Summer 2019
Scripting workshops
With the right team in place, it’s time to brainstorm
“We ended up with a much richer story than I think any of us anticipated. You look at the richness of that News Feed. There’s huge depth in that. That is an animated film script awaiting to go straight to animation if they wanted just to follow that path, because there's lots of character slots and modes. There's lots of backstories, lots of humor, huge maps out there.
So that story writing became a big chunk of activities...”
- Richard Sagger’s, commenting as part of his review of the early R&D process
What can make people inventive?
Beyond diverse thinking, you might think that creativity is all about playfulness, and it is, but that’s not the whole truth.
Compare two challenges:
You’re challenged to do something creative in the middle of a room.
You’re challenged to invent new names for all the furniture in that room.
The first request might well create panic in a lot of people, followed by a mumbled attempt to do something… anything. Whereas the second request, which offers enough form and focus to distract from performance anxieties, can instead inspire the more creative response.
Imagination is often aided, even empowered by clear, focused rules of play, much like the design sprint sessions that Fictioneers undertook in their very first workshops. To build upon these possibilities, Fictioneers introduced holistic systems, or principles for invention, like agile.
Powered by short, dynamic cycles of experimentation the team were able to review the options and quickly decide that Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up would prioritise augmented reality (AR) over virtual reality (VR), for example. From this point, Fictioneers focused their research and development efforts on portable and generally accessible mobile AR experiences in the real world, with some VR content also accessible via the mobile phone viewing screen.
What else can make people inventive?
Knowledge: Rather than reinvent the wheel, it helps to build upon past learnings. How do you know what works and doesn’t work in AR?
“First of all. I look at a lot of the apps and games that are already on the market… And then I also look at academic studies online… it's just taking a look at it and trying to figure out what someone's done well, and then trying to think how it could have been done better.” Sam Beale, Fictioneers Game Design Team
Take a look at our research summaries, including the transmedia research insights listed below to find out more:
With a classic new Wallace & Gromit story in the making, the rest of the team need to research and develop the best way to tell that story.
Doing that demands creativity and time.
Transmedia Elements
Platform
Film
Features
Moving image, audio, non-interactive, fixed interaction time, passive viewing.
Unique Strengths
Popular, reaches a wide audience, commercial. Good for vista, special effects – The wide shot.
Episodic Shows
Moving image, audio, non-interactive, fixed interaction time, passive viewing, shorter, episodic.
Quick; episodes extend the duration of the transmedia work over time. changes the nature of how audience engages. overall extended narrative.
The Close Up: Intimate narrative/ soaps/series – reality/quicker turnaround
Web – shorter – but open to comments/TV – larger audience?
Gaming
interactive, animated/moving graphics, music, sound effects, no fixed interaction time.
players become an extension of the story world: they can act as a character, manipulate the world, and possibly form their own narrative – but expensive and time-consuming to make/interactive tasks potentially limited
Toys (action figures, costumes, trading cards)
Playable, physical, tactile
hands-on media, collectible, portable, allows players to become part of the world physically, helps form ideas of collective identity and competition and passion! (i.e. trading card collections)
Music (Song)
Only audio, fixed interaction time, single media environment (just sound).
sing-alongable, emotional
Artwork (Photography, Painting, Installation etc.)
only image, no fixed interaction time, single media environment (just image).
highlights key moments, encourages hardcore fans to appreciate and engage further
Literature (Novels)
written word, more detailed, fixed time, but longer than most other media
encourages reader’s imagination – detailed, psychological
Graphic Novels, Comics
written word, images, expressive, fixed time but duration is quite long.
encourages reader’s imagination, niche market
Social Media
videos, audio, text, image, networked, quick and fast connectivity, interactive
direct interaction with the personal audience
member - personalization. encourages
audience participation. bridge between the
story world and the real world, networks,
summaries, encyclopaedic layers
2020 Masterclass on emerging technologies presented by Dan Clemo from Sugar Creative.
What is agile?
Agile (Beck et al., 2001) is an R&D approach which emphasises fast, flexible, iterative development cycles. It was developed by people within the software industry as a type of bespoke development approach for inventive and dynamic contexts involving interdisciplinary teams. Previously, long planning phases and a fixed development cycle had created a type of fixation on planning documents. As a result of this sort of fixity the results might only be presented to developers, or even clients upon a predefined delivery date, which invariably caused problems when further changes were required.
At the core of agile is a set of 4 principles:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
These principles prioritise a range of practices that include client consultation throughout with a preference for face to face communication, short and iterative development cycles that enable ready change as required, enabled by daily cross team collaborations in tandem with a preference for simplicity, that regards working software as the primary measure of success, supported by processes to ensure regular team reflections, meaningful feedback mechanisms and pursuant work-flow adjustments (Beck et al., 2001).
Agile innovation cultures are now well established within software R&D cultures with numerous proven use cases (Duka, 2013; Serrador & Pinto, 2015). Fictioneers use agile in combination with a regularly target iteration cycle known as scrum, which (involves…) a regular (in this case fortnightly) Sprint Planning and Review cycle, including team leader strategy meetings to clarify targets, and review timelines. Progress in between these fortnightly review sessions is monitored via the daily scrum, or stand-up, which is a start of day ritual sharing of each team member’s daily work-targets either face to face, or via the team messaging application Slack instead. A fourth element in the scrum cycle approach is a reflective Sprint Retrospective to workshop and address any issues arising. Fictioneers dub these reflective workshopping sessions retros. These team building sessions can include discussion of what’s working, what’s not working and how to address those challenges, or playful discussion starters, aided by team coaches.
An excerpt from Patrickson and Davies, Is this Even Possible: Co-Creating University and Industry Learnings
