Brief: To create an online course which is a solid introduction to the craft of storytelling for BBC production staff. To work with Line Communications (now part of LEO Learning) to create a re-useable Mohive (rapid development e-learning tool) skin.

Multiplatform Producer, BBC Academy,  2008 – 2009

•  Used Mohive to produce course.
• Directed digi-beta crew to produce videos in course.
• Worked with subject matter expert on the course design.
• Set up dance shoot in the beautiful Rivoli Ballroom.
• Worked with Line Communications to design new re-useable skin for Mohive.

Course aims

This course was intended for people who were just starting out making their own films and structuring scripts. It also provided a fun refresher for more advanced production staff. The idea was to show people all successful stories have the same core ingredients – how they are combined is up to the storyteller.

Hazel Marshall, Story Consultant to many BBC departments including the Natural History Unit, was the subject matter expert. Hazel wrote the script and I directed the videos  using a digi beta crew.

The course was divided into three parts – Structure, Character and Emotion.

*    Structure – An interactive story featuring two professional tango dancers in the beautiful Rivoli ballroom. You choose whose story you want telling, what music you’d like to accompany them and finally how many characters you’d like in your story.

*    Character – A visit to the National Gallery and to the many  colourful characters in An Allegory of Venus and Cupid. Users click around the characters in the painting and discover what secrets they hide. Later on, there’s  a look at how one uniting theme – dance – can bring out very different outcomes for characters by looking at works including those by  Picasso and Degas.

*    Emotion – Discover how a theatre production of Romeo and Juliet used tango music to highlight the passion in their new re-telling of Shakespeare’s classic drama.

Results

When I joined BBC Training and Development (as it was called then) in 2008, rapid development e-learning was seen as low-end  – everybody wanted expensive Flash courses. This course, along with Creative Processes, pushed the creative boundaries of what was possible with tools such as Mohive. They were both shown at industry events by then Manager of Online and Informal Learning at the BBC Academy, Nick Shackleton Jones, as being an innovative and effective examples of rapid development e-learning content.