The Brief

 A reporter wrote a story about gun violence in American schools — and even interviewed a twelve-year-old school shooter. As Snapchat audiences trend younger, we wanted to bring this story to the platform in a sensitive way for an interested audience.

Challenges

The school shooter, who was the bulk of the narrative, was never named or photographed. Ethically, this totally makes sense: he’s twelve years old and no one got hurt. Visually? My work was cut out for me. The photographers had managed to get some pictures of crowds outside of the school, but I wanted to be very cognizant of using any close-up photos, as I didn’t want to misrepresent a random classmate as the offender. 

Solutions

Create a holistic environment. When you can’t suck someone in with powerful photographs of the shooter, you need to suck them in some other way — and my choice was to do so with a strong background, transitions, and music selection. Tonally, I wanted to keep it dark, but adding a bit of color and using unique typography choices kept the story from feeling too washed out.