Challenge 1: From Product to Narrative
Introduction
Every ad starts with a product and tells a story to sell that product. In this challenge we’ll introduce the product and come up with brand guidelines for the product, design a story and a character while making sure everything stays coherent.
The Product
The Cymbal Pod is a single person, urban transport vehicle that hovers silently and moves quietly through the world.
Note
This challenge is all about building our story and characters, we’re expecting you to craft descriptions, which we’ll use in the subsequent challenges to create prompts. So, your descriptions should be detailed enough to capture the essence of your story, but keep in mind that we’re not designing prompts yet.
Description
First, create a document (e.g. Google Doc) that’s shared with your whole team, so you can collaborate and keep track of your work.
Then, start by designing the brand guidelines, these should include:
- Aesthetics (e.g. 1920s art deco)
- Values (e.g. sustainable farming)
- Mood / Color Palette (e.g. film noir)
- Target Audience (e.g. 20-35 year old farmers)
These characteristics will guide all the visuals we create for the product.
Next, create a description of your protagonist who is the main character of your ad. This description needs to be detailed enough so that we can achieve consistency from shot to shot in the ad.
Now, we’ll craft an overall narrative to tell the story of the Cymbal Pod and what makes it compelling. We will do this by creating textual descriptions of at least three scenes describing what happens in each scene and how they tie together to tell your story.
And finally, create a tagline or call to action that meets the brand guidelines (e.g Available for pre-order now). We’ll use that text in our final ad video.
Note
Using Gemini in this challenge is fair game, but if you want to flex your creative muscles and do your own writing, please feel free to.
Success Criteria
- You have created a set of brand guidelines describing the aesthetics, values, mood/color palette and target audience for the brand.
- You have created a detailed text description of the protagonist of your narrative.
- You have created a text description/script for at least three scenes that seamlessly tell your story.
- You have created a tagline or call to action that meets the brand guidelines.
- Your work is stored in a shared document (e.g. Google Doc) that’s accessible by your team.
Learning Resources
Tips
- Focus on your story and keep in mind that you have 30 seconds to tell that story.
- Don’t try to squeeze too many different things in a single scene.
- Using Gemini is fair game, but make sure that you keep its output brief and clear.
- Although Gemini will help with inspiration, it will generate similar (and rather bland) ideas if you enter the challenge description in verbatim (we’ve seen far too often an architect called Elara to be the protagonist).