Project One: Interactive Family Ebook

The Brief

In this assignment you are going to produce a piece of interactive documentary narrative which utilises a wide range of media, delivered as an ebook for the iPad. Researching content and sourcing the assets for documentary can be an extremely time consuming process, so this project will keep the content and themes of your story close to home, drawing initially from material that exist for you (family stories and archives of images) and then extend this with new assets (interviews, graphics, animations).

Your aim is to produce an aspect of your family history or a family story to life with mixed media. This family theme can be interpreted in a wide range of ways; think quirky stories or remarkable family members, relative who took part in historic events or have lived interesting lives. It can be historic and/or contemporary, can focus on one particular family member or spread of personalities, can tell a story in depth or cover a range of events, can focus on a period of history or range over time. Alternatively, you could explore the place you're from, which might mean the house, street or town. Part of the challenge of this brief is to find an interesting an engaging angle.

You will source or generate text, images, sound, moving image and animation. The ebook must contain at least the following:

- A title page or cover which may be animated
- Text and images
- At least one audio interview with a family member, edited to tell the story in 1 minute or less
- Animated visual elements to accompany the interviews

You will use After Effects to create the animations and iBooks Author to create the interactive ebook for iPad.

You will follow a project planning and design process which will be reflected in your blog and sketchbook. This will include at least the following:

- Plan your time with a production schedule
- Find and analyse examples of interactive documentary narrative
- Find and analyse examples of animation used in a documentary context
- Visual research which contributes to devising the look and feel
- Design the graphical style, interactivity and animation
- Undertake design and technology research into developing content for the iPad

You will pitch your content and design solutions to this project to the group for discussion in the form of a prepared presentation. This must contain mock-ups, navigation plans, storyboards and animations and/or sequences which experiment with your animation style.

You will produce your ebook and apply user testing techniques to explore it's characteristics as a piece of interactivity. You will detail your user testing in your blog.

You will prepare a finished ebook to crit with the group of and your tutors.

This assignment requires the following:

- Attendance at pitches and crit presentations is compulsory
- Sketchbooks must be available for discussion with your tutors in every lesson and must be updated at least weekly throughout the project
- Blogs must be must be updated at least weekly throughout the project
- The pitch must be in the form of a presentation, prepared in advance of pitch session
- Production will be complete by the crit, so a full product is shown in the crit session, though changes and improvements can be made between crit and deadline

Deadlines and Key Dates

Monday 24th September - Assignment set
Monday 22nd October - Pitch your proposal
Wednesday 5th December - Crit your final product to the group
Wednesday 12th December - Submission of your work

FdA Second Year

During the summer break, we were given a project to complete for the beginning of the second year.

The Brief 

This assignment is to be completed in the summer break between years one and two of the FdA Digital Media Design.  During the summer holidays, you must take part in an event or placement, which shows an ability to take advantage of a networking opportunity.  This may be:-

- Attendance at a conference or industry event as a delegate or a volunteer

- Work experience at a design agency relevant to Digital Media Design

The following networking opportunities are available and suitable for this assignment:- 

1 

   Attend the three day OFFF Digital Media Design Festival in Barcelona (16^th – 19^th May 2012)

2   - Volunteer at Reasons to be Creative ( Formerly Flash on theBeach ) (3^rd – 5^th September 2012).  Email your interest in this opportunity to volunteer@reasonstobecreative.com as soon as possible.  There is a selection process for this; being offered a place as a volunteer is not guaranteed but offers a great chance to be at the heart of the conference, as well as attending for free.  

3   - Buy tickets to Reasons to be Creative at http://www.reasonstobecreative.com/tickets/ and attend as a delegate.  

If you are unable to take part in any of the above opportunities, then it is your responsibility to find an alternative conference of a similar scale and relevance (minimum 3 day conference specifically related to Digital Media Design) or to set up a placement at a design agency, again with a minimum of three days attendance.  Obviously if you’re lucky enough to be offered some paid work at a design agency, you can use this as the basis of this assignment too.  

Method of Assessment

What you need to produce:

You will write a report (word count guide 2000) which outlines an aspect of this networking opportunity you found useful or interesting, and you will produce an illustrated presentation to show to the group and your tutors at the start of next academic year. 

Your report and presentation should be based on something, which inspired you about this experience.  If you’ve attended OFFF or Reasons to be Creative, you may want to pick a particular agency or designer your saw talk about their work, do a profile of them, review their talk and analyse why you found them inspiring.  You may pick a theme you saw several speakers discuss (such as social and mobile media or a technology like html5) and explore the range of responses to this from the speakers you saw.  

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In response to the project I attended a six day work placement at a design agency called East Web. I helped to design a web site for a project called Location Darling, which helps people find suitable venues. This is what I came up with based on the sketches I was given and the design requirements: