The initial idea of journey untold arose on a rainy afternoon in March 2017, when a group of four students sat together to brainstorm ideas for a project in the Media Engineering degree program. We wanted to address the refugee crisis by telling a refugee’s story, but we wanted to tell it in a different way than has been done so far – one that weaves together story, visuals, and sound in a more engaging and immersive manner. The idea of an interactive comic as a means to approach the topic of migration and immigration began to take shape.
Jump forward a few weeks. After countless phone calls, emails, and meetings, we found ourselves assembling our audio equipment in a small room in Solothurn, where a woman and her brother had agreed to meet us to talk about the woman's journey from Afghanistan to Switzerland. Not knowing what to expect, we became utterly absorbed in the conversation within the first few minutes, and we knew that this was the story we wanted to tell.
And so began the process of turning the conversation into a story that could be told through a comic. We spent hours upon hours discussing possible storylines and sketching out ideas, until the storyboard was finished. While we did have to make slight alterations to the story in order to be able to turn it into a cohesive narrative, we made sure to leave the story as a whole untouched. This is her story, and we wanted to tell it as accurately as possible.
What followed was the lion’s share of the work: rotoscoping accurate images, recording the interpreter, animating, working on sound design, designing and coding the website, and gathering relevant information, to name only a few. And this is it. You are looking at our months worth of work, and we hope you appreciate the story as much as we do.
We would like to use these last sentences as an opportunity to express our gratitude to the woman and her brother who so kindly shared the story with the four of us, and who gave us the permission to pass it on to others. Thank you for opening up to us and for letting us be part of your journey, even if it is only for a small part of it. We hope we did your story justice.
And last, but in no way least, a big thank you goes out to Linda and Susan for taking the time and lending their voices to journey untold. This project would not have been the same without their contributions.
Irem Bilen
Ricardo Fariña
Gino Knöpfel
Joanne Urwyler
Susan Misicka
Linda Knöpfel