UPDATE 12/30/2022: The AJAM projects server is no longer live. Files available upon request.
We had great plans for this project. When I heard the pitch, I wanted to experiment with some kind of timelapse video treatment. I originally envisioned the entire journey, sped up and mapped. That didn't work out for many reasons, something we chronicled in this Medium post (aptly subtitled "How not to shoot time-lapse video").
But the end result wasn't a disaster. We had a beautiful narrative from writer Richard Grant, a great character and rich, colorful imagery from photographer Will Widmer.
We ended up with 90 GB of dashboard footage. I searched through it and found the most visually interesting imagery. We chose four and ended up using a VideoJS embed with almost no chrome and set the video to autoplay when the user got close to it. These are meant to be part of the background of experiencing the whole story, not something front and center and flashy.
The video themselves are sped up to about 2500% and cropped into a severe horizontal frame (these appear letterboxed in YouTube, but do not show up this way on the storypage), but they do show the reader the different sights and flavor of the road from this particular trip.