THE PRESENTATION

The presentation went really well, we were able to answer all the questions quite confidently and I think we kept our audience quite entertained!

The only thing I would have like to do differently is perhaps add a bit more of the story along with the choices but perhaps that is because of my role as the writer, but I think it would have served our presentation well if we had shown an example of the interactive scenes and games we had produced as this was something the panel did pick up on. Also it felt like the presentation was a bit marketing heavy but I suppose it had to be as we were told to treat it as a professional pitch.

There was one small technical hiccup when the radio clip wouldn't play but it was resolved very quickly and wasn't because of my nervous clicking of the powerpoint!

Overall though, I'm really happy with how the presentation went and how most of the artefacts have turned out. I think if we had the money to really make Varytales I would like to include animation to a bit more fantastical and appealing for children of our target age group. 


It will be interesting to get the feedback for our group in order to understand in what ways we could have improved our product and presentation.

Preparing the Presentation

Today has been a rather long day, in a 9am and I've just got home at about 11pm. Unfortunately it took longer than we'd hoped to get the presentation and artefacts within the powerpoint to work properly, but I'm confident that all will go well after a couple of good presentation practices towards the end of the night.

Unfortunately we didn't manage to get the video artefacts in time for the rehearsal we had booked in the Wallace Lecture Theatre but it still provided us with a chance to get acquainted with the room and equipment. We also plan to get into the room early in the morning to have another quick run-through

Christopher, Sam and Glen will be presenting and I have been given the rather envious job of clicking through the powerpoint. I am a little worried my nervous fingers will click to eagerly and I'll ruin the whole presentation but I've practised it a few times now with script indicating all my cues and I think I should be fine!

At least we got the presentation sorted ready for tomorrow even if it does mean a bit of a late night!

Until tomorrow...

The Website

After emailing Matt on the 12th with the revised layout, extra artefacts and walk through of each of the pages and then emailing him again today to ask whether there was any progress, I received a reply.

Unfortunately it wasn't really the one I'd wanted. He said he'd been really busy and hadn't been able to much for any of the projects. He did provide me with a mock up of one of the pages I'd described and given my own example of, which wasn't vastly different. He said he could send the other pages he had mocked up too, but I wasn't really sure why he hadn't provided these anyway unless he hadn't actually done them. I forwarded the email to the rest of the group and we all decided that it would be good to see what he could provide and continue to develop our own website in case he didn't manage to get the stuff over to us in time.

So I emailed him back and asked him if we could have the other pages. I didn't receive a reply or any web pages. I later found out that Yunus had been to see Matt and trying to get him to do the website. I was a bit annoyed about this because I thought that this would perhaps confuse Matt and the group had all agreed that one person should discuss the website with him to avoid confusion. From what I gathered, Yunus discussed trying to get a website layout done in time for the handing in the artefacts on the following Monday, but I'm not sure whether this is a good idea or even whether it will come to fruition.

We have not received any other mock-ups and have decided to definitely go with our own mock-up website which is disappointing as none of us are very capable in this arena.

Lots of photoshop work and booking the lecture theatre for the dress rehearsal!.

I have been spending a lot of time on photoshop just recently doing a lot of design work that I hope will benefit the look and feel of the Varytales website. My most recent creations include; Pinocchio with varying nose lengths, The updated background with a border to distinguish the web pages from the normal presentation pages, certificate print-out awarded to the user for completing the Varytales adventure, colouring-in print out pages, writing page print-outs, signpost replicating the design of the 'r' in the logo for the website and stills for the Pinocchio story.

I also emailed room bookings at the university in order to book out the Wallace Lecture Theatre so we could run through the presentation and get familiar with the equipment. We have it tomorrow from 11-12. Let's hope we have everything ready by then.

Progress Meeting

Today we had a meeting to discuss what stages we are all at in regards to the production of the artefacts and presentation.

After a weekend spent filming, the directors and producers were preparing for their editing session with Roger Shufflebottom which would take place the following day.

We also booked one of the radio studio's to record some of the sound that would accompany some of the artefacts; Gepetto (Yunus) for the story stills and Rapunzel's (my) singing for the video artefacts.

