Recap of the research

The research stage of the project is now over which means that it is time top reflect on my research, and the steps I have taken from the inital concept.

It evident that the research has allowed me to explore possibilities that were clearly innapropriate for the purpose of the project, but was only after extensive was it obvious that this was the case.

A List of things that have changed is made below.

The educational sector side was completely removed. The more I researched the more it became apparent that the purpose of the site was that it should encourge exploration at the will of the user. By trying to add educational features would only prevent the exploration element of the site.

The profitabilty of the service became defined more. Instead of charging users for availability of features, I found the best way would be to offer unlimited use of the features, and allow them to use it to meet people globally online. The profitablity comes from user becoming engaged in the ecosystem of the service and then buying the accessories that are available through the store. While this is optional it, it allows the user to be fully present in the engagement with the content and other users without any distractions.

The characters developed over time, and went from being one character, to five characters with different characteristics. This made the option for the customisation of the service much greater! This was influenced by a large ammount of research, including the trip to the M&M’s store (https://akbrodie.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/kids-store-research/), the Angry birds characters (https://akbrodie.wordpress.com/2016/10/20/analysing-the-angry-birds-platform/) & the kids movie research (https://akbrodie.wordpress.com/2016/10/22/notes-from-childrens-movies/).

The content of the site changed in a large way too when I realised I would not be able to mix real imagery with cartoon imagery. Then I choose to move into a cartoon based site. That was realised through three main pieces of research, the virtual experiences, other kids games (https://akbrodie.wordpress.com/2016/10/24/lessons-learnt-from-kids-games/) and the design for kids (https://akbrodie.wordpress.com/2016/11/16/knowing-my-target-audience/).

Developing a storyline was something that followed my research of the kids movies (https://akbrodie.wordpress.com/2016/10/22/notes-from-childrens-movies/) and storytelling techniques (https://akbrodie.wordpress.com/2016/11/20/storytelling-emotions-characterists/). It meant that the kids could be more engaged in the content. I realised they could expore the world in a dfifferent way fi they were doing so with a character.

The site became much less bloated from jusing the virtual trips idea, as it meant the content could be simplified and categorised to maked the overall experience esasier to understamd for my target audience.

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Connecting cultures for kids presention

Hull Open Day

Hull College had an open day for potential students and asked me to take some photographs of the day for the student union to use in advertising, below is the contact sheet:

CONTACT SHEET

I selected a couple of the images that worked well and used the techniques I have previously used, I ended up with a total of three quality images.

The first one was a shot of the classroom, I weaned to focus on the boys looking forward as if they are concentrating, a crop of the image fixed this. I also noticed there were a few ‘distracting’ elements to the image, the boy forefront in the image had a black eye which I was able to lighten up and made the area look a bit healthier, there is a lot of noise out the window so I was able to remove a lot of unnecessary items out side to tidy it up, then i tidied the room up inside by removing sockets on the wall and loose wires which made the image look a lot cleaner and allowed the viewer to focus on the people. The last adjustment I made was to play with the levels of the image, this allowed me to change the lighting to brighter the image as a whole. You can see the original and edited versions below:

The second image was of the Hull College logo printed on a window with a reflection of the church behind it. It was a nice image to begin with but a fees adjustments made it a whole lot  better. Firstly I removed the dirt from the glass, lights behind the glass and unnecessary reflections. Next I played with the levels to allow the logo to stand out even more, and then finally I selected everything but the logo and filled a layer with black, then brought the transparency down to 10% to make the background darker and again to make the logo stand out more.You can see the original and edited versions below:

The last image I edited was of the front of the building with the logo on it, again the image didn’t look right so I edited it in photoshop. In this image i removed lights within the building and the used the clone tool to clone closed windows onto open windows making all the windows closed, I straightened the image, cropped it then changed levels on the image to make sure the colours looked right. You can see the original and edited versions below: