Magna Carta

The Human Rights Commission asked us to help devise an education resource as part of the national curriculum for school students in Years 6 and 10. Its purpose was to explain the origins of the freedoms and rights which we often take for granted today. After working our way through the whole syllabus, we decided the project called for a scrolling parallax timeline to connect the events spread over 800 years, followed by a video to explain their significance.

We had been itching to make a scrolling parallax site for ages, so simplifying such a long chain of events in this way became an engrossing challenge. This approach enabled the video to focus on the ‘why’ of the story. The complexity here was to extract clear meaning from abstract concepts such as freedom and democracy.

The project was launched by the Human Rights Commissioner, Tim Wilson, in Canberra on 16 June 2015. It was also screened by Professor Gillian Triggs, the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, at the Supreme Court and Parliament House as part of commemorative celebrations for the 800th Anniversary of the Signing of the Magna Carta.

“We came to The Explainers with the challenging task of conveying some very complex human rights concepts and collapsing several centuries worth of history into a few short resources. To make things trickier, we asked them to come up with digital resources that were highly engaging for students and easy for teachers to use.

The Explainers exceeded our expectations by creating a beautifully detailed scrolling interactive webpage which spans the key historical events and neatly complements the video, which illustrates ideas on human rights and freedoms with humour and clarity.”

Prof. Annie Pettitt,
Australian Human Rights Commission