How we work
Every film is built from documents you can check yourself. This is how we find them, how we check them, and what we add.
Reinforcing bars recovered from the FIU pedestrian bridge, tagged as evidence, August 2018.
Photo: Adrienne Lamm, NTSB, public domain.
Sources
We start with primary records: investigation reports, court files, engineering drawings, patents, test reports and archive photographs. We keep a copy of every document and note the page of every fact we use.
Press coverage can point us to a document. It is never the source of a fact in our films. Each film lists its sources with links, on its page here and in the video description.
Fact-checking
Every number, date and quotation that appears on screen is checked against the page it comes from. Where official sources disagree, we note it, and when it matters to the story, we say so in the film.
Research and scripts are prepared with the help of AI tools. A human editor checks every script against the sources before release.
Our own calculations
Sometimes a story needs a number the record does not state directly. Then we work it out from the values in the sources and mark it as our calculation. It is never presented as an official finding.
Images and reconstructions
We use photographs and film from public archives, most of them made by government agencies and in the public domain, and we credit every image.
When we explain a mechanism, we draw on the official figures or build it as conventional computer graphics from the dimensions in the record. We do not use AI-generated images or video. We do not show victims.
The voice
The narration is a synthetic voice, generated with AI. That choice lets us put our time into research, sources and checking instead of the recording booth.
The words it speaks are our script, checked against the record like everything else on screen.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we correct it in the open. Corrections are pinned as the first comment under the film, listed in its description and on its page here, each with a date.
Found an error? Send it with a source to [email protected].