Cardiff Design Festival

Brief

To create promotional material to market the Principal Learning Qualification in Creative and Media to schools, further education colleges, potential students and parents in Wales. DCELLS, Skillset and the creative and cultural industries in Wales believe that the Principal Learning Qualification in Creative and Media is a fantastic opportunity for young people. They wanted to create an innovative and creative promotional tool that would capture young peoples’ imaginations. The producers were asked not to duplicate the boring talking-heads style of the promotional material which existed on the web for the same qualification in England. To display the wide variety of career roles within the creative industries and to promote other career paths in addition to the well-known ‘glamorous’ jobs such as directing, producing and presenting.

Result

Both DCELLS and the creative and cultural industries have been delighted by the response to the way young people have been engaged and inspired by the DVD. In addition to being used as a successful marketing tool to promote the Principal Learning Qualification in Creative and Media across Wales, the interactive journey aspect of DVD has shown its potential and is now also being used as a learning and teaching tool. Teaching staff within schools and further education colleges are using the detailed information about different career paths included in the disk to teach about the media industry. The success of the DVD has also prompted other subject areas and Sector Skills Councils to change the way they have been promoting their skill areas and inspired them to move away from traditional marketing techniques of print and leafleting in order to embrace interactive methods to help engage younger audiences.

Solution

We wanted to create an engaging experience, a piece of interactive content that allows young people to journey through inspirational material which clearly describes the creative and cultural industries in a fun and factual manner. Using a DVD interface we developed an innovative game-like experience which taps in to youth culture trends but also provides all the relevant information for potential students. By using a mixture of live-action and animation we created a world where the users can navigate through the different aspects of the creative industries. Users were asked to select their tribe by selecting one of four distinct characters allowing them to journey through the disk in their own unique way and also choose a mission type from 6 categories. Within each category four different career paths were detailed, each with a 30 – 40 second live-action clip, filmed with high profile media organisations such as WNO and BBC.