This week, Patronus received our team url: http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/patronus/
Our future weekly updates will be posted on our website, though we will continue to email them out to the team in PDF form over email.
Over the course of the week, we had two classes on Tuesday and Thursday with our undergraduate teammates at CMU’s main campus. We had a big brainstorming session for coming up with as many ideas as possible during our first class, and narrowed our focus during the second. We’ve improved our ability to communicate and bring the undergraduates to a cohesive idea. Together, we’ve decided that our product will take the form of an interactive graphic novel, where the guest will play a bystander that has the ability to intervene and prevent an instance of sexual assault. We would like to inspire a feeling of empowerment in our guests: that as bystanders, they have the privilege and the power to stop incidents of harassment and violence as they witness them.
We came away from the class on Thursday with tasks to give concrete direction to our interactive graphic novel. We are now brainstorming artistic direction, story elements, and pros and cons of various technological platforms that our product will be hosted on.
We had a faculty pass this week for our branding on Friday. To prepare, we had our logo finalized by our artist Cewon, after some feedback from our advisors:
We showed our finalized logo to the ETC faculty, as well as describing to them our choice of the team name Patronus: to act as a protector (patronus in Latin) towards those who suffer the trauma that comes from sexual assault. They liked the direction and logic behind our branding, and urged us to take it further and keep our theming cohesive when coming to the remaining branding materials, such as the poster, half sheets, website, etc. Our other artist, Wenyu, is now coming up with ideas and concepts for the project poster, which will be a reflection of our product goals.
We also received the products that the previous Morality Play projects worked on. While both were informative as to the issue they were trying to bring to light, we found them both unengaging and not cohesive. They provided a good inspiration of ways to improve and pitfalls to avoid for our iteration of Morality Play.
Jesse Schell gave the team a couple different reference materials to look at when considering interactive graphic novels. He encouraged the team to look into pop-up books for guest interaction inspiration. He also urged the importance of picking a specific platform (phone, tablet, desktop) to concentrate on so that the team is not spreading their efforts too thin. Finally, Jesse advised ways to structure the production process so that Patronus is not blocked or depending on the undergraduate class in order to continue working on the product. Once there is a more concrete idea of what the team is making, we plan on implementing such a structure to help the flow of production.
Next week:
For the upcoming week, our team wants to further solidify the concept and the deliverable for our project. For Tuesday’s class we want to be able to present the undergrads with creative options for them to decide on, and by Thursday want to have a solid story arc with defined “learning moments”. With an agreed upon art style, story arc and platform, our team can start the prototyping process over the weekend. Having these concrete ideas will also allow for our artists to continue to develop the team’s branding for our website and poster.