Author: Brynn Gelerman

Early this week, Verizon got back to us with the story they wanted us to use in this project. In the end, Verizon selected “QB1: Beyond the Lights,” a reality/documentary show on their Go90 video platform. QB1 follow three of the country’s best high school quarterbacks as they complete their senior year football season. The show depicts how the they train/prepare for games and lead their teams. It also shows the quarterbacks hanging out with their friends (both informally and at big social events like prom) and handling the glory of being local celebrities.

Our client told us that he didn’t have specific demographics to show who QB1’s target audience is, but that the Go90 platform in general is targeted towards high school and college students. The team deduced that because QB1 focuses on high school players, it was likely to attract high-school-aged fans. To test our theory, we enlisted John Balash, an ETC faculty member whose job is to connect the ETC with schools in the area. We gave John a survey to distribute at a local high school that he happened to be visiting at the end of the week. The survey was designed to help us determine not just if high-schoolers are interested in QB1, but which high-schoolers are interested. For example, does the show appeal mostly to males or females? Do kids on sports teams watch the show to see how other high school athletes balance sports with the rest of their lives, or do football fans watch the show to get a preview into up-and-coming football talent?

While we thought that the survey results would give us insights into QB1 fans that would help us design extra content, we couldn’t wait for the results to start designing – after all, the semester is flying by! Therefore, we decided to try to make educated guesses about what might appeal to people. Since the show revolves around getting to know the lives of the three quarterbacks, we thought it would make sense to create trans-media experiences that let the audience learn even more about them. Thus, we decided to prototype a VR experience where the user can see into the bedroom of one of the players, and interact with objects in the room. Each interaction would trigger a video clip from the show footage that showed the significance of that object.

This week, the client told us that the story we would be working with over the semester would be one of the reality TV shows on Verizon’s video platform, Go90. The client did not initially know which reality show our project should focus on, but did give us two examples to review: Road to Race Day, and The Runner.

Thus, our first order of business for the week was to investigate these shows. We found that Road to Race Day is a documentary-style reality show about a NASCAR team, and what they do to prepare for a big race. On the other hand, The Runner is a competition show where teams of Chasers have to track down a Runner who is sent to mysterious locations across America. To figure out where the Runner is headed, the Chasers must decode riddles. The show also had an interactive element in which viewers would help the Chasers solve the riddles by posting answers on social media platforms such as Twitter.

The team thought that The Runner was a good candidate for this project, because it was already attempting to engage viewers in off-screen content (riddle-solving) to aid the Chasers. However, because the show was already completed, we were not sure that the client would want us to create additional storytelling elements for it. Therefore, we decided to focus our brainstorming not on The Runner specifically, but on competitive reality shows in general. We reasoned that for any competitive show, we could follow the model set up by The Runner and engage the audience in challenges that contributed in some way to the challenges faced by the contestants.

To that end, we made a Composition Box of thoughts regarding trans-media storytelling for competitive reality TV, and took it to a brainstorming seminar held by ETC faculty member Mike Christel. There, we collected information from our peers regarding which portions of their favorite competitive TV shows they would want to experience, and what questions they had about our proposed project. After the seminar, we sent out a survey to students and faculty, so that we could get more insights into the kind of extra content fans of competitive reality TV shows would be looking for.

 

Composition Box 1

Composition Box 2 (Inspiration)