Explore the project
Can you join a challenge to co-create the Audience of the Future?
New and emerging technologies are transforming how we can tell stories, but more needs to be known about how to make even better immersive storytelling experiences.
Immersive stories are complex, more likely to be made by teams, rather than individuals – and that’s why we’re here. As part of the Audience of the Future Demonstrate Programme funded by the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund, the University of South Wales (USW) has been working on this industry-led project in collaboration with a consortium of commercial practitioners dubbed Fictioneers.
Using Aardman's popular Wallace & Gromit characters, the consortium draws upon their combined skills in games production, animation, creative marketing and technology development to create a new and playful location-based experience. This enhanced mobile experience aims to engage new audiences and provide innovative ways for long term fans to interact with a media favourite.
Our University team contributes expertise in audience research, documentation and evaluation.
And now you can share those insights.
This site was made with the help of USW Students
LET’S GET CRACKING!
Follow along with the insights of the USW student interns*…
View all USW Research and Innovation Intern Blog posts:
*Numerous students participated in this collaborative research and innovation project. Fictioneers also welcomed five USW Student Media Interns who who helped to produce some of the media documentation on this site. Plus, three USW Advertising Student Interns were invited to help make a Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up pre-launch ‘sizzle’ preview video.
Research and development
One of the best ways to start research and development (R&D) is by exploring what’s worked well, or not in the past. With that in mind we’re going to revisit Fictioneers’ R&D experience step by step, or should we say challenge by challenge!
So, just how do you reinvent Wallace & Gromit’s Audience of the Future?
Here’s a key lesson from past creative projects: You’ll need to take a few risks…
September 9, 2018.
The chair is padded. You’re perched somewhere on top of it doing your best to look relaxed, even though your smile is, let’s face it, more trigger happy than you’d like. You’re in London. Or is that uptown? Either way the view outside those floor to ceiling wraparound windows that mark the entrance to the Business Design Centre where you’ve been invited to pitch your bid for the chance to reinvent digital storytelling is escalated, aspirational, and … intimidating. You’re seated across from an exacting group of assessors and you’re asking for money, a lot of it. Few people will achieve that goal. You’re up against top notch competitors and you know it. High profile applicants like the National History Museum, the Science Museum Group, even the Royal Shakespeare Company are vying against you.
You want to make stuff and for that you’ll need the grant. But to achieve your dream you’ll have to not only propose exciting new ways to tell stories, you’re also going to need to prove that you can make it happen.
You need help.
Cue Fictioneers…
Susan and Lee Cummings were the driving force behind the original Audience of the Future moving image funding bid. Their company Tiny Rebel Games is what is called a micro company. Micro-entities are very small companies with less than 10 employees.
To make their dreams a reality they would have to join forces and form a new Creative Industries Consortium, or alliance.
The Audience of the Future Demonstrator Challenge was part of a government investment strategy designed to develop digital storytelling capacity within the UK. Media producers were asked to create an entertainment experience that was inventive, immersive and appealing enough to engage a substantial number of people. To enable this the creative R&D teams were encouraged to work with an established IP, or intellectual property identity, such as a popular media brand.
In addition, the industry led consortiums were able to collaborate with a University research organisation…
…who could support them with advanced research expertise, and also join forces with other groups (businesses, research base or third sector) in order to draw upon their combined expertise across both the arts and technology development sectors.
Such as Fictioneers…
Fictioneers begins
Fictioneers is a consortium of three creative companies which include Potato (the London and San Francisco digital production development specialists), Sugar Creative (the Cardiff, Wales based creative innovation studio specialising in emerging and intelligent tech), and Tiny Rebel Games (a Newport, Wales based game producer). All three companies joined forces to make what would emerge as the Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up experience. Here’s a bit more info about each founder company:
One of the key aims of UKRI’s industry-led demonstrator programme was to propel new immersive storytelling insights informed by extensive audience research. Thus, during the Audience of the Future R&D project the consortium also worked alongside University of South Wales (USW).
Aardman Animations Ltd provided the final momentum, working closely with Fictioneers to ensure that Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up was as authentic, as it would be innovative.
As academic partners our role was to provide an expert spine of evaluation and research in order to help inform the evolution of the project and ensure that the learnings gained as a result could be shared more broadly through both industrial and academic channels.
USW Research Fellow for Impact and Evaluation Bronwin Patrickson documented the Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up R&D project for knowledge transfer purposes. She was assisted by USW student media interns Gina Parkinson, Beth Randell, and Harry Pettigrew (who presented student produced media) aided by Gabi Page and Charles Stylianou (who co-directed and post-produced the student produced media).
Are you ready to test our research insights?