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How we Made the Make-Along

Find out how creating an interactive experience alongside a ´óÏó´«Ã½ series enabled us to steer our object-based media development.

Published: 15 March 2018
  • Jasmine Cox (MSc)

    Jasmine Cox (MSc)

    Development Producer

returns to ´óÏó´«Ã½ Four to celebrate the world of silver jewellery-making, cross-stitch and lots, lots more.

Alongside the series we have created a special interactive Origami tutorial which gives viewers the ability to change camera angle, repeat steps in the lesson and take the exercise at a pace suitable for whoever is following it. In the second of on the experience, ´óÏó´«Ã½ R&D's Jasmine Cox and Matt Brooks explain what happened when the created the Make-along - our next step on the way to an object-based future.

I will post an update early next year when it airs.#mindful #origami #mindfoldness #mindfulness #MentalHealth #wellbeing #artshealthwellbeing #crafts

— Mindful Origami (@mindfulorigami)

We held a making session, and asked people to follow a conventional video of our origami teacher Sam making a frog. We learnt about when people needed Sam to pause for them to catch up, and how individual people wanted alternative cameras angles at different points in time. We also found that people wanted to feel they were having a meditative experience - stepping though the complexity in a calm way, rather than being stressed that they weren't keeping up!

Following this we iterated and tested a number of features: user control of the viewing angle, a flashcard view, background music that flows through the experience, independent volume controls to let you mix, automatic pausing, chapter navigation, and subtitles.

We segmented the footage according to the complexity of each fold in order to create a step-by-step guide, and described the experience using our object based media data model.

We then built our object-based media player, making sure everything we built was reusable for future projects. It’s an ongoing challenge for us to find a perfect workflow for designing & delivering an object-based experience, with a constant tug between bespoke, single project work and reusable, multiproject work. We believe we've struck a good balance, but we’ll still be checking over what we’ve done to fix anything that’s a bit too ’origami frog shaped’. As ever, when you’re up against a deadline, you occasionally need to make a compromise.

Towards the end of the project we had enough time to tackle desktop and multiple tablet vendor versions. We’re really pleased that we ensured that as many people as possible could use the make-along, providing an equivalent experience on a wide-range of browsers and devices from laptops, to iPads, to Kindles. We’ve also packed the player with analytics so that we can understand how people use it on ´óÏó´«Ã½ Taster.

What We Achieved

We've learnt tons about engaging with production teams, from sharing and translating ideas to aligning with production timelines. One of the most interesting things we've found is how open the teams we've worked with have been, from capturing metadata about their processes – something which can assist us in our research - to extoling the benefits of object-based media to colleagues and producers.

The best thing is being able to share the work with lots of people through Taster, where we'll get honest feedback about whether audiences find having more control valuable.

Also we'll be ramping-up our efforts on our production tools and collaborating on more experiences that use an object-based philosophy on top of an OBM data model.

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Credits

  • Presenter: Sam Tsang
  • Voice over: Martha Kearney
  • Software Developers: Matt Brooks, Andy Brown, Max Leonard, Thomas Preece, Craig Wright, Angie Merryweather
  • Producer for R&D: Jasmine Cox
  • Testing: Gem Hill
  • Design: Jimmy Lee
  • Commissioning Editor: Stephen James-Yeoman
  • Commissioning Editor for MAKE! Craft Britain: Clare Patterson & Owen Courtney
  • Producer for RDF: Anna Wood
  • Thanks: Chris Northwood & Matthew Scarth

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