Archive for the 'Web Design' Category
Thursday, August 13th, 2009
Nearly Full Circle for TOCAN LIVE
I know narrative puzzle http://www.tocanlive.com has had a few mentions here of late, but I just wanted one final push before the final installment tomorrow.
I’ve enjoyed and learned so much running this ARG all week. But I was asked to do it to help promote ‘They Only Come at Night’ series of live vampire spectaculars by the fantastic Slung Low Theatre Company (and featuring music and sound by the very lovely Heather Fenoughty) which are going to be brilliant.
We can sometimes moan about how lazy and dim we can all be as an audience. But this week, I’ve really been reminded how amazingly bright and enthused audiences can be too. What’s impressed me most is the little community that formed, piecing things together that I would never have thought of. So to those who’ve been clicking through, thank you.
And to anyone who has patiently read my shameless plugging (for http://www.tocanlive.com) but hasn’t had a chance to log on, Please do.
And thanks for playing along. Normal service will resumed shortly 
Sunday, August 9th, 2009
Final TOCAN Gesture
With Slung Low’s narrative puzzle http://www.tocanlive.com going live first thing tomorrow morning, I’ve just been nervously doing some final tweaks and changes to the story text - the biggest thing that needed fixing being that a main character’s surname changes halfway through - nice one, me 
(Don’t know what I’m talking about? Check this blog post for more info)
I think everything is set to go so I just hope it does go as soon we click the button. If you haven’t done so already, I’d really appreciate your support if you wanted to sign up as a facebook fan of Slung Low’s They Only Came at Night and maybe select that you will be attending the event here.
But in the meantime, here’s a newspaper article I wrote for the story that we didn’t use in the end. As loyal blog readers, you get a sneak peak (kind of like a film maker trying to lure you to watch his film by showing you the deleted scenes first… Hmmn)
I will be blogging about it (amongst other things - don’t worry!) day by day next week as I will be virtually (heh) living on the internet for the next five days, checking everything is working, responding to readers (as well as hovering at the analytics page to see if anyone is actually logging on!)
Please do feel free to offer any queries or comments but, if you do stop by this week, I hope http://www.tocanlive.com provides as much fun to read as it was to write and that someone reading is the lucky winner of the tickets to the live show or the graphic novel.
And thank you for all the tweets and messages of encouragement. Cheers
Wednesday, August 5th, 2009
New Online Project: TOCANLIVE goes LIVE!
Finally. I can unveil www.tocanlive.com
For months I’ve been hinting and alluding to it. And for months, I’ve been staring at wordpress trying to plot the thing. But it’s finished and ready to go. From next Monday, The hunt goes live online!
www.tocanlive.com is designed as an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) to expand the world of Slung Low Theatre Company’s ‘THEY ONLY COME AT NIGHT’ series of vampiric theatrical extravaganzas. With live shows coming up at the Lowry in September with TOCAN: Resurrection and at the Barbican in November with TOCAN: Visons, www.tocanlive.com allows the opportunity to present the world of the story to an audience who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend (I’m looking at you, international vampire fans!)
From our facebook group:
Updated daily from August 10th-14th, join an anxious scientist’s online journal from the comfort of your own computer as she stumbles into the world of the undead and needs your help to find answers.
Follow a series of cryptic puzzles and interact with the characters to help the scientist find three answers that make up a hidden email address. When emailed, the hidden email offers the chance to win tickets for the live Salford show at The Lowry (Sept 2nd-12th) or copies of the graphic novel that may have incurred the vampires’ wrath to begin with (which can be sent by post to wherever you are)
Monday’s posts give you the chance to read back through our intrepid scientist’s journal since making the strange discovery that persuaded her to start blogging. Each subsequent daily entry will then offer a coffee-break sized puzzle to piece together into the elusive e-mail address.
If you belong to facebook, please please please join the facebook event and then click through to become a fan so you can see what’s happening in your facebook stream. Otherwise, keep checking back here and bookmark www.tocanlive.com to keep up to date.
This has been a lot more challenging than The End is Nigel with a lot of the focus on making it more of a game rather than an online narrative. It’s been really fun to write and a real challenge to plot so I would really appreciate any questions or feedback.
I hope you can join us next week and play along. Fingers crossed this works!
Thursday, April 9th, 2009
Follow ‘THE END IS NIGEL’ to win £30 of HMV vouchers!!
I am currently plotting and writing a pitch for a much larger version of online comedy apocalypse ‘THE END IS NIGEL’ . So to take a little break from harping on about the other script I’ve been struggling with (which is going much better now btw) I wanted to get some constructive feedback so I can really take this project to the next level.
So, while I hope you enjoy the experience, to add extra incentive for you to follow Nigel through to the End, anyone who leaves feedback on the Nigel facebook group between now and the end of April will be entered in a draw to receive £30 of HMV vouchers as a thank you from me (unfortunately, I’m afraid this applies to viewers in the UK only).
If you haven’t been through the project before, ‘The End is Nigel’ was made for a mere £840 from Screen Yorkshire’s MOViES scheme. It combines video, blogging, webcomics and dummy websites to follow film student Verity’s online quest to prove if local nutter/doom-prophet Nigel was right… that the End is indeed Nigh.
I’d like to take this chance again to thank the brilliant cast and crew who worked on ‘The End is Nigel’ and hope that, if you haven’t already, you enjoy watching what we did or even enjoy watching it again. If you want to know any more, please follow this blog back to the beginning for the project’s origins. Looking forward to hearing from you.
Thursday, April 2nd, 2009
Online Audiences
This will probably be a recurring topic as it’s something I’m greatly interested in. While ‘The End is Nigel’ has had a great deal of online traffic, it’s fair to say that I could probably trace at least 70% of the audience finding the site back to either being friends, friends of friends, on facebook, message boards, twitter etc where I have mentioned the project or through other direct contact. (and a big hello to you all, you lovely people!)
This interview with ‘Lost’ exec producer/showrunner Damon Lindelof got me thinking about the nature of viral marketing as he looks at what happened with Watchmen and and prepares for the launch of the new Star Trek movie (to which was recently announced he will be co-scripting the sequel to).
Lindelof raises an interesting point – one that cuts the heart of most cult-mainstream hybrid offerings, especially his own. Traditionally the whole idea of advertising has been to make potential buyers aware of a product in a positive light. But as Lindelof points out, “”The people who are most into the movie or going to be playing these games, are already buying tickets.”
When it comes to viral marketing, are you only succeptible if you’re already interested in the product? Was the The success of the ‘The Dark Knight’ and its I believe in Harvey Dent campaign only so huge because the film itself was always set to break box office records?
In the case of Watchmen and its online marketing at The New Frontiersman, I actually found myself enjoying the texture of the online world more than I did the finished film (which I didn’t actually dislike btw - I just felt it lacked all of the brilliant little moments that made you care about the big bits). But the excellent campaign added all the texture and world but I wondered if it would make more sense if audiences had only already read the book or would have seen the film first, then looked at all the online material available.
So I’d love to know which marketing campaigns have completely snared you, especially ones where you knew little to nothing about the film/project beforehand. Please vote in the poll and leave any specific answers in the comments box below:
Loading ...Wednesday, January 21st, 2009
Aftermath
The scary bit. Having got the project to a point where I am happy with it, I sent it off to our commissioner, Andy, at Blink. Way back into the middle of last year, Andy and I had a big chat about all of the wondrous creative possibilities achievable with an online project. And yet I wrote something about some nutter predicting the end of the world. But with a quick e-mail back and forth, Andy has said:
Well done, that is excellent. It’s just what I’d been hoping you’d come up with.
Phew. As you can imagine that came as quite a relief. He did have a few suggestions about breaking up the text of Verity’s blogs which I had been umming and aaahing about myself - for example, the quotes from other characters now appear in those colourful boxes which they didn’t this morning. I think the pages now scan much better.
Right, the next thing is to actually launch this properly online so that everyone can see it.
Ulp.
