Gunnar's Story

In our class, we were tasked with creating a project based on the Woodland Park Zoo "Empathy Project" to design an interactive media that would encourage empathy for the animals that lived there.

Research and thought process

Our group was primarily made of illistrators and artists, and after a brainstorming session we settled on creating an interactive comic that would tell the story of a particular animal from the zoo. This was to help stilulate growth for the Zoo's social media and website as well as promote the zoo in a positive light, showing that despite some stigma about how zoos treat their animals, the Woodland Park Zoo does not, and takes good care of their animals.

With our idea cemented, we began to brainstorm ideas for how we were going to make it interactive and what animal we were creating a comic for. After some research and communication with the Woodland Park Zoo, we learned that they wanted us to focus on animals who, in the public's eye were harder to empathize. In the end we decided to do a story about a one eyed, Redtailed Hawk named Gunnar.

The Redtailed hawk and his story

Gunnar was a normal redtailed hawk before getting hit by a car. He was nursed back to health but was unable to be released back into the wild due to his eye injury and eventually found a home at the woodland park zoo.

We chose this story