Week 4: 2/2 – 2/6
Over the course of this week, Patronus took their branding art to the producer’s workshop on Monday. After receiving feedback and critique, our artist Wenyu modified the poster and half sheet. The poster is shown below, with the half sheet description below that.
Our branding art was completed and submitted for printing on Friday at noon. To hammer out our pipeline for creating scenes in our graphic novel, we started a prototype scene. We completed a script involving a catcalling incident, including differing dialogue and events depending on a single player choice. We created storyboards for our script, with Stephanie creating the initial layout, Cewon refining and clarifying the art, and Wenyu helping with the composition. Our finalized storyboards are shown below:
On Friday, Spencer brought his drama classmates to the ETC so that we could photograph the group acting out our prototype scene with still shots. Cewon plans on using these shots to produce our prototype so that we can gauge the length and intensity required for each scene.
A lot of time was spent this week discussing the story for our experience. We discussed possible incidents, story structure, and user interaction. We also discussed the possibility of using voice over instead of text in the experience, but settled on text/dialogue bubbles due to the workload and potential production hold ups recording voice overs would create. The team talked to story and design consultant Whitney Beltran about the subject of sexual assault and harassment and how to deal with such a complex issue in a digital experience. We also held a story workshop with Ralph and Chris to lay out the “skeleton” of our story, knowing this structure will allow us to consciously write the story and dialogue with a specific goal in mind. Through their assistance, our main story now has a basic three-act structure, where the first gives the player a clear place to intervene, the second motivates the player to intervene but immediately sends messages that it was not wanted there, and the third leading to the actual incident where the player must use their judgment to understand they should intervene.
We have also designed the basic interface for decision making in our graphic novel this week. The available options will appear as icons or smaller comic panels at the bottom of the screen, and the player must click and drag the option they choose to the middle of the screen. The panel would then expand, and the story would continue. Our HTML programmers, Mahar and Ladera, have been working this week to create the panel transitions that allow them to appear and move across the screen.
Next Week:
Our next week is quarters, where we will be visited by rounds of faculty from the ETC to see our project and give us feedback about our progress and intended future work. We will be creating a short presentation that shows the information, and the rest of the sessions will be devoted to questions and comments from the faculty. The presentations are ungraded, so as to facilitate honest discussion about project progress.
We hope to complete parts of our prototype by quarters to show faculty the form of our project. If not, we will likely show the art samples and storyboards we do have, and hope to complete the prototype pipeline by the end of the week. Meanwhile, we will continue to write and storyboard more scenes in our product according to our story skeleton. We are also hoping to look into analytics packages for our project to help analyze effectiveness of various story sections, as well as music and sound effects to begin adding in.