And The Logo Winner Is........

Short Post...

We had the results of the focus group back today. It was really positive, which is good.

The results regarding the QR codes was as I expected, only 1 girl knew what it was because her mom did it once. I was also glad to hear the producer say "They are girls though, boys may know what they are"

Another interesting thing I learnt was that people still use MSN to talk to each other. About 6 people had a Facebook account, out of a group of, actually, I don't know how many, if it's out of 10 it's not that bad.

Anyway, poster results. The posters shown to them was the following:

This poster just got a resolute no, which is ok considering it was the first design and I didn't think it was great.

This one apparently freaked them out, with some saying they probably wouldn't go on the site because it may have a lot more images like it. Kind of a shame as it got the reaction we wanted but too much so...

There were no comments on this one, I presume because it got the same sort of results as the last poster, they are pretty much the same. I didn't finish this one, I think I changed the spider to the one above. Oh well, dunno why they chose those two to show, maybe because it had the red colour logo on it.

This one I think I hoped the kids would hate. This was the one they liked the most. Balls! Although, what they liked about it wasn't really clear but what I got from it is that they liked the text taking up image and the vortex spirals. Nothing was said about the actual text style, but the group weren't found of it as it looks like flames. Kind of does actually.

So anyway, yeah, that gives me enough of an idea for the designs. We film on Monday so these posters need to be done so I can start editing Monday evening. Oh yeah, editing, I forgot that was what i'm on this course to do. Strange! I think i'll start doing these Apple Motion tutorials I have so I can have a bit of good knowledge about it, although it makes logical sense to learn After Effects but I can't afford that just yet. Price is £1047.60 so yeah, not getting that for a while I think.

Gorillaz Augmented Reality App (As Promised)

This is an Augmented Reality Marker, also known as an AR marker. This particular symbol was found in the back of a passport that was given free in an NME magazine (12/05/10) that also gave an interesting story to the making of the third Gorillaz album and other interesting stuff. Anyway, by using either your iPhone or webcam, you could take a photo of this symbol which would allow for a 3D image to appear over it that you can navigate using your finger or mouse. For the iPhone, the AR reader was integrated in to a free app called Plastic Beach that can still be found on the App Store.

Testing it out today, it has added more stuff to the app that i'll get to later, but here is a quick screenshot of what comes up on the iPhone app:

The 3D content constantly gets updated, when I tested it earlier, it was a submarine promoting their last single. The text that floats around the island is regarding texting a number to win tickets to their show but as that finished last year, I don't think it has been updated in a while. 

Anyway, the stuff that HAS been updated since I last played with it, is a viewfinder section of the app. This isn't best demonstrated on my phone as the GPS function isn't great but the idea is what I believe i've mentioned in a previous post. You move the camera around and it gives you information about things that are near to you. All I got as I moved the camera around was videos of their singles in different areas of my room. This photo I took as I moved round in my room and shows the icon to access the video for their single Stylo. 

I can't rotate it unfortunately but it is in a horizontal orientation. All this sort of stuff is still open for proper exploitation and fits nicely under the cross platform umbrella along with QR codes. 

There is one more example regarding cross platform experiences that i've had and it's one I was involved in and was a global event and spawned not as successful sequels but still thoroughly entertaining. I can see myself babbling on and on about it as I thought it was phenomenal what they achieved and brought together people from all over the world and allowed them to work together to solve a mystery that somehow tied in to the TV show. Yeah, save that for another post, I think....

Oh, by the way, the show was LOST :)

A Brief History On Quick Response Codes

QR codes are extremely common in Japan, and it is also here where they originated. A subsidiary company of Toyota created them in order to mark vehicle parts that they created. It was created in 1994 and is called a two-dimensional barcode or matrix barcode that can be decoded at high speeds, hence the name Quick Response.

The data that can be stored in these codes is wider than the conventional one dimensional barcodes which are the ones that you will find on the back of your products when you go shopping. They can store web addresses, which is what we are going to use it for in our project, images, text and a whole host of other media.

"QR-Codes first hit mainstream when they were initially used for tracking parts by vehicle manufacturers. After a while, companies began to see the scope for where QR-Codes could be used elsewhere within the world. The most commercial use for QR-Codes is in the telecommunications industry where the mobile phone seems to be the biggest driver of their popularity." - Courtesy of mobile-barcodes.com

A great website that explains the use of QR codes in an interesting way is this slideshow presentation.

QR codes is still a very new idea in the West that hasn't been fully explored so if this project could help children understand about phobias and also learn how to use a new technology that will no doubt take off further in the future, then I think we will have nailed this brief perfectly.

Poster Design Process

So tomorrow, we have a focus group arranged with a local school where they will be asked a number of questions to see how well they react to certain aspects of our project. The one that concerns me most is the poster design and QR code results. Now, the school that the focus group is taking place at is an all girls school, which isn't the most ideal scenario but it's the best the producers could do in the limited time we have.  My main concern from this, is that the results that come back regarding the QR codes will be negative as girls won't know what it is. Most guys don't know what it is except for extremely nerdy geeks like myself. Or Japanese people. Will wait for the results though, I may be pleasantly suprised.

The poster designs will be finally figured out tomorrow as well based on feedback, like what colour the text should be, how the image should be layered etc. So I thought before my mind gets all biased, i'd give a quick look at my favourite designs that I made.

