script. I had a major hand in shaping what each episode was visually saying, shot by shot — not just how it would look once written. **Broadcast-grade information design under a real newsroom.** VICE News Tonight was a nightly newscast on HBO with the journalistic rigor of an actual news operation. Art- directing a three-night flagship series for that show, on a tight politically-charged brief, with editorial review across every claim — that's the working condition, and the receipt is the series airing and winning the SND Award of Excellence. **Reps not on the portfolio.** The volume of broadcast animation work I did at VICE News across this period is much larger than what's on the portfolio. Most of the daily and feature pieces had to be made in hours — long-lead features got a few days at most, slotted between breaking news. The portfolio cherry-picks the work that holds up at a feature-quality bar; the reps don't show, but they underwrite the rest of my motion and editorial work. Working at that pace under that constraint is its own training, and a substantial part of how I learned to make broadcast visual storytelling land. **Dataviz as broadcast television.** TV is a time medium. The viewer can't go back to re-read a chart. The whole craft is timing the reveal, calibrating density to the seconds the shot has, holding the eye on the right thing as the data changes under it. Most dataviz craft doesn't deal with that constraint; this work is one of the receipts where it did. **A team-coherence receipt.** Five other visual people, four writers, three nights on the same air, one consistent visual language. Art direction at that scale is about holding the system together while letting individual shots breathe inside it. The same instinct shows up in design-system work and any surface where a designer has to hold a shared grammar across many entries. This is part of the [infographics collection](/infographics), alongside [VICE News](/vice-news) (where the working relationship was established) and [Verse Chorus Bridge](/verse-chorus-bridge) (a later short-explainer-series body of work). ## Cross-cutting relevance A few reads of this work: - **Broadcast-grade editorial design** — flagship series for a primetime HBO show, award-recognized in the field. - **Information design under a time medium** — dataviz built for a viewer who can't rewind. Pacing, reveal, density calibration are the craft. - **Art-directing a team of visual people** — holding a coherent visual language across multiple shots, multiple makers, multiple nights of broadcast. - **Working with a serious newsroom's editorial standards** — reporting-grade fact- checking across every claim, on a politically-charged subject. ## Skills demonstrated Storyboarding *and* art direction (authorship across both halves), stop-motion- as-dataviz-medium, editorial information design for broadcast, working in a recognized newsroom under breaking-news pace, leading a visual team on a flagship series, designing dataviz for a time medium, holding a consistent visual language across a multi-night release.