You’ve seen it on your favorite television drama. You’ve heard it on Serial. It’s the recap sequence!

For this assignment, I created a “recap sequence” that could be viewed before reading an article about an on-going or developing story. In this case, I started with this piece, “Saudis launch air campaign to defend Yemen government,” published by Al Jazeera on March 25, 2015.

Instead of creating an explainer for just this one story, I opted to try and come up with a way that every story could have a “recap sequence” using just material from the news organization’s archive.

I compiled the contents starting from the original article — published by Al Jazeera on March 25, 2015.

First, I collected all the linked articles (from in text or “related” boxes in the side and bottom margins of the story), pulling linked article data 3 layers deep.

Then, I scraped the images, captions, headlines, and deks associated with each link, using import.io and manual cut and paste.

Next, I organized the headlines chronologically.

I created a series of “cards” in a Google Fusion Table to look at the potential material.

I then pulled all the images, headlines, captions, and deks into an Adobe After Effects composition. Each unique piece of text is displayed for 2-3 seconds, in order, with the associated images whenever possible.

I manually excluded a few ‘related’ feature or opinion pieces, but otherwise tried to see if a relatively “autopilot” approach would yield a passable explainer.

My video editing leaves something to be desired, but personally, I thought it was a quick little way to get some background that helped me understand what was happening in the story!

See what you think!