JFK Presidential Library & Museum

Case Study

Reimagining History Digitally

Clouds Over Cuba was an ambitious interactive documentary created for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Rather than presenting the history as a conventional website or linear film, the experience combined documentary storytelling, archival material, interactive timelines, expert interviews, mobile synchronization, and calendar-based storytelling to give audiences multiple ways to explore the crisis.

The experience launched on October 16, 2012, exactly 50 years after Soviet missiles were discovered in Cuba. At its center was a 25-minute documentary supported by approximately 200 archival photos, films, documents, and audio recordings, along with expert interviews, historical context, secret ExComm recordings, and an alternate-history film exploring what could have happened if the crisis had escalated into nuclear war.

Developing the Experience

Clouds Over Cuba was my first project at Tool of North America. As a Senior Interactive Developer, I developed major portions of the interactive experience while also taking ownership of critical media and infrastructure systems required to bring it online.

I worked across the front end alongside designers, developers, producers, and technical leadership during an intensive production cycle leading to the October launch. Two contracted developers joined the production with Hydra, a JavaScript framework they had developed and knew well. We worked within their system because it provided a strong foundation for rapid development. I developed alongside them, learning the framework while building significant portions of the experience and integrating the application with the broader content, media, and production systems.

That responsibility continued after the contracted developers completed their engagement. I remained involved with the application in production, maintaining and troubleshooting an experience built on a framework originally developed outside Tool. By that point, I had developed enough familiarity with both the application and Hydra to help keep the experience operating after its original framework developers were no longer embedded with the team.

Engineering the Archival Media Pipeline

One of the project’s largest technical challenges existed behind the experience itself. Decades of archival footage, interviews, recordings, and other audiovisual material arrived with differences in formats, codecs, resolutions, quality, and other characteristics. That material needed to behave consistently inside a modern HTML5 experience, and in 2012 there was no ready-made production workflow that could simply absorb an archive of that scale and prepare everything the application required.

I designed and built the media-processing system that allowed us to turn those disparate sources into reliable web media. Using Bash, FFmpeg, and related command-line tooling, I developed repeatable methods for processing, filtering, transcoding, encoding, and muxing source assets into the formats required by the experience.

The goal was not simply to encode individual videos. We needed a robust production workflow capable of repeatedly taking inconsistent archival sources and producing predictable output for a large, media-heavy interactive application. The pipeline became a critical part of how the production operated, allowing the team to prepare and integrate historical media at the volume and consistency the experience demanded.

Infrastructure & Launch

My ownership also extended into the production infrastructure supporting the experience. I helped configure the Rackspace environment, including server software and DNS, and worked directly with the Rackspace team to test bandwidth and validate that the infrastructure could handle the demands of launching a media-heavy experience to a broad public audience.

The infrastructure and media work were closely connected. Preparing the archival assets correctly was only part of the challenge. Those assets also had to be delivered reliably while the application coordinated documentary playback, interactive content, historical material, and other parts of the experience. I worked across those concerns through production readiness, deployment, launch, and post-launch support.

I also helped ensure that the application worked correctly with the calendar-driven synchronization used to recreate the chronology of the crisis 50 years later. The broader mobile synchronization and dossier functionality was developed by other members of the team, while my work focused on the front-end experience and the technical systems I owned within the larger production.

A New Kind of Interactive Documentary

The completed experience allowed audiences to move between a primary documentary and layers of historical context without losing the larger narrative. As the film progressed, archival photos, videos, documents, and audio became available for deeper exploration. Users could connect a smartphone to the experience, while calendar integration allowed audiences to follow events surrounding the crisis in sequence 50 years after they originally occurred.

The result brought together documentary filmmaking, archival research, interaction design, application development, media engineering, and infrastructure in a single digital experience. Instead of using technology as decoration around the story, the team used it to make an enormous historical archive more accessible and to give audiences a different way to experience one of the most consequential moments of the twentieth century.

Impact & Recognition

Clouds Over Cuba became one of the most recognized interactive projects of 2013. Most significantly, it won the News & Documentary Emmy Award for Outstanding New Approaches: Documentary. The official winning production credits list me as one of the project’s developers, reflecting the substantial application development work I contributed to the experience.

The project received recognition across interactive design, documentary storytelling, mobile, film, branded content, and digital craft. Its success demonstrated what could happen when filmmaking, historical archives, interaction design, and web technology were treated as parts of the same experience rather than separate disciplines.

Recognition

• News & Documentary Emmy: Outstanding New Approaches: Documentary
• News & Documentary Emmy: Outstanding Research nomination
• D&AD: Yellow Pencil and additional honors
• The One Show: Gold and Silver Pencil recognition
• CLIO Awards
• Art Directors Club
• The Webby Awards
• Cannes Lions Festival: 11 Lions

As my first project at Tool, Clouds Over Cuba became an important foundation for the work that followed. My role was fundamentally that of a hands-on Senior Interactive Developer, but the project required me to solve problems well beyond individual front-end features. I developed major portions of the application, engineered the archival media workflow, helped own the production infrastructure, worked directly with our hosting partner on bandwidth readiness, supported launch, and remained responsible for the live experience after outside development specialists rolled off. That combination of application development, media engineering, infrastructure, and production responsibility became part of the technical foundation I later brought to larger delivery, product, and leadership roles.