Night Life Blog

Following on from Roberts post earlier today I have been looking into an alternative form of sponsorship.

Crowd funding websites are becoming an increasingly popular way of raising money to fund your project.

“Kickstarter” is the most famous of these. It works by a large amount of people pledging a small amount of money. The site give you the opportunity describing the project and tell people about yourself. You set the amount that you needto raise and the duration of the project.  However if the target is not reached in the allotted time no money changes hands. This is designed to protect both sides. You are required to offer incentives or “rewards” to those who donate. There can be numerous levels of rewards for different amounts. A limit can also be set on the number of each reward. The rewards are usually to do with the projects themselves. For example, if it is a film you can offer a credit or a DVD copy of the film. If the target is reached before the deadline the collection goes on so it is possible to receive more than you ask for.

http://www.kickstarter.com/

After working with this website for a while I discovered that you cannot sign up to receive payments from outside the US.

Fortunately I found an Irish version called “Fund it” that works on the same principles. We are preparing a submission for fund it that will be launched when the website is relaunched.

We are looking for €500. This will be used to buy an iPad as a major incentive to encourage people to submit content. The idea is that if you submit something then you will be entered in to a draw for the iPad. 

The rewards we will be offering are in three levels:

• People that donate €1 or more will receive a “funder” credit.
• People that donate €5 euro or more will receive a “funder” credit and a copy of the film on DVD.
• People that donate €10 or more will receive an “executive producer” credit and a copy of the DVD.

http://www.fundit.ie/browse

It may not succeed but the way we see it fund it is as risky and the chances of success are the same as any other type of sponsorship effort. The time commitment is also quite low so we thought we may as well give it a try. We are currently thinking for 28-35 days but that has not been decided at this moment.

Today we discussed the project with Trevor and the conversation led us in a slightly different but still exciting direction for the project. We’re gonna rework the public contributions aspect to be much more engaging and easy to use, and focus on that as the interaction aspect of the project, doing away with the installation idea.

Implications this will have on the project:

• Website - the website will be downgraded to a “coming soon” type of set-up for the time being, and all promotion will be withdrawn, until it’s ready for public use again.
• Contributions - the main part of the conversation was about reworking the way we collect work from the public. Instead of leaving people to their own means and ways of generating content, we will instead provide the tools, i.e. a drawing application (Flash or HTML5) with a colour pallet and brush sizes prescribed by us, allowing the user to trace over a preloaded image. More on the tracing and its context in the next post.
• Production timeline - the immediate focus will now shift to the storyboarding; decided on exactly what shots we want in terms of cinematography/composition/etc. so that we know exactly what we want from the public, or more importantly, so that they know what we want from them.
• No more installation - this frees up so much time on production as we no longer have to research and implement physical technologies, meaning a quicker and easier set-up for the exhibit also.

Another important point Trevor made was that despite this is primarily an animation project, we have yet to show any actual animation work, so experimentation with that needs to commence very soon.

This morning we met with Paul to discuss the current state of the project. The meeting went well. We were advised to adjust the website to make it clearer what we are asking the public for, which will be fixed soon.

We were also advised to engage in user testing for the website, which not only will help find any problems on the website that we overlooked, but will also look good in the hand-up document at the end of the semester.

We also discussed our approaching schools to collect work, and we agreed that primary school students are more ideal as at that age they are more open minded and enthusiastic about art, especially the type of art we are looking for.

We were also advised to give examples on the website of the sort of imagery we are looking for.

One of the leads that I spoke about yesterday in Liverpool has followed up with me. This is not a guarentee of participation but it does spread word even further and boost the chances of more uploada. This is very encouraging in the early going.

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/fq3v7t

As mentioned previously myself and Ken have completed work on the script.

One of the key aspects of the story is how the narrative contains a number of scenarios and that the scenarios displayed shall be dictated by user interaction before viewing the piece. In order to illustrate how this will work please see below for a graphical breakdown of the story flow structure.

The titles of Scene 1,2 etc are simplistic but the theory remains the same. The scenes in blue shall remain constant throughout all viewings while only one red scene out of the options given shall be placed within the timeline. Each red scene shall correspond with an interactive element and, depending on which elements are selected by the user, this will then determine which red scene is played.

At the moment, with the number of scenarios that we have written there are 24 different possible narratives that are available to be shown.