After further discussion our group decided to go with two main digital features for the campaign – an interactive youtube video series and a social media based game named FireVille (in lieu of the well-known FarmVille), to reach as broad an audience as possible while retaining an element of seriousness to get the fire safety campaign across.
We made a point to integrate the two ideas together more so than we had done on our previous presentations, using the youtube series as more of a supplement to the game idea such as earning rewards in-game by the choices made in the video series.
I developed the concept of the video series further, and mainly took inspiration from a similar choice-based video series “Deliver me to Hell”:
As such we decided on a rather similar format to the videos, that the user has to decide between two options one of which will result in failure while the other allows them to progress through the series. We aimed to keep it all based around fire safety, having the choices be topical to good fire safety practice. The series was therefore split up in to two elements, one set in the day before the fire starts where the user has the opportunity to make pre-emptive decisions to improve their fire safety at night – such as clearing bags out of the hallway so there is no obstruction to escape. The second part of the video series was at night when the fire is going on and the user has to actively make the right choices for their character to escape.
The images above display the idea behind the series’ layout and presentation. We still would include an element of comedy in these videos – such as the wrong choice making the user meet an unrelated or amusing failure, like in the zombie series, in order to make the series somewhat entertaining while still carrying the message across.
Using this youtube series to supplement the campaign’s other digital media was our way of reaching a broader audience, as not every consumer will necessarily take to social media games or video series so we made sure to expand our audience to a multitude of platforms.
Our ideas still came across slightly seperated in the presentation however in our peer review we received more positive feedback on the integration of our pieces of digital media together than before, which I found successful. I think we struggled to come up with a way for our digital media to reach such a broad audience while still retaining the important messages of the campaign this time, and as such took to using multiple formats to reach a wide audience. We could have spent some more time in the planning stages choosing an idea to focus on – whichever we thought could reach the widest audience – and simply developing that for the campaign. Overall I found our fire presentation to be more developed and successful than our previous presentations.
Reference: LITTLESISTERFILMS, 2010. Deliver Me To Hell – an Interactive Zombie Adventure [online]. Available from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9p1yBlV7Ges [Accessed 2 December 2013].
Joe White 