Bridge

A story concept, storyboard and animatic produced  in conjunction with Crystal CG and displayed in the Youth Olympic Museum in Nanjing, China.

Role: Producer and narrative designer

May 2014 – August 2014

What I Changed

The mascot of the 2014 Youth Olympics, Lele.

I took a rapidly evolving project and facilitated a team of narrative designers, animators, and storyboard artists through iterations on the shape of the story. I used collaborative story development tools to create buy-in amongst the team and a broad and politically-sensitive story that Crystal CG could pitch to government stakeholders.

As the film developed and feedback came in from Crystal CG’s director, I shifted into a screenwriting role, iterating back and forth between script and storyboard until we could fuse together an animatic.

I also helped produce a game prototype and several other interactive concepts to allow Crystal CG to further leverage the IP from the film in future exhibits at the Youth Olympic Museum. I took a team from the Centre for Digital Media’s IDEA-X cohort and mentored them through the game design process in three weeks, familiarizing them with the Bridge project’s core goals and facilitating pipeline integration.

What I Learned

Bridge was as much about internal learning as external learning. Our team was made up of two Canadians, a Venezuelan, and two students from China along with an IDEA-X cohort of Chinese undergraduates. There was a wide array of experience in the team and everyone dealt with problems differently. I had to adapt to a lot of different rules and expectations while the team tried to find its identity. It was a challenge of understanding and learning. When crunch times hit, the team had to figure out its own way of managing the pressure that comes with a large, important project. I was able to use careful task delegation and creative discussion to adjust the critical path and make sure everyone worked in his best environment.

Learning how to mesh writing best practices with storyboarding processes has also been valuable. Getting to see a story come together visually in such a short period of time means that changes to the story occurred in many different ways. Editing solutions can be applied to both the overall storyline as well as the way it is visually communicated–both can have a tremendous effect on the writing. Figuring out when to iterate through a story session and when to fix a problem in editing has been a valuable experience that I can apply to future projects, especially in collaboration with other disciplines.

Due to the size of the 120-degree 3-D screen used by Crystal CG in the museum’s theatre, I had to learn not just how to tell stories visually, but how to use much more visual space than usual, meaning movement and location on the screen were as important as movement and location within the story-world. This was very useful to learn considering my interest in experiential, spatial storytelling and other future technology in that area.

Notes

The English version of the film is below. Click here for the Chinese version. (Please note that Team Bridge did not produce the screenplay for the final version, and the script below was reverse translated back into English. I wrote the story concept script, linked here.)