Accident Reconstruction
School Bus Crush Legal Animation
Right Way vs. Wrong Way Comparison
Right Way: Proper Stop and Yielding to Oncoming Traffic
This section demonstrates the safe driving scenario, showing what should happen when the bus driver comes to a complete stop and remains alert to oncoming traffic. The animation uses the “right way” sequence to show how yielding at the intersection allows the pickup to continue safely through its lane of travel.
Wrong Way: Failure to Yield and Collision Sequence
The “wrong way” sequence shows what happens when the bus driver does not properly yield to right-of-way traffic. The animation recreates the bus entering the intersection, the pickup approaching from the left, and the emergency braking that occurs before impact.
Was the Pickup Driving the Speed Limit
This section analyzes the pickup truck’s speed in relation to the posted 35 mph speed limit. The animation shows the pickup traveling at approximately 34 mph, supporting the visual explanation that the pickup was operating within the speed limit before the collision.
Did the Bus Have a Stop Sign?
This section addresses whether the school bus was controlled by a stop sign at the intersection. The animation highlights the stop sign location and its relationship to the bus approach path, helping viewers understand the driver’s duty to stop before entering the roadway.
Did the Pickup Driver Have Enough Time to React?
Accident Reconstruction
Accident reconstruction is pivotal in discerning causation. More often than not, the plaintiff and defendant disagree on the events that led up to an incident. There are a few ways to reconcile potential differences, but the strategy you use will depend on a variety of factors.
Some of these are: what happened, whether or not it was avoidable, what the opposition is willing to admit, what experts you’re able to retain, and the evidence your experts are able to find during discovery. With these in mind, it’s possible to create an animation that depicts the scene of the incident with incredible precision.
Legal Animation for Accident Reconstruction
You may ask why a legal animation would be helpful when reconstructing an incident. The answer is simple. Animations demonstrate liability by showing that a collision could have been avoided if a certain party avoided negligent behavior. For example, without the use of a visual aid, it would be challenging to depict to a jury the exact location of a vehicle in reference to a place they might have never been.
Oftentimes, we find that the facts in a case are complex and challenging to understand for the average person. In a society that is inundated with visual media, it’s critical to be able to teach them the ins and outs of a situation in a way that they’ll be able to understand. If you’ve heard somebody say “I’d have to see it to believe it,” then you know the extraordinary value of providing a visual display for the jury in order for them to understand.
Mark Dombroff says it best: “The varied uses of courtroom visual aids are limited only by your imagination. Legal graphic consultants and artists can be an important part of your team, in helping you highlight salient points, increase comprehension, illustrate the unknown and hard-to-imagine, permit audiences to digest large amounts of data quickly and easily, increase critical events in an evidentiary chain, add dramatic effect [and] make your presentation effective.”
Legal Graphics Help Jurors Decide
Jurors are more likely to sympathize with your client’s injuries when they see that the defendant’s actions were blatantly negligent. Adjusting points of view allows jurors to evaluate a driver’s actions from multiple angles. We work with such precision that our animations have actually been used as substantive evidence, not just demonstrative.
In our extensive experience developing crash reconstruction animations, we’ve done trucking collisions, multi-vehicle collisions, low-speed spine injuries, motorcycle collisions, and many other kinds of incidents. We perform FARO scanning, topographical mapping, forensic analysis, and nighttime visibility studies to determine the precise circumstances under which the incident occurred.
Fox Animation Engineering - Industry Leader for Legal Graphics
The overwhelming satisfaction of our clients is living proof that we’re the best in the business for animated engineering. Ultimately, we’re here to streamline the information transfer process from you to the jury. No matter the kind of injury or the circumstances surrounding the incident, we can render a compelling representation that will leave your audience stunned.
