Flight of the Swans
Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust
Background
// The brief
Flight of the Swans was a fantastic campaign that we had the pleasure of working on with WWT.
To highlight the plight of Bewick's Swans, Sacha Dent from WWT took to the skies in a paramotor to fly with the swans as they made their epic migration. Together they flew 7,000km, across the wilderness of the arctic tundra, endured injury, braving freezing temperatures, and battling through snow and thunder storms to make it back to Slimbridge.
As part of the campaign we built the campaign website that followed the swans, Sacha and the support vehicle's progress live, using satellite tracking as they made their way to the UK.
Satellites
// Data from space
For this project we partnered with Inmarsat, who provided the satellite tracking beacons and gave us access to feeds of data from each tagged swan and vehicle. We were able to convert the data into the right format to present it using Google Maps.
One of the challenges of the campaign was presenting large amounts of live tracking information in a way that could be used easily on both desktop and mobile screens. We aimed to keep the design simple enough for the audience to be able to follow the story and look at interesting bits of the journey without it being overwhelming.
We also worked with the team at WWT to ensure the website supported blogging and social media activity, to enhance the story of the journey as it progressed.
National press exposure
// Creating an embeddable map for The Guardian
The Flight of the Swans campaign really captured the public imagination and got vast amounts of coverage in the UK press. We were asked to create an embeddable version of the swan tracking map so that The Guardian could embed it directly in their website, so their readership could follow the story there.