2024 - Dubai Unlocked
In the early months of 2024, OCCRP and its publishing partners got hold of a big leak of property records from Dubai, UAE. We focused on researching how many people in the leak are criminals, suspected criminals, politically exposed individuals and/or subjects of international sanctions, compiling a database of several hundreds individuals. Editorial decision was to present these records in form of several interactives - A scrollytelling animation with background video, a database of exposed individuals and another scrollytelling explainer showing how people could purchase properties in Dubai with illicit/laundered money.
The main scrollytelling narrative needed to look as compelling as possible so we decided to combine video that advances on mouse scrolling with HTML text cards cued to right moments in the video. We didn't have any drone shots of Dubai so the decision was made to create a simplified model of the city (40x40 square kilometers area) and create a fly-through animation highlighting specific buildings from the story.
I used Openstreetmap data and QGIS to scrape data for the requested area of the city. Then I used Blender (Open-source 3D modeling and animation application) to convert this 2D data into 3D city. Positions of roads, buildings, coastline and other features were directly sourced from GIS data, while the buildings' heights were calculated from each building's number of floors (found in metadata), then multiplied by 3 meters per floor in height in the 3D model. Finally I animated the camera, set the timing and rendered the final result using Cycles rendering engine. Next, the renders were assembled in the form of a video in Adobe After Effects and overlaid with individuals' profile pictures and text labels to show which suspects purchased properties at which addresses.
The final video was exported in versions for desktop and mobile screens and embedded inside a HTML scrollytelling interactive with timed descriptions and in responsive way.
Please click on the link below to see the interactive in action.
