The pitch

ABP was approached by Comverj and Biluru with a list of 72 health care topics and asked to manage and produce Australia’s largest indigenous health care education application. I was put in charge of our pitch and asked to project manage the job if we won it. Using my experience in medical education I pitched a simple cellular health concept that used icons to explain the importance of nutrition.

Communication

With a tight deadline of 8 months to produce over 2 hours of animation and the health application, I quickly built an on-line content review system. This was built with Flex using PHP and MySQL. This system allowed ABP to upload scripts, storyboards, animatics and final animations, that were reviewed by all parties in a specific order and then approved by Biluru.

Scripting, storyboarding and audio

I liaised closely with our external medical writer and made sure that the scripts were consistent with the concept I pitched. I organised all the storyboards to be drawn by a freelancer and sent him style frames where necessary. As the application was aimed at the global indigenous market I recorded a reasonable paced audio track for all the scripts. Chris and myself then converted the storyboards to a video piece with the correct shot timing. The storyboards were then sent for review and passed onto the animation team.

Animation

With such a large amount of animation to produce and a team of 3 with 1 junior, my priority was to organise all our assets into environments, gross anatomy, cross sections and cellular. New assets were then built and textured by David and Colin. The three animators were then given specific environments and scenes to work on. With the help of Mike and a few extra hands at the end we finished the animation on time and in budget.

The application

I developed a functional specification for the application, and then worked on the design in conjunction with Comverj, who were working on the branding. I built the application using Flex and ActionScript 3. The keyword search was creating using PHP, MySQL and XML. I used Nullsoft for the installer on windows. I also advised on dongle security which was implemented at the end of the project. The project was very successful and has now gone global www.iberaglobal.com.