On. Aug. 23, 2020, Kenosha, Wisconsin, police officer Rusten Sheskey shot and critically injured a 29-year-old Black man named Jacob Blake after Blake opened the door to the SUV that belonged to the mother of his children.
To the millions of Youtubers who watched the brief cell phone video of the shooting, in which Sheskey fires his weapon seven times at an apparently calm and defenseless Blake, it likely appeared that the shooting was unjustified.
News stories published and aired in the days following the incident reinforced this notion. Blake’s father told the Chicago Sun-Times his son didn’t have a weapon in his possession at the time of the shooting, while Blake’s attorney told CNN that multiple witnesses claimed Blake hadn’t threaten the officers in any way.
In the court of public opinion, Sheskey was guilty of committing the same crime as Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who only a few months earlier on May 25 had knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes during an arrest and killed the man, a jury decided in 2021.
But the video of Sheskey and Blake didn’t capture the whole story, says Brady Held, founder of Courtroom Animation, a Chattanooga-based business that creates 3D visualizations of car wrecks, shootings, medical treatments and more.
As Blake recovered from his injuries in a hospital and Sheskey faced possible criminal charges, the Wisconsin Department of Justice asked Held to complete the picture.
“The headlines read, ‘White officer shoots Black man in back seven times,’” Held recalls. “I was tasked with showing everything else, including the moments before the video. No one knew Jacob had a knife in his hand, or that Officer Sheskey was trying to make sure this guy who’d just been in a fist fight with three cops didn’t turn around and stab him.”
This story was different than the one the first video to publicly appear told. But Held had at his disposal certain tools the person who shot the original footage from across the street lacked, including the same software film animators use to create special visual effects for today’s blockbusters.
“The Wisconsin Department of Justice used the video I created to show the full story and ultimately decided to not press charges against Sheskey,” Held recalls. “He was simply trying to protect himself.”
Held’s animation colleagues in the film industry have the freedom to fashion worlds in which anything is possible. But Held and the 15 other animators across the U.S. who make up the Courtroom Animation team have no bags of movie magic pixie dust to sprinkle on their work. Instead, their guiding star is scientific accuracy, Held says.
“I could animate a dragon descending from the clouds and setting a car on fire,” Held says. “But if you want your video to see the light of day in court, it needs to have a scientific foundation. It has to be based on facts, whether it’s numerical data, physical evidence, or an expert’s opinions.”
As an instrument of dispute resolution in the U.S., the legal realm provides Courtroom Animation with plenty of fascinating fodder for work. In the morning, Held might set the scene for the police response to a warehouse theft in Chicago; that afternoon, he might animate a forklift accident that left the victim with an exposed bone.
While Held spends much of his mouse and keyboard time on officer involved shootings, Courtroom Animation as a whole has a portfolio that’s packed with medical animations that go deeper than a broken bone, Held says.
“There’s a great need to visualize injuries and treatments in court, especially for plaintiffs’ cases. It’s important for juries to understand how an accident occurred and what the injuries are.
“You probably know a few people with a disc herniation, but do you know what a disc herniation looks like and what the treatment is? Showing an animation of a surgeon cutting into someone’s back with a scalpel, pulling pieces out and putting plates in can help the members of the jury understand the full impact of an accident.”
It can also induce nausea in the weakly stomached. Fortunately, Held was either born with a strong constitution or developed one since founding Courtroom Animation in 2013.
“As far as gruesome goes, disc herniation animations are at the low end of the scale,” he says. “Nothing bothers me anymore, though. I eat lunch while I’m animating videos.”
These videos can play an important role in an attorney’s efforts to win a case, Held continues, partly because 3D animation allows an artist to display an event from any perspective, and even speed up or slow down time to help a jury see and comprehend what happened. It can also tell the opposing counsel in a case that the lawyer’s client means business.
“When you go to the expense of animating what happened, the other side knows you’re not messing around,” Held claims. “That tends to move things along.”
