Week 16: Let’s tell a story
Telling a story
This week is all about figuring out how we want to tell our story — our final 10-minute pitch. Last week we already made a start with this and experimented with different formats.
We started with a linear presentation that included all the points we wanted to tell. But doing it that way felt like we were missing an essential part of the emotional aspect of our concept. So then we tried telling the story through the eyes of helpful Hugo (one of our earlier defined archetypes) but this too felt too linear and we had trouble highlighting everything we wanted to highlight. Additionally, it felt like our story was becoming a happy day sunshine scenario that was very far removed from real life and the struggles people face when building a community. We then tried a storyline that told the story more from a helicopter view: life with Kwilt, life without Kwilt. what worked well for this perspective was that the impact of our concept is easily shown but again we were missing the emotional layer on an individual level that we needed for our audience to feel connected to our story and therefore agree with our concept.
We had a small breakthrough when talking through these different stories during the peer review sessions on Monday. Just by talking about our concept without a script, we started to realize where & why we are passionate about this concept. The features that we need to highlight in our story are:
- this app will NOT solve all your problems, it is a mere facilitator to make building community easier.
- Every community is different and has different needs — our concept acknowledges that
- Building community takes time — this is not a one-time thing but rather something that you should build upon.
- Building a community is difficult — real life is messy and not a linear process.
Based on the points listed above we finally realized why it was so difficult for us to build out a linear story told from one perspective. It is because our story should be told by the community. That’s how we came up with the idea for our short video that will be included in our presentation.
To describe the essence of the video: it will be raw, home videos with the community telling the story. We are in the process of creating a couple of prompts that we will ask our friends/family members/ neighbors to answer while making a video of themselves. Some ideas for the prompts we had up until now are:
- Do you think community will be less or more important in the future?
- What are your hopes and dreams post COVID — what will be the new normal?
- How do you feel about the community right now — do you think it could be improved?
- What is your community missing — what are the challenges in your community?
- What does your community do really well — tell us a story about how your community has helped you
- What do you wish you did more of with your community?
Final selection of prompts
Describe your community in one word.
How does your community help you?
What challenges does your community face?
How do you think Kwilt would help you and your community?
Trimming the fat
While working on the storyline for our presentation and video we are also working on reworking our screens, in a way that Bhakti calls: trimming the fat. Taking out all the things that are unnecessary and focusing on building out the essentials and features that are critical to our concept. The design considerations that we are taking into account are:
Design for Modularity + Flexibility
Design for Trust
Be Clear, Concise, Transparent
Security + Privacy
Design for Motivation
LOW BARRIERS — MAKE IT SUPER EASY
Design for P2P Engagement
Visually Accessible, but also hot : — )
Storyboarding
Branding and HiFi UI design
We think it is awesome! Are you excited!?
We decided to keep the branding very simple! To emphasize the fact that this app is here to serve the community, but the community gives it color and life!
Designing video assets
Working remotely brings its challenges especially in regards to video editing in animation, how do we divide up the work? How do we share files? Do we need a naming convention? etc. We finally split up the creating of the assets, the stick figure animations and the stitching together of the video.
Recording the script
In the absence of a recording studio, on your bed with a blanket over your head works perfectly well!
