Netflix's 'Trainwreck: The Astroworld Tragedy' is a gripping, shocking, and thorough investigation of the fatal crowd crush at Travis Scott’s 2021 festival. We’re proud to have worked with directors Yemi Bamiro and Hannah Poulter, along with the whole team at Passion Pictures, to provide graphics for this immersive, revelatory documentary.

Our collaboration started with the 3D maps that appear mostly in the middle section of the film, when the crowd crush occurs. These scenes are terrifying and at times overwhelming — capturing the confusion and fear that audience members felt. For the victims and eyewitnesses, the whole thing was a blur of panic, and so our graphics had to help the viewer occasionally take a step back amidst the chaos and reflect on the bigger picture. We accurately recreated the site map for the concert in 3D, and returned to this map throughout the sequence to locate our key contributors amongst the crowd. In key scenes, this map also serves to explain the catastrophic site planning errors that led to the crush, and the way the crowd flow caused a build up of pressure in a certain area of the audience.

Beyond maps and the title card, we also contributed a suite of astons, stills, social media graphics, newspapers, documents, and more to tie the film’s style together. Social media was particularly important: the concertgoers were young people who were very online, and a lot of the film is made up of ‘found footage’ that they filmed on the ground and posted on social media. We worked with the edit to develop a style for presenting vertical UGC that evoked the online world these young people lived in, while still maintaining a light, subtle, and respectful touch.