Wednesday, December 31st, 2008
Mist Opportunity
Christmas is over. Hope you all had a very merry one! It’s now New Year’s Eve and (to quote Sinatra) the weather outside is frightful. While this may be a good excuse to stay indoors and contemplate January’s inevitable detox, I took it as an opportunity to go galumphing round the hills behind my flat as a really eerie mist has swept along and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Even from my windows I could see it was the perfect backdrop for what I wanted for the Apocalypse Nige site. 150 photos and 10 severely chilled fingers later and these are my favourites:
Typically, the shot we’re going to use that was so obviously perfect to have a bunch of Warren Chambers running around within was discovered by accident. I’d wandered across a field trying to get a spooky shot of a tree in the mist but couldn’t get it right. But when I turned round to go back across the field, behind me all along was the perfect shot as the spooky mist followed me along the path.
As it’s New Year’s Eve, I’m reminded of the way I felt at the turn of the Millennium. Even though I didn’t believe in the Y2K Super-Computer Virus bringing civilisation to an end, the same way I didn’t believe that the Large Hadron Collider was going to destroy the universe (ie - by listening to the people who know what they’re talking about) there was always a slight feeling of excitement that made me think ‘oooh, but what if it did?’. Of course, it didn’t. A no-show for the apocalypse. In fact, as the clocks started chiming midnight at the end of 1999, I was banging on a toilet door at a party to make sure that a friend hadn’t passed out inside. Maybe there’s more insight there into why I’m writing this silly little project than I’d care to think about. Ho hum.
Oh well, Happy New Year and see you on the other side… 
Sunday, December 21st, 2008
Christmas Online Presence 2
Having spoken about the web aspects, Heather has persuaded me to put all my initial sketches for web-design online. You can see now why I didn’t draw the Saxophone Deity strip myself
Despite my innate inability to draw, I did have specific ideas for each web-page not just in terms of design or style but also usability. I’m sure we’ve all experienced very clever web-sites full of bells and whistles but that are a riddle in themselves to navigate. I also had to bear in mind that this is a promotional tool so I don’t want to lose anyone along the way because of design fault.
I always had the moody photo at the top of Verity’s blog (and the parody at the top of this one) in mind but it took a lot of looking at other blogs to see what I liked best that led to this sketchy looking thing. Colour-wise though, I think it sets the right tone for the ominous air and makes the break-out sites like Saxophone Deity and Rainy Day seem all the more colourful.
Here’s my sketch for the Saxophone Deity design. Webcomics are becoming an increasingly popular and viable thing -Not only in terms of self-publishing but also the big names in likes DC’s ingenious Zuda Comics. Despite my best efforts, I have often had trouble trying to convince Heather to read comics and graphic novels - not for the obvious reason that she’s just plain cooler than me, but because she has trouble with following the panel order. Director Tim Burton quite famously had similar issues and was always finding himself peeking ahead to the bottom of the page before he’d read the top.
Even though the panel-by-panel structure meant more work for the Saxophone Deity comic zsite as it would require more pages, I knew I’d hit the right design with the scribble below as it converted Heather as the reader, once in the thick of the story, never even has to move the cursor. Making the colours and buttons so vivid and cartoony again seemed the good contrast to Verity’s blog but it didn’t hurt that we had such vivid pictures to work with to begin with!
In designing the Apocalypse Nige site, it would have been easy to just do an over the top explosive James Bond layout type thing but the involvement of the Rainy Day Corporation made me want to provide a sinister edge. Having taken a million and one pictures of Mike/Warren Chambers in his last visit, I really wanted to do the multiple version of him all photoshopped together as a tribute to one of my favourite onscreen villains.
(I don’t want to start a Matrix-related debate, but whatever your opinions of the sequels, I hope we can all agree that 100+ Agent Smiths all looking pissed off in slightly different ways after Neo has cheated and flown off is a good moment).
Without spoiling anything, in the big picture of ‘The End is Nigel’, I had planned to develop the Warren Chambers character as a Smith-esque wild card in the ongoing plot. Waitaminute…is John saying that the Rainy Day Corporation aren’t the big bad guys in this plot??? Bwahahahahaha.
Anyway, having looked through all of the photos I’d taken, this was my original design:
In particular, and with such good winter weather available, I wanted to add the elements to anything to do with Rainy Day (for example, all of the cloud shots in the movie posters and on the Rainy Day sites are genuine snaps we took of the sky ourselves). I guess all the study of Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein’ at school has instilled me with the romantic notion that anything dramatic happening must always be accompanied by moody weather.
