
Where are you working from today?
Today I’m in the office. I work in Southbank on the fourth floor of the ABC building. It’s an open plan space so I’ve cut everyone out of the background. We are supposed to clear everything away at the end of the day but as you can see I have colonised a bit. What you can’t see is that behind me is a full sized poster of 1970s Rod Stewart.
What are you working on?
I’ve recently started working for ABC Education making resources for teachers to use in the classroom. On the screen you can see a game I am testing for Media Literacy Week. It’s called Barrie’s Bias Busters, and it’s a quiz where you try spot bias in some fake news stories while racing the clock. Barrie Cassidy has kindly agreed to let us use his name and face – like him, it’s tough but fair!
How’s it going?
I’m really enjoying working for Education but I have only worked on a couple of projects so far. An animated series called Minibeast Heroes for primary students and bunch of things for media literacy week. Previous to this, I worked in Research and Development. It was a lot more technology, strategy, and prototyping – it’s nice to get back into making content. Barrie’s game is going well – we are publishing it later today.
When you get stuck, what do you do?
As a producer, these days I almost always work as a team with my colleague Amy Nelson. When either of us gets stuck, we tend to grab the other person, go get a cup of tea and draw it out on paper (depending on what it is). Designing and writing for interactive content is quite detailed and finicky so often it’s about trying about ten different ideas on for size to get the thing to work. The last thing we made for Minibeast Heroes was a room scale VR which neither of us had done before. I think we are used to working with uncertainty and banging our head against something until it works.
Who sees your earliest version/draft & at what stage?
The way we work is usually we will brainstorm ideas to get a rough plan, and then one of us will try and draft up the basic concept and functionality. Then we show the other person first to do an idiot check. Then usually it’s our EP to make sure we haven’t gone completely off the rails. After that, we tend to split into writing and interaction design or scripting, design briefs and art direction etc. Usually, we’ll work with different designers, animators and developers to realise our vision. So I guess we check in all the time.