For some strange reason, this image has locked itself in portrait orientation. Strange. Anyway, this is the first poster that I made for Agoraphobia, took me about 5 minutes to knock up and it was purely to give the group an idea of what to think about. It incorporates the tagline our project now has, What Scares You?, and the logo that we also had made by Hannah's dad. I'm of the opinion that there has to be a defining thing that links all these posters together so that you know that it's part of the same campaign, which is why I added the logo on the hanging sign. A few issues that the group brought up was that although it instantly put the idea of festivals in to your head, which helps the phobia, it doesn't seem scary enough and the target age group wouldn't be attending festivals. Although I agree with the last statement, it doesn't mean we can't put this image on. It's an effective image that gives the viewer an image of 250,000 people in a crowd and your one of them. I think it allows the audience to get the idea of what we are aiming at. Anyway, I don't think it shows fear enough so I set out to incorporate the logo more.

This poster I like because you kind of have to look hard to see what the hell is behind the text. I know it'll get a negative from the group but I like it anyway so thought may as well show it. In case you can't see it, it's a massive spider to show off Arachnophobia.

OK, for this one, the olive green background has been removed and replaced with another festival image. I took it during Rolf Harris in case you are wondering and the funny thing was Mike Histon on the directing course is 6 people behind me, behind the F in fear, in the photo but didn't know him at the time obviously.

Anyway, the text will be changed to What Scares You? instead and a web address will be added for the people who don't have access to a QR reader but i'm going to recommend that the app that we're pitching comes with a QR reader as well. The swirls is what I thought would be the link between each viral poster made. It adds the extra "fear" level that the first poster just didn't. Anyway, I experimented further rather than just settle.

Now this one creeped me out as I went round the body erasing the background of the Spider, so it's kind of a hash job but as it's still in beta phase, who cares, you get the idea behind it. This is another one of my favourites to be honest. I think out of both phobias, spiders is going to be the easiest to creep an audience out with. I'm not afraid of spiders but i'd still get creeped out if I found this guy in my shower!

Going back to the 2nd poster style but with a crowd instead. I think this kind of works to be honest but it's kind of hard to read the text so the outline of the text will have to be bolded up to make it clearer to read.

This final one, i don't like at all. This was what I did when told that the festival poster doesn't appeal to young teens, so I went and found a school picture off of google, put it behind the logo and faded the green background so you still had a kind of eeriness to it. I then tried to create the tagline using the same style of text that the logo uses but couldn't find it in the default text choices so I imagine that it is an extra plugin to be downloaded. I'll find it later, but at the minute the font I chose is definitely creepy. I just don't like the school children behind it. It just looks.......crap!

Anyway, tomorrow we get the focus group results back so i'll be able to focus all my time on the final poster design. Hopefully, the kids don't respond better to the last poster, or any of the other posters I made that just look lame.

Which Logo Is More Likely To Appeal To An Audience Of 11-16 Year Olds?

OR

?

Note To Self: Don't Blog at 3am

Being tasked to create posters for our project, I took a nice look in to how films and other events have created viral poster campaigns in order to hook an audience to build up anticipation.

Inception Campaign

The first film I looked at was Inception. They added QR codes or Quick Response codes that people with QR readers could photo and it would lead them to a website. Inception did this for majority of their media campaign and it got the ball rolling for build up, not that it needed it as the plot was kept secret for a long time. The only issue of using QR codes are that our target audience of 11-14 year olds probably wouldn't have access to the type of phone that would allow downloading of a QR reader. Then again, my 8 year old cousin has a smart phone, so it would require some market research to find out if that:

a) 11-14 year olds have access to smart phones
b) They know what QR codes are

At the same time, as long as everything doesn't hinge on the QR code being used, I see no reason why it can't be included, so I think it would be worthwhile looking in to it further.

Just so you know, this is what a QR code is:

Using a QR reader, which is a simple app you can obtain for free off of app marketplace or app stores. This particular one was created for a speculative web address we may be using.

Here is another one that I took a photo of Tim Burton's 9 poster from a few years ago that was put up in a cinema:

I think the most important part is creating a striking poster that catches peoples eyes. If we were looking at people who had a phobia of sex, I would personally take a leaf out of The Simpsons book...

"SEX!!! now that i've got your attention, vote Bart!"

But anyway, I digress, i'm going to start knocking together a few ideas for the posters to present to the group when I next see them. I aim to be armed with knowledge about QR codes and iPhone apps and at least 2 or 3 poster designs to impress the group when I head back.

Augmented Reality Application 

The current aim for the iphone app, by the way, is an augmented reality app which is still an early technology and hasn't really been exploited to it's full potential of yet. It essentially allows an app to use the camera on your phone, or I suppose now your iPad, to react to items you are pointing at. For instance, one of the first times I had ever heard of something like this was from Google, where you would point your camera at, say, Big Ben and it would then next to it put up a load of information about it. Then you swing down to point at the Houses of Parliament and there's now information about that. Really smart stuff but it really never fully took off. I believe this was pre-iPhone days because now, you have Star Charts, which allows you to point up to the sky, presumably a clear night is required, and it will tell you about the constellations in the sky depending on where your camera is pointing.

The best example I have about the use of QR codes and Augmented Reality is from the "virtual" band Gorillaz. They gave out a..... you know what, i've said too much already, I should probably actually do some work and research now. I'll save Gorillaz' endeavour in to this technology for my next post.