How We Turned a Huge Failed Project into a Major Success

 Last year, we teamed up with the Napa Parks and Recreation Department to create Countdown Clocks for the first ever Napa Lighted Art Festival.  The Game Design class experimented with the idea of what a clock is and is not and how to incorporate ideas of time in different ways using Illustrator and After Effects.  The video below is a sped up version of each clock.  They were supposed to be projected on several buildings downtown in between the light shows in 20-minute increments.  The finished work never got used and the students were disappointed.  But that's not the end of the story.

There were many contributing factors to the failure.  This was the first year of the festival and we didn't know what we didn't know.  We also encountered pretty devastating fires in the Napa Valley and sponsors were not able to recover from the financial loss from lost tourism and pulled out of their sponsorships.  Time was not on our side either, as we were working under very short deadlines. 

Regardless of whether our work was shown, the students made some really cool artwork and learned some great technical skills along the way, so it was not a complete failure, but we were a bit disappointed. Luckily, we were willing to try again.

I decided to reach out to the Parks and Rec department to see if we could try our collaboration again.  Yes! They were interested and big changes were already in the works to hire a community liaison for schools in the district, to  hire consultants from the UK, Ross Ashton and Karin Monid from The Projection Studio, and we had a lot more time to plan properly and find new sponsors for the students to have their own building.   We decided to give it another go.  
 
I'm so glad we stuck with the project and tried again because the extent of learning and the scope of what we accomplished this year really blew me and the students away!

See the New Tech Lighted Art Project below!

This year the project entailed students creating their own six-minute show by working in 4 teams to create a cohesive, yet varied art exhibit.  The work was then projected on a 70 ft wall on the Native Sons Hall during the Napa Lighted Art Festival, January 12-20, 2019.  Our show has gotten nothing by praise from audience goers and there is just nothing like seeing student work projected on a building of that magnitude to a live audience of thousands.  The stakes were high and the students came through.  There were many sleepless nights when I wondered if they were going to make it, but they did and did so in an incredibly professional manner. I am so proud!

Community Discussion Panel:
​Hear what the students had to say about their learning

A Create-a-thon in the middle of it all!

As a part of the sponsorship agreement with Adobe, we offered to run a day-long school-wide design day, using Adobe Software. The top creators of the Create-a-thon were given the opportunity to have their work included at the end of our Lighted Art Project.   If you want to know more about the Create-a-thon specifically, you can find the blog post HERE.  

So, my students were tasked with both putting on a major event for 650 students in early January, as well as creating their Light Show art piece. These two tasks took up our entire Fall semester. 

Our Step-by-Step process

At the beginning of the semester students interviewed for a variety of jobs on each team, Project Managers, Technical Experts, Designers and Documentarians. They submitted resumes for the job and had to do a presentation of a SWOT analysis of themselves as hirable people.

Ideation phase: Students met in their hired teams and ran through the ideation and prototyping phases.  Then pitched their ideas to the entire group with a visual presentation.
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They met with Ross Ashton and Karin Monid from London via skype to discuss Knows and Need to Knows.  Ross presented some basic concepts they needed to keep in mind when they created their artwork, such as taking into account the scale of the building, the ambient light and technical issues. 

Iteration was key in this project as students worked through their prototypes, gave each other feedback and got feedback from their mentors. Through all of the process, students ran the decision making meetings and took leadership roles within the class and within their smaller teams.

Students met in Scrum meetings or "stand-up" meetings at the beginning of every class to see what had been done, what still needed to be done, who would do the tasks and when they would be complete. They used the Agile Project Management protocol to manage time, resources and people.

Celebrating our final product!

Having a chance to look back on this project, I don't know how we pulled off such a thing!  The students owned this from beginning to end and benefitted from being given such an adult project to complete.  They had the skill and know-how.  The feedback we have gotten from the show has been amazing.  Many people commented that the New Tech piece was their favorite.  It certainly held the audience's attention and entertained in a way that was both exciting and fresh.  I am already planning for how we can do this again next year.  Look out Napa Lighted Art Festival 2020!