TORONTO—UPDATE April 27/12: The D-DAy to Victory website has won the Best of Show Award, as well as the 3D category in the 2012 FITC Awards.] One of the goals of Remembrance Day is to ensure we honour those who lost their lives in battle in order to secure a better future.

And part of that challenge is to ensure future generations understand what our soldiers sacrificed. That was a mission of Secret Location, based in Toronto, which calls itself an integrated media company.



Secret Location created a website extension of the History Television's D-Day to Victory documentary series, which aired leading up to Nov. 11. The site covers the Allied push towards victory in Europe during the Second World War, breaking the campaign down into six components which echo the six television episodes focusing on D-Day on June 6, 1944, to the seige of Berlin.

Each leg of the battle has its own page with relevant weaponry information, along with links to real stories from those who experienced the battles. While the television series featured a number of those stories, the website was able to offer several more — about 100 — because it's not limited by time, explained Pietro Gagliano, Secret Location's creative director.

The Secret Location team was able to meet some of the veterans featured on the show and website, he said. The veterans brought along their grandchildren who helped them navigate the D-Day website, he recalled. "That's what we're trying to do here — allow these stories to live on in a format that can reach a younger generation," said the creative director.

The graphic renderings of each battle were meant to be a snapshot of reality, explained Gagliano. "The main issue we were trying to solve was that we didn't want it to be entirely literal to a map of Europe, because it's far too much ground to cover," he said. "We needed to be abstract, but be sensitive to the fact that these are coming from the memories of the veterans, and these are vivid real-life events."

The small team of designers and developers used Cinema 4D and Blender (open source graphics software) to create the scenes, while Flash was employed for interactive components, he said.

D-Day was an extension of an earlier project by Secret Location in conjunction with History Television, which can be found at StormingJuno.com. "It's difficult to get funding to build properties like this in Canada," said Gagliano. "For Juno, we applied for a Bell Fund [grant] and won it."

While many pieces of information on the D-Day website is from the television series, "We wanted this piece to stand on its own," he explained. "We had to engage someone who was going to check on historical references for us."

That included hiring a narrator for the website who vocalized a script written with the help of a historian, said Gagliano.

D-Day represents five months of work and to date has 11,000 unique visitors and close to 100,000 page views since the Nov. 9 launch, according to Gagliano.

Shaw Media/History Television promoted the website and Secret Location in turn promoted the series, "as a token of our remembrance," he said.

Visitors to the site can also leave their own words of remembrance.

Shaw Media also connected Secret Location with the Global News online team for its Canada Remembers microsite. A "video widget" that showcases four of the Canadian veteran stories can be found here.