Food for thought – and a clever approach to visual storytelling – comes in this video that uses Legos to illustrate data about social mobility in America.

It features Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution fellow. The person who directed it is George Burroughs, who lives in Baltimore and who is the creative director in communications at the D.C.-based Brookings.

In the video, Reeves is positioned behind five stacks of green Legos representing 20% chunks of the population (“If you’re boring like me, you might call them ‘quintiles.’”).

He talks about the gap between rich and poor, but focuses on this issue: “In terms of fairness the question is less, ‘What is the gap between the bottom and the top’ and more, ‘What are your chances of making it from the bottom to the top?’

“How mobile is society? How far does where you’re born on the ladder affect where you end up on the ladder?” he adds.

“In a perfectly mobile society, an opportunity utopia, being born down here in the bottom quintile would have no effect on where you ended up. You’d be equally likely to make it to the top as to stay at the bottom,” he goes on. “But now I want to show you what it’s really like. . . ”

We won’t be responsible for any spoilers. To see how one’s chances are impacted by being black, born to parents who aren’t married, lacking a college degree or a high school diploma – you’ll have to listen to Reeves’ explanation and watch him move those Lego characters up and down the rungs of society.

As for the making of the video itself, Burroughs explains it in detail at “Shaping the debate through visual story-telling.”

“During my first meeting with Richard, I listened to him explain his research. As he explained I ran through various approaches in my head. Animation would be too sterile, Richard explaining two-dimensional charts would be visually mind-numbing, nothing felt right,” Burroughs wrote.

“I went back to the basics. Why do we watch videos online? What do people respond the most strongly to? Emotion and Story.”

Below are the names of the people who worked on the video, but Burroughs wanted to give special recognition to Baltimore School for the Arts sophomore Mecca Lewis who interns with him and helped make it happen.

“She falls into two of the demographics discussed in the movie and lives in Baltimore,” Burroughs said.

He also noted that Chris Peters, the motion control slider operator, is a local artist.

Credits
Director: George Burroughs
Technical Director: Ian McAllister
Director of Photography: Sareen Hairabedian
Editors: Ian McAllister and George Burroughs
Graphics: Mark Hoelscher
Sound: Zachary Kulzer and Mecca Lewis
Motion Control-Slider Operator: Chris Peters