Project Canvas Development Diary
All Out Productions & Stardotstar (aka The All*Stars)
Diary 1: March-April
Project Canvas has been and is, a case of boldly going forward in to new territories for all of us working on this. When the briefs were issued by Vision+Media I’d literally landed for my first day in a new job as senior content producer for All Out Productions, an established Sony award winning radio and sound production company making documentaries and features for network BBC radio (and the How>Do< Awards Independent Production Company of the Year 2010, don’t cha know!). The company had digital ideas and ambitions for a while but was still chasing that ‘elusive’ first commission.
Meanwhile, Manchester’s Stardotstar, whilst established experts in digital production with innovative websites, games, software, iPhone apps, user interface design and no less than three 2010 Big Chip Awards to their name (including Big Chip Agency of the North), wouldn’t have exactly counted the ins and outs of radio broadcasting among their core skills.
So, how to win the brief to realise Radio 1 working on the forthcoming Project Canvas?
Cue collaboration... the obvious but not widely practiced solution to going over the sheer drop of the rapidly converging world of media production. The two companies’ reasoning was simple: Don’t attempt to do things you can’t realistically do yourself but find someone who can and buddy up with them. All Out met Stardotstar and The All*Stars collaboration was born!
To solve the brief we sat around on the All Out sofas being creative with a flip chart, munching on a bought-in sandwich platter and quaffing a drop of Spar’s own finest sparkling... water. Before anyone surmises we have a development budget in line with Clear Channel, we’d frugally under-ordered and it was far too scant a feast to fill any of us up but, no matter, as we were genuinely fuelled by the inspiring mix of skillset in the room.
We had radio producers, development brains and user-centred digital designers. It sounds twee but we fed off each other’s knowledge and our solution was simply developed as a natural conclusion to a very creative but draining day. We methodically took apart the brief and put it back together again as radio producers explained and applied how Radio 1 quantifies its three levels of audience and digital brains applied the rules of light-touch, intuitive design and interaction to help make sense of it and, finally, All Out’s researcher Jenn provided the important I’m-still-young-enough-to-be-a-Radio-1-listener factor. It was obviously a bit more complex than that but essentially, we simply fused those vital elements together.
The important write up of the 'sell' followed, again as a collaboration where I wrote the proposal with all of the creative flourish and prose befitting of a media producer type and Stardotstar applied the digital terminology and framework to collectively make our submission feasible, realistic and attractive. We even had a graphic marker artist visualise our proposal to give it that 90s design edge - chic.
The deadline was hit. We liked our idea, we loved our collaborative efforts but would Project Canvas? The selection process was efficiently turned around by Vision+Media and the answer was ‘Yes!’
The All*Stars had a collaborative beer and set about planning to build this thing.
Lyndon Saunders
All Out Productions
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