Fictioneers shift to 100% remote working
Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up transforms to become an at home experience
Creative product lead Jamies Innes, and USW Audience Research lead Dr. Helen Davies grapple with the implications of a disastrous and global pandemic that turned the whole world upside down, Fictioneers included.
Luckily, the R&D team was already smart working, employing an extensive network of collaboration tools to enable flexible working arrangements.
Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up was soon redesigned as a take-home experience.
Student production
With 100% remote working underway, Fictioneers online networking tools became doubly important to the development process. These included Slack, Confluence, Jira, Miro and not to forget, gif making applications!
Researching augmented reality experiences without face to face observation still posed a challenge, but not for long.
James Rendell, USW’s co-Research Fellow for Audience Research describes how the project’s audience research strategies were completely transformed by this most dangerous and heart-breaking of all challenges encountered during the making of Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up:
Human participant research was central to the project’s ongoing R&D where testers would engage with the usability and immersive qualities of the app. Pre-Covid-19, diverse and dynamic methods were used with a range of audience demographics. This included: focus groups, creative task-based activities, and tester observation. But with the global pandemic greatly hampering how we could conduct research, we turned to digital media to find alternative solutions. It was suggested by Jamie Innes (Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up Creative Product Lead) to use the software Lookback to moderate and/or observe users testing the app. This could be done both in real time or reviewing archived video documentation.
Traditionally, Lookback has been used in laboratory settings. Thus, by taking it literally into people’s homes as they tested the app, we were able to gain meaningful data rich in ecological validity that allowed R&D to continue. Furthermore, Lookback has received very little scholarly attention, so by using the software in this new and novel way points to ways that researchers might use such a digital methodology to analyse audience engagement with media beyond the pandemic and support future research.
For more details about this shift, as well as other arts research responses to the global pandemic please see Davies, H “Looking to the Future through Lookback” pp. 57 – 59 in Doing arts research in a Pandemic: a crowd-sourced document responding to the challenges arising from COVID-19, compiled by Vida L Midgelow. 2020.
Covid-19 couldn’t foil Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up
The global pandemic caused extreme suffering for far too many people during the making of Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up. During lockdown, Tiny Rebel Games made and delivered 3D masks to local care homes. USW Researcher Bronwin Patrickson joined a Roath volunteer network in Cardiff, swapping shopping help, and delivering community generated newsletters to ensure ongoing contact. Other members of the team attended Black Lives Matter rallies across the country, cheered on by the rest. Shout-out also to Jamie Innes, Fictioneers’ Creative Product Lead whose entire young family was downed by Coronavirus, and very thankfully recovered, only a month before deadline. We’re with you on this.
