Developing Contents for Universal Learning

I'd like to re-iterate again that this blog has nothing to do with any body or any organisation that is/ are named within the posts of this blog.  Everything posted are my first-hand stories about my engagements in the drive to support the title of this blog site "Providing Digital Opportunities for the disAdvantaged - share the knowledge to develop the region".

Well for this post, I will share one of my participation at a UNICEF funded workshop which was supported by the Department of Education (PNG) for the digital practitioners here in Papua New Guinea. The workshop invited participants from different sectors who went to Madang to develop Early Childhood Learning materials for children under different age groups.

I was again invited by the Department of Education (Papua New Guinea) to participate with other fellow content designers in a workshop in Madang. This was the second time; similar workshop was conducted in 2014 where I sent 2 representatives (Amos Manasau & Jessy Joe) to participate in that workshop.  Last year (2015), I went there myself and participated at the workshop in order to understand the concepts behind Universal Basic Education (UBE), which this workshop emphasized on.

I got a request from the Department of Education (Media and Communications division), to nominate at least 10 graphic designers/ illustrators in my network to attend this workshop.  Instead of nominating, I posted a notice on one of our social network groups on Facebook (PNG GFX Designers) and 5 young designers volunteered to go along with me so I sent their details to the facilitators and they organised tickets for all of us except one, who lives in Madang.  The five were former students from the Arts and Design program at the University of Papua New Guinea who are attached to various organisations during the time they were taken to the workshop.

The idea of involving these young men and women was to expose them to some of the approaches and requirements of designing reading & learning materials for early childhood learning, in particular considering universal learning.  Additionally, I thought this would be a great experience for them to participate in a collaborative project at the workshop so that they gain some experience working in a team, doing a project within pressing deadline.

During the workshop, we were all placed into groups of 5-8 members comprising various working groups ranging from Production of Books, Videos and Animations.  My group was one of two groups that were tasked to produce an animation at the end of this 30-40 hour project.  In our group were two other members whom I took with, Anderson Habiri and Brian Aiere.  Anderson and Brian were recent graduates and animation is something totally new to them. They were to do illustrations and graphics for our animation however, that also required them to have fair knowledge on animation so they can develop characters appropriate to be animated.  I had to fill in this gap by giving an overview of what we should expect and where each of us would fit in, outlining our specific duties as illustrators and animators for our project.  I had to also take them through basic concepts of animation and how frame by frame animation works as well as showing them some tweening animation basics.  We also have other members who fitted in for sound and children's psychology & behaviour.

The vector drawings in (above) with the fills (below)

For me, that was going to be fun exploring animation as an introvert/ animation enthusiast however getting into my suit as a perfectionist and a number 1 in the Enneagram,  I was worried as time was very crucial for us to come up with an animation product.  Unlike other groups, our group needed more time to complete the compilation however the workshop trainer, Barbara Kolucki assured us that we can still get something done within the time frame.  She stressed that based on her previous experiences with various other places around the world where she conducted the training.  Sure we can, however it won't be to our satisfaction or to a professional standard, I thought.

The workshop's project challenge began and all the group went straight onto planning and execution of their respective projects.  We had a day to do our interviews, investigate and record any audio; basically to gather raw data - and the next day to start developing our illustrations and trace them to vector.  
Back at our table, our group came up with the script.  I then did a quick storyboard to guide us in developing our images for the main poses.  This is shown to the group for approval, then to the trainer, to get the OK to continue.  We got our green light from the trainer so everyone started working on their tasks.  The illustrators worked on the illustrations whilst our sound designer, Josh Tamanabe worked on scheduling the young students of Kranket Primary School to be recorded.

Original Quick Sketches I did for our storyboard

We spent few hours trying to figure out how our illustrators would come up with the poses for our animation.  It was very challenging, considering the time constrains versus the limited knowledge our illustrators have to develop illustrations for animation so our next option was for me to guide them through thumbnail illustrations which they followed to refine.  This approach turned out well so we progressed.  We got all the illustrations done manually, got them traced (vector graphics) and brought into our animation program for manipulation and animation.  

We had almost a non stop period from 3pm that day till 3pm the next day, completing all our timeline and synchronizing sound with the animation.  We added sub-titles to help those students who aren't able to hear (the deaf) and finally converted the versions to various platforms for distribution.

In our final presentation, we presented our production on various outputs representing those that can be played on a computer, using online (youtube & website) and on mobile/ android devices. Just to make it a little bit interesting, I added a matrix code to a card, printed it and used it as our access code to see the video.  This is to show how technology can be used to directly access the video through scanning using a barcode scanner.

The matrix code added to a card for our presentation