SINGAPORE - For seven years from June 2015 to May 2022, sprint queen Shanti Pereira’s 200m time stayed static at 23.60 seconds. But in the next 16 months, she ran below that mark at 18 races and brought her time down to 22.57sec.
“Shanti has had a very interesting career where she did very well early on and then her career plateaued, and a year or so before the Asian Games, she consistently started running faster,” said Mr Rohit Brijnath, assistant sports editor at The Straits Times.
How did she get faster?
To find out, ST contacted Ms Pereira in April 2023 to broach the idea of following her for a day at the Singapore Sport Institute (SSI) and Singapore Sports School.
A cross-desk team spent the next five months working with Ms Pereira and her coach Luis Cunha to learn what she did at the start, middle and end of a race to improve her timing.
They published a visual story on Sept 18, 2023, that used videos and interactive graphics to explain the technical aspects of how Shanti got faster.
On April 25, the story “Shanti Pereira: How Singapore’s finest sprinter found her speed” won second place under national brands in the Best Use of Visual Journalism and Storytelling Tools category at the Inma Global Media Awards 2024 in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum.
Mr Brijnath said: “It was a very thrilling and painstaking project to get it right and it’s not easy to explain to people how an athlete improves technically.”
The team first sat down with Ms Pereira and Mr Cunha to ask which aspects of her race had changed, to determine the kind of visuals they wanted.
Data visualisation editor Rebecca Pazos said: “I thought this has to be slow motion video because you have this incredible athlete and when you slow down their body movements, you can see the detail of which muscles are working.”
The shoot took place on June 25, 2023, with the indoor shoot at the SSI and the outdoor shoot on a running track at the Singapore Sports School.
Mrs Pazos said: “Shanti would be running at this incredible speed and we had to capture her entire movement in a vertical shot.”
The team had to do very wide shots at a very high resolution to zoom in and focus on the sprinter, she added.
Mr Brijnath said: “These are the great triumphs of teamwork because everybody is working together to produce something of a very high standard.”
ST also garnered two honourable mentions at the global awards, which had international winners such as The Economist and The Washington Post.
The first was for Ask The Next President Anything under national brands for Best New Video Product or Feature.
For the 2023 Presidential Election, ST designed an Ask Me Anything show for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube where members of the public submitted questions via selfie videos on TikTok and Instagram. The show, which premiered on Aug 27, 2023, featured six questions from young Singaporeans on a broad range of topics including mental health and tackling corruption.
Then presidential candidates Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Ng Kok Song answered the questions in an informal setting with no prior knowledge of the questions or rehearsals.
ST’s head of video E-von Yeung said: “We are constantly experimenting with visual storytelling ideas and formats that can allow our audiences to connect with the news in creative ways. In the case of the Presidential Election, we hoped for younger audiences to have a voice and engage with a key event on the national calendar.”
The second honourable mention was for “Experience myST: Giving What Matters Most to Readers” under national brands for the Best Subscription or Registration Experience category.
myST tailors content discovery for subscribers and registered users who log in when using the ST app.
“The myST feature is designed to help time-starved users get quickly to content that interests them. It is all about meeting our audience’s needs and responding nimbly to changing reading habits,” said ST associate editor Ong Hwee Hwee, who oversees the visualisation, tech and product teams.
ST editor Jaime Ho said: “These global awards are recognition of the best in experimentation and innovation that The Straits Times has to offer, and of the joy that this newsroom brings to its journalism. We are deeply thankful to the judges and to our readers.”
