Producer for Amnesty International’s visual investigation into the Russian air strike that destroyed the Donetsk Regional Academic Drama Theatre in Mariupol on on 16 March 2022.

At the time of the attack, hundreds of civilians were in and around the theatre; many were killed. The theatre was clearly recognisable as a civilian object, perhaps more so than any other location in the city. The evidence Amnesty International gathered demonstrated that the attack was a war crime.

Disinformation online and a lack of access to the site of the attack led to a struggle to first obtain evidence and second to communicate the organisation’s findings. During its investigation, Amnesty International’s researchers spoke to 53 witnesses as well as experts in physics, weapons, and satellite imagery. The resulting visual investigation used 3D modelling to organise this diverse evidence base in space and time.

A video of the 3D model was created to communicate the organisation’s layered and often technical findings to a general audience. For the investigation team, the reconstruction revealed new relationships between evidence, such as the positive correlation between the locations of interviewees at the time of the attack and the areas of the theatre that experts had estimated were the least severely damaged.

The video was published on 30 Jun 2022 to accompany an in-depth report.

3D modelling by Tom Jones.