Myself, Chris and Sam were continuing to work on the presentation, collecting any useful images or bits of research and writing the script for the presentation.

James and Glen will be working on the marketing aspect of the presentation and presentation script as they are most competent to deal with these issues.

James also asked to send over the stills for the Pinocchio segment of the story so I could photoshop my Pinocchio design and any other little effects into the images to make them more 'magical.'

The presentation and the artefacts do seem to be coming together quite nicely but I'm still a bit worried about the website aspect of the presentation as I've still not had word from Matt Northam. It's looking like we'll perhaps have to mock up our own example website. Without input from our interactivity specialist, I think our website will perhaps not look quite as advanced as other group, but I hope the idea behind these examples will be enough to make the presentation work.

Disagreements and a lack of focus in the group

I'm started to get a little bit frustrated with certain members of the group presenting artefacts that have no relevance or coherence to what we have discussed. I am sure I am not the only person in the group who feels this way. I, along with other members have tried to express this to the people in question and although they appear to understand, continue with the same disregard. This has been occurring all the way through the project and less than a week away from the presentation deadline and I'm quite stressed about this lack of focus and also worried by the fact that some members of the group are either trying to change the product from what the rest of the group have agreed or perhaps do not understand the basic premise of the task at hand. Either way, I am finding it difficult within the group at the moment.

Completed artefact: Little Red radio piece

Christopher sent me the completed Little Red radio piece we had recorded earlier in the week and I was extremely happy with the outcome. I think that it is a very entertaining piece that also encourages your imagination to run wild which I think is exactly what we were hoping for. I would be eager to see how children reacted to, to make sure that these assumptions are correct but am I confident it will fit into the product very well.

Playing the part

Today I was Rapunzel for the day as after we were unable to secure an actress to play this part James and Glen asked if I would be able to step in. Although I wasn't completely convinced, I agreed.

I hope it all turns out ok and that my acting isn't too awful!

2nd Meeting with Matt Northam

Our 2nd Meeting with Matt was a little disappointing. Even though we were the first group to provide him with artefacts, he had not had the chance to put anything together for us. He also said that we had provided to many website pages and he would only be able to create a mock-up of about 4 and the website layout information needed to be more about what we wanted and where, rather than to do with the content.

So tonight I have been working on revising the website layout and creating an example page that indicates the sort of thing we would like. I will send these on after emailing the group and asking what they think and whether they have any suggestions on what else we could include.

I also sent across my design for the fairy godmother which will hopefully also be incorporated into the website:

Little Red on the radio

Today I sat in for the radio recording for Little Red and also voiced the mother and grandmother part in the script. I really enjoyed the experience and was impressed with the radio producers talent. I can already tell it is going to be a brilliant piece and I can't wait to hear it once it is finished. I will however have to return to the studio next week as we were rushed to get the quality of performance we wanted from myself in the role of the grandmother.

4th Tutorial with Trevor

During this presentation Chris went through a walk-through of the presentation so far. After listening and watching Trevor advised us that we should try and liven things up by adding more related visual, sound effects. We also decided that the introduction that at this point was just text on the powerpoint would be accompanied with a 'movie trailer-style' voice over to really engage the audience.

We also took time to decide who would be presenting for the presentation. We eventually decided that Chris, Glen and Sam would present as they all felt confident and enthusiastic about taking on this role. We decided to use 3 presenters as the variation in voices would keep the presentation more interesting and hopefully ensure that the audience would be more 'switched on'.

We were also informed that we should be aware that questions would be asked and therefore we were not expected to relay all the information and research we have gained over the process. I felt relieved to learn this as I do feel we have a lot to talk about and I was anxious that we would not be able to get across every single aspect of Varytales across to our audience. Hopefully now we can focus on what we see as our main points of research and the key examples of our artefacts and we will be given the chance to explain anything that is left unanswered through these questions.

Questions may include things like:
When will this product be ready?
How many impressions do we think the website will attract?
Have we thought of any spinoffs that relate to the company as a publisher i.e. books
Licensing?
Is it really Cross Platform?

