Overview
  • 2 Developers – Myself as lead, and one freelancer.
  • Flash 8, XML, FLV.
  • Media rich.
  • Large scale OO Design.
  • Green screen video footage.
  • Bitmap Displacements.
  • Online video editing.
  • Real life CBBC presenter.
  • £100k+
Description 

Media Studies was a BBC Jam commision for 14-16 year olds. The drive was to create a media rich environment where the user played the part of a ‘runner’ in a fictional TV studio.

This was realised by creating a fully explorable 3D virtual world.  The user navigates through large three-screen panoromas, moving through doors, locating secret content and playing games.  I used Bitmap displacements to cubic warp the panoramas.  Our graphics team rendered the source images through a fish eye lens and the result was quite spectular and needs to be seen.

Media studies features a wealth of BBC assets such as behind the scenes footage of many BBC factual and drama programs, downloadable scripts and six interactive games.  These games focus on many of the different jobs available in a real television studio. The user can play the part of a vision mixer, an editor and even a storyboard artist. One of the most popular activities allows the user to create a 20 second ‘My Family’ trailer by editing short clips together on a timeline.  A variation on a theme of this allowed the user to put together a News Round report on the pro’s and con’s of wind farms.

It is with some personal sadness I feel, that this product never got the exposure it deserved due to the well documented demise of the Jam project.

Screenshots

Blue screen video over rendered background

3D rendered studio

Video footage

Editing suite