In one case, an attorney placed Courtroom Animation’s video at the top of their demand package to encourage a settlement.
“They didn’t want the case to be tried before a jury, so they used our animation as a trump card,” Held clarifies.
With a 99% admittance rate, Held says Courtroom Animation rarely has trouble convincing a judge to allow a video to be used as evidence in a case. But that doesn’t mean 3D animation is appropriate for every situation, he continues. Due to the high cost involved in animating an event, the potential size of a settlement or award has to justify the expense.
“The average cost for a customized animation is about $15,000,” Held notes. “If an attorney wants to settle a fender bender that gave someone whiplash for $30,000, they can’t spend $15,000 on animation.”
Although Held’s work requires him to be technically savvy, his software suite, which includes 3DXMAX, Maya, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects, can’t do the heavy lifting for him. If he wants to show what happened after a van packed with stolen goods backed out of an electronics warehouse and hit several police officers, he needs to be a skilled artist, as well.
Held has his mother, an art teacher who taught him how to oil paint long before he learned out how to manipulate pixels, to thank for this. He’s also grateful she encouraged him to attend a technical school in Los Angeles when he said he wanted to make video games.
“I grew up drawing and painting, but I never thought I’d have a career in art,” Held remembers. “My mom said, ‘Go to technical school. That will allow you to do what you want to do.’”
After earning a degree in 3D art and animation, Held lent his imagination and talents to some of the biggest names in the video game publishing business, including Activision, Electronic Arts and others. These companies tasked him with creating cigar-chomping mercenaries, towering Transformers and 3D versions of popular cartoon characters, and made his dream of developing video games come true.
So, when a high school friend who’d become an accident reconstructionist called Held in 2008 and said, “We have a difficult case. Can you animate what happened?” Held said, “No, I’m busy making games.”
Held, who was making $13 an hour, changed his tune when his friend offered to pay him $5,000 for a weekend of work.
He remembers the details of the case to this day.
“It was a single-vehicle wreck in California. A young kid was driving 90 mph, lost control of his vehicle, and ran backwards into a utility pole. A friend in the back suffered a traumatic brain injury.”
Like many cases, this one seemed open and shut. But Held’s animation showed how nearby construction had created a defect in the road that was the actual cause of the accident, he says.
“We figured out how to merge his scientific data with the artistic medium of 3D animation. This laid the foundation for a business venture with my friend.”
Held left that undertaking in 2013 to start Courtroom Animation. He and his wife later moved to Chattanooga, where he and a handful of his animators work out of an office in the Society of Work complex off Cherokee Boulevard.
While Held’s hands are full with a sizeable project he says will make his company’s product more affordable (he says he expects to announce the details this month), a new event will occasionally capture his interest, and he’ll imagine what it would be like to animate it.
“So many things pop up on the news that are ripe for animation,” he says. “For example, what did George Floyd’s death look like from the perspective of the officer who was kneeling on his neck? It might have looked just as horrible, but then again, he might have felt threatened by what was happening around him. Adding new perspectives to events people have seen from only one point of view can be powerful.”
Held says he’d also like to animate the January 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, though he says conveying what actually happened would likely require him to break it down into smaller, isolated events.
“People stormed the capitol and then people died. That’s what we know. But there’s not a lot of context for the videos we have. Where do they exist in time? What happened before each clip? Having the complete narrative, where people are located at different points in time, and showing that event in chronological order would be interesting and reveal a lot about what happened. Three-dimensional animation is a great tool for putting a story in context.”
At his core, Held is more than a tech whiz who can replicate reality inside a digital world, and more than artist who can draw a convincing picture; he’s also a storyteller. He says the ability to craft a narrative that can change minds is what draws him to his computer, mouse and trio of monitors each day.
“I’m an artist, but I also like putting together a cohesive narrative. Even if it’s a simple case, I ask, ‘How can I best help someone to understand what happened? Which viewpoint tells the story?’”