Trevor also drew our attention to vooks as another possible reference and resource into which Varytales could easily utilise.

During this meeting we were also told that Roger Shufflebottom would be our editor and would help us edit our artefacts at the beginning of the next week after which we would have hopefully completed the video production part of the artefacts by Saturday. I am a bit nervous about this as the presentation is next Thursday which means that the deadline for the video artefacts will be very tight.

Thinking about the web layout

After our meeting with Matt Northam, who is helping us with interactivity and the design for our website on March the 3rd I have sent on as many artefacts that we have at this stage.

These include the logo, the background we hope to use, music files which Chris has composed especially for the project and the diagram which Chris made to explain our product.  I have also written a 12 page website layout guide that I hope will explain what we would like to achieve in time for the presentation. I also sent along our presentation powerpoint to give Matt an overview of our product.

In our meeting with Matt, he informed us that based on last year's group projects, we are not expected to construct a working website and that he would only really be able to provide us with example pages that we could incorporate into our powerpoint presentation. Although this was slightly disappointing, I understand that due to time restrictions it is unreasonable to think that we could construct a fully operational website.

After I sent the email, we arranged a further meeting with him at 1pm on Weds 10th March, by which time he said that he would hopefully have something to show us.

3rd Tutorial with Trevor

We are still a little bit worried about the situation with our editor as we still haven't been designated one for our project. Trevor assured us that we would be given an editor to help us out, however they would not be part of the MA course, either someone who works at the university or a another student. While we are relieved that we know that we definitely will be allocated an editor, it is disappointing that it is not someone who understands the project fully and has been with the group from the beginning. I do feel we might be disadvantaged in this way and the fact that we have had one less member in our group has meant that we've all had to work even harder.

During this meeting we also discussed the possibility of who we would like to pitch our idea to. Originally we had envisioned that we should pitch it to the BBC because of its mixture of entertainment and 'soft learning' However with the recent controversy around BBC cutbacks, particularly in reference to BBC blast (an internet based resource for kids) we were encouraged to consider other possible companies to approach. This pressure on the BBC to cut back on the online environment makes them probably not the best company to pitch our idea to. After discussions during the tutorial we considered the approaching a children's publisher as we identified the desire for these companies based in print publication to migrate to the internet as a way of branching out and reaching a wider audience.

After this meeting, with this in mind, Glen researched into educational publishing and found a company called Pearson Education who actually have links with the BBC and other educational publishers such as Heinemann. We decided that as they are a leading educational publisher they would be a very suitable company to approach with this idea.

Trevor also encouraged us to think about the presentation and how we get across our excitement about the idea. We decided that we would try and interact with the audience and link the idea of fairytales to the presentation by thinking about it as telling a story and by being as creative as possible. We talked about incorporating visuals and music to keep ensure that we keep the audiences interest in our product.

Little Red Radio Script and Interactivity meeting with Matt Northam

Last night i finished the radio script for the radio segment of the little red riding hood strand. Chris also sent through some music that he had already composed which we thought would really suit the website and could play in a continuous loop in the background.

Me, daniel, sam and james also went to see matt northam about setting up the website. He advised us that we should create a template of the pages we wanted to include with links so we could pretend that we were using the program as it should be used without having a fully functional website as this he thought was too ambitious. He also encouraged us to email him with any artefacts we had such as music, images and examples of styles of websites that we would like to emulate. I will therefore send him the script, logo and other artefacts i feel will be useful before monday as requested.

Devising the Brand: Out of the Library and to the place where Varytales live.

