The <em>Endurance</em>

In 1915, the Endurance sank off the unexplored coast of Antarctica, yet all 28 crewmembers survived, along with photographer Frank Hurley’s unprecedented record of the journey. The Endurance expedition, featured on Kodak.com, tells the crew’s story using Hurley’s photographs and excerpts from his journals, while an interactive map traces their route. Biographies of Hurley and Sir Ernest Shackleton, the expedition’s leader, profile these legends in exploration, while a timeline traces the full Endurance journey. Hurley’s efforts to capture the expedition on film were nothing short of heroic. He worked in a near-freezing darkroom to develop his images and dove into the frigid waters to save his negatives from the sinking ship. The focus of the Endurance Web site was to keep Hurley’s images within the context of the narrative, yet tell the story without a heavy reliance on copy. It was also important to let users track their location with the expedition map while viewing the photos and reading the story. The result is a hybrid site that lets users jump through the crew’s journey with an interactive map, or follow the linear narrative in a zone containing photographs and text. Users can move between the two navigation modes at will, zoom into the map, and call up larger versions of Hurley’s pictures. To capture the spirit of this age of exploration, the Endurance site borrows design elements from old travelogs, while the Web’s interactivity gives users a quick grasp of the amazing story.