The Brady Campaign presents End Family Fire

The Brady Campaign to prevent Gun Violence is committed to cutting the number of US gun-related deaths and End Family Fire. Despite compelling evidence to the contrary, 63% of Americans believe that owning a gun makes your home safer. But the fact remains, eight kids a day are killed or injured by loaded, unlocked guns.

Brief

The language around the national crisis of gun violence is disjointed. That’s why The End Family Fire campaign wants to raise awareness for a productive conversation about gun ownership within families and increase injuries and death of unintended gunfire amongst children.

Family Fire gives this crucial issue a name, placing family (specifically the love of a parent for their child) at the center of the discussion. It’s inclusive of all in-home gun-related incidents (a shooting involving an improperly stored or misused gun found in the home, resulting in death or injury) which should be reflected in the campaign hub.

The purpose of the site is to appeal to the largest possible segment of American Society - gun owners and prospective gun owners as well as non-gun owners - while keeping in mind that the objective of the ‘End Family Fire’ campaign is to promote gun safety, not gun control. Even strong anti-gun advocates were inclined to share out the site because of what it stands for.

Craft

The site’s content exists within a cinematic narrative structure that starts in close proximity to a central firearm and vertically zooms out as the user scrolls to reveal the surroundings of the family’s home, floor by floor, through the roof, until we are above an entire neighbourhood.

The film with the cinematic narrative structure that vertically zooms out was shot specifically for the site and was not reproduced for any other pieces of content. Doing so allowed for complete control of the navigational paradigm structure and created a seamless storyline from start to finish.

In its design we kept the amount of UI and information on the screen at any moment to a minimum. Information relevant to each location is presented starting with gun safety, the storage, then the conversations around owning a firearm and, finally, the community's responsibility to safeguard it. In this way we avoided to overwhelm the user as they continued on their journey.

To give the site that extra dimension we used dynamic WebGL dust-particles overlaid to add an extra sense of depth to the whole experience. Through the use of a custom script for After Effects that exports tracking data in order to control a 3D camera, we effectively synced the film movement with the WebGL 3D camera position.

Relevance

The EndFamilyFire.org site raised awareness for a productive conversation about gun ownership within families to increase injuries and death of unintended gunfire amongst children. Families with a gun in the home are now encouraged to reevaluate their home-protection needs and take the necessary steps to be safe and responsible gun owners and those that don’t own a gun can work to spread the End Family Fire message and impact their communities.

The campaign was produced in partnership with the Ad Council and was distributed to media outlets nationwide prompting a national conversation and driving awareness to the issue. The campaign has garnered over $5.5M in earned media to date and traffic continues to the campaign hub. EndFamilyFire.org won the FWA Site of the day, Awwwards Site of the day, CSS Design Awards Site of the day, and was featured in Communication Arts, Ad Age, Adweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Huffington Post.