After much brainstorming around the research of other products on the market, I came up with the title Varytales, which the rest of the group were very happy with. It's a simple one-word title that indicates to children and parents the main aspect of the product (a retelling of fairytales where the user chooses their own path). I started to design the logo and in doing so used bright and bold colouring with clear and equally bold text whilst incorporating arrows into the first syllable of the title to emphasise choice. I then used a font that emphasised the products basis in the fairytale literature world as I tried to produce a golden embossed looked using a font that signified antiquity and the traditional fairytale look. I also added a background that looked as though it had been torn out of a fairytale book, again emphasising this products relation the fairytale literature but also the revival and different approach which is a key aspect of Varytales

My research into the Television Schedule and Branding

Because we felt as though by this point we had a good concept of what the product would be we felt that it would be important to come up with a brand that the product was deserving of.
Originally, we had two working titles The Fairytale Library which came out of ideas around the opening pages of the website, and A Modern Fairytale which emphasised the style and contemporary qualities we hoped to represent through the product. 
Yet on reflection of our demographic (6-7 year olds) we felt that these titles were far too bland and were not dynamic enough to communicate excitement and adventure to our very discerning audience. 

Therefore, we researched into the Television schedules and existing children's literature titles to get a taste of the trends in what sort of titles appealed to our audience. 
We found that the key features of the titling of children's books and television programmes used:

Phonetic Spelling- We also found that titles very rarely contained any silent letters and were always spoken exactly as they are written. 

Onomatopoeic words - BAMZOOKi, Ooglies, Gerald McBoing Boing 

Alliteration, Rhyme and Rhythm - Tinga Tinga Tales, Bear Behaving Badly, Yertle the Turtle, The Cat and the Hat.

Bold and clear typography - The clarity and legibility of the text is obviously important to ensure that the young readers find it easy to identify the words and letters in the text.

Character driven titles - Jakers!, Ed and Oucho's Excellent Inventions, Stig of the Dump, The Gruffalo.Obviously this would be difficult to incorporate into our product as the user would be the main character. Therefore we toyed with the idea of including a personal pronoun in the title making it similar to the Choose Your Own Adventure books. 


 

2nd Tutorial with Trevor

In this meeting we had already come up with the idea and I had written the script so Trevor wanted to emphasise the importance of the brand. Originally entitled 'The fairytale library' or 'A modern fairytale', Trevor questioned whether these titles would really appeal to the 6-7 year old demographic. We therefore have decided to scrap these and I have been put in charge of coming up with the name and logo of our brand. Trevor suggested looking at what kind of titles are used for programmes and websites aimed at a similar age group and to think about the significance of character within them.

He also drew to our attention the need for seeking out other branding opportunities in order to make this a lucrative venture. I am also going to think about how we can stretch our brand outwards to perhaps turn it from a 'pan-platform' product to a cross platform one. The ideas of books and Television series along with merchandise and advertising were suggested as a way of extending the brand. This is all in order as Trevor put it: prove our awareness of the potential of what we are doing. Rather than merely focusing on the idea of the website which we have done up to now.

In the meeting Trevor also suggested that it might be good to do some research into age 6-7 child psychology to back up the project.

We asked Trevor what the situation with getting another editor on board was, as we still haven't got a replacement for Bertha. He said that he would email us shortly to let us know what was going to happen.

After the meeting we split duties between the group based on our strengths. Mine was to research and come up with a brand name and logo.

Meeting with Jane Quinn

Today we had a meeting with Jane Quinn who has lots of experience in setting up internet and cross-platform resources with children in her career with the BBC. The meeting followed a lecture, which proved very insightful as it helped us define our idea as 'Pan-Platform' rather than straightforward cross platform. Pan platform she explained involved one message being told through several different media which are all linked together in one place, whereas cross platform is about accessing different types of media in different places which are all linked.

Our meeting with Jane Quinn was really useful and she had some really positive feedback about the project and thought it was a good idea but also warned us that it was quite ambitious which she said there was nothing wrong with as long as we were careful that we didn't overstretch ourselves with such a big concept. She also said that the biggest challenge we would have is linking the stages of the story together. Which I hoped we would achieve as I feel responsible for this aspect as I developed the idea and the script.

She also thought that our target market of 6-7 which we had linked in with the curriculum seemed appropriate and it was good that we could back up our choice of audience with this research.

We also asked her about the difficulty of approaching both a male and female audience at this age. Jane seemed to think this was do-able along as we had a good mixture of things that would appeal to both boys and girls. Particularly boys whom she said required a strong action element and were more put off by feminine elements that girls would be about masculine ones i.e. she advised us to avoid using the colour pink on any of our product as this could potentially put boys off.

