100 Days in Evros — Situated Testimony
Provenance
| Source | Organisation & people | Link |
|---|---|---|
| Featured film (64 min) | FAIA | vimeo.com/1191494676 |
| Written investigation | Solomon | wearesolomon.com |
| Method and interview quote | Global Investigative Journalism Network | gijn.org |
The case
FAIA's investigation into forced labour at the Evros border used situated testimony: witnesses interacted with a spatial representation of the scene while an analyst drove the virtual world live, in response to what the witness described. The 3D environment served the interview — recall, visibility claims, and the witness's own indications — rather than replacing it.
"We find that working with spatial testimony and spatial tools helps witnesses unlock certain parts of their own memory which would otherwise be obscured or lost to trauma," Levidis says. - https://gijn.org/stories/investigating-pylos-shipwreck/
The featured investigation was built in Unreal Engine, not Blender. The choice is worth pausing on, because it gets at the core of setup decisions in visual investigation: you could likely build this same environment at equal fidelity and with equal viewport response in both Blender and Unreal. The question is what you want to do with, or within that environment.
- ~15:00 — a limitation of Unreal for this use case becomes apparent: the assets used to build the environment require changes at a more fundamental level than Blender's more direct editing.
- ~47:55 — bottom-right shows character customization options that go beyond a collection of poses. Unreal lets you customize characters deeply, even across multiple poses — which makes sense for a game engine. It is unclear whether that can be replicated in Blender; it is not something seen that way so far, but it is also not a deeply researched comparison.
Either way, there are always tradeoffs and concessions — and they are often driven by what you intend to do with what you are creating.
— BVI
The technique
The live session itself — driver setup, walk navigation, POV verification, seeing through walls, live annotation, and recording the re-enactment — is documented as a standalone technique:
Summary
FAIA ran situated testimony live: an analyst drove the 3D scene while the witness pointed, recalled, and made visibility claims inside it. The scene served the interview instead of replacing it. The engine choice — Unreal Engine, not Blender — makes the wider point: pick the tool for what you intend to do inside the environment, not for fidelity alone.
Resources
- Situated Testimony — Live 3D Witness Annotation — the technique this case demonstrates
- Introduction — what visual investigation covers
Sources
- 100 Days: The Forced Labourers of Evros — the featured film, published by FAIA
- GIJN — Investigating the Pylos shipwreck — the source of the spatial-testimony quote