National Geographic produced a number of micro-site and second-screen experiences for their shows. For Killing Jesus, National Geographic’s adaptation of the book by Bill O’Reilly, the creative team wanted to build an immersive, engaging, and reactive website that didn’t feel or act like anything else.

I worked with the creative team and creative technologist and a production designer to animate eight chapters across twenty-four scenes telling the same story from three separate perspectives:

• Headdress – The Jewish clergy
• Laurels – The Romans
• Thorns – Jesus and his disciples

The scenes were animated in After Effects and then exported to Javascript and images in a way that the technologist could import and digest in a proprietary platform custom-built for the project. All on-screen elements were given parallax values to make the site fully responsive to mouse/device movement. Audio triggers were incorporated into the timelines and custom soundtracks and ambient environments were built for each scene.

The scenes were painted by Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme based on stills from the production and provided to us as layered Photoshop files. I did some production design and clean-up on this but the majority was done by a separate production designer as the scope of work was too large to do both on the tight timeline we were working with.

This project was started in December of 2014 and completed for Easter 2015. It was one of the more intense and demanding projects I worked on between the timeline, scope of work, and client requests or revisions. Unfortunately, the site has been removed from National Geographic’s servers but it is still available on the Internet Archive. The scenes will not load but the site is visible.

The videos below are the animation used for the basis of the site and do not include the audio or parallax interaction that was built into the pages.