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.