2025 - Tracking forced labour across China
In 2025, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in an investigation with New York Times and Der Spiegel, uncovered a number of cases of minorities turned into forced labor and shipped across China to work in factories producing goods for the brands in the West, including KFC, Sketchers, and US car, aerospace and defence industries.
I was added to the project as an external contractor to create a scrollytelling presentation, using maps and smartphone videos (made by the chinese workers and uploaded to Douyin, China’s version of TikTok) to show the transfers and the conditions these workers were subjected to.
I used Mapbox to build initial tile-layers and animate them. Javascript was used to determine specific points in website scrolling progression and to bind them to animation keyframes, so the animation would play automatically as the user scrolls through the website.
Boxes with videos and text explaining what happened in each location were overlaid on top of the map, and as users would scroll from one to another box, watching the videos and following the story, the map would zoom, pan and focus on certain locations, all while making points, lines and borders visible or invisible, depending on the context.
Please click on the link below to see the whole presentation in action. It was built with responsive design in mind, so it works both on computer screens and mobile devices.