She also helped us realise what the aim of this product was and provided us with the term 'soft-learning' meaning that its primary goal is to entertain with the opportunity for the user to learn some things in a passive way. This she said is usually the approach with many of the CBBC websites and therefore seems appropriate for our product as we could potentially market it to the BBC.

She also gave us a few things to go away and think about such as:

What is the user going to get out of it?

Where is the endpoint?

How do we make the ideas of books or the library appealing to 6-7 year olds.

In response to these I feel as though the user will hopefully gain a greater understanding about fairytales whilst taking part in something that is enjoyable and really excites and encourages their own imagination and creative ability.

I realised that I need to come up with the story in its entirety in order to present this to possible investors.

And the third point is definitely another thing we have to work on, trying to make all aspects of the website and other materials involved and exciting and as colourful as possible.

Bertha's departure from the group

We have just been notified as a group via email that Bertha, our editor will no longer be part of our group.

This has been a blow to the group as not only were we sad to lose our editor but Bertha as well. I was aware that there were some issues she had with working in the group and completely understand her reasons for leaving. Hopefully we will get a replacement soon though, as none of us are really competent with the editing software and we are also one member short now so we all going to have to pull together and work even harder. However I do think it is unfair that an editor might have to come into the group at this stage after already being involved with another group. Also they will be coming into our group at a point where we have already formulated the core idea and therefore may not feel as much of a part of it as we would like them to.

I suppose we will just have to wait and see what happens.

First Tutorial

After the first tutorial several issues were raised these included:

1. That we needed to be more specific about what the age range for the target audience should be. Therefore Market Research must take place.

2. What did we mean by 'Modern Day' fairytale? And how would we express this in a way that was appealing to our audience.

3. What other materials could we come up with to make this a financially viable venture. The idea of having a book to accompany the website was mentioned.

4. Did we intend to focus on Western fairytales and a Western audience? Or did we want to branch and use International fairytales?

5. We also acknowledged that we would have to be careful in terms of making the project from the point of view of the user because of differences in gender and targeting both would be difficult therefore research into this was needed.

We also have organised a meeting with Jane Quinn through our tutor to help us target our specified audience more clearly.

We defined clear roles for each member of the group at this preliminary stage. My role is to focus on creating the story. Other members roles are as follows:

Bertha & Sam: Researching comparable examples already available in the media and the international storytale.
Glen & Chris: Market Research: Contacting Schools in order to understand the target audience.
Jay & Glen: The Business Model
Yunus & Hasan: The visual elements e.g animation and video use.

Another important breakthrough was that it is a good thing that we have many ideas on how the project could be expanded but it would be unrealistic to suggest that in the 6 week timeframe we would be able to fully realise the project in its entirety due mainly to a lack of resources and time. As a group we felt that this was encouraging as we may not necessarily be able to fulfil all our aspirations for the project at this stage but could later on.

Group 1 - First Meeting

Today we had our first meeting and introduced ourselves and what we thought would be our roles in the group. The majority of the group had never worked with one another so this was exciting and we all seemed to get on very well, creatively and socially within the group.

We also tried to come up with an initial idea.
After discussing a couple of ideas the one which we decided to develop was a modern day fairy tale that the user would navigate through the different artefacts to create their own narrative. One common idea in the group was that it should be based in traditional fairytale and presented in a modern day setting.

We discussed what we thought would be the basic age range that this product would be aimed at. By the end of the meeting we had a rough idea that this would be suitable for children ages 8-12 but we decided that we would need to do more research to narrow this down.

We also discussed whether we wanted the project to be more entertainment based or whether it should be for purely educational purposes. In the end we decided that the project would be mainly for entertainment purposes but could incorporate educational values such as literacy, story-telling, presenting moralistic questions and perhaps including some numeracy based problems as well.

As the writer in the group I said I would go away and work on the story using the structure we had chosen ready for the next meeting.

Cross Platform Practice: Brief

We have been given the brief to create a product aimed at children of our own chosen age range that incorporates several different types of media under one brand/product.