Example 4 – Interactive Project
This naming convention was developed for a gigantic interactive media project.
As opposed to a typical media project where the audience watches the deliverable passively, interactive projects call on the audience to become active “crafters” of the story, experiencing their own version of it depending on the choices they make on each watch. As the audience was welcomed into this media experience, they were given the choice to take on three different stories, each one had its own structure, acts, and scenes.
Such a project is delivered as many different videos, which are then managed by an interactive platform in a sort of node map. In this particular platform, the node names matched the video file names, and these node names could further be used as variables to program complex story paths through javascript. Therefore the filenames for this project needed convey the story’s structure, its alignment with the node map, and be easy to use as variable names.
Another additional challenge is that this interactive platform truncated any filename longer than 8 characters, so to make it easier for the tech team to manage the files on the platform, we restricted the names (not including iteration naming) to specifically 8 characters.
The carefully scripted footage was shot, and ingested into post within a day. A total of 900 deliverables was then edited by a team of 8 editors. Each deliverable had iteration naming for review purposes, but this was then parsed by a program that stripped the iteration portion before uploading to the interactive platform.
The complexity of an interactive project requires careful planning and execution, so there were no changes made to the script through the edit, and each node of the story was accounted for. We established the principles of the naming convention, and then an index document that described the name of each expected node/deliverable and their content.
The basic rules of the naming convention were as follows (I’ve changed key details to protect proprietary information):
Interactive Media Naming Convention
To facilitate the understanding of building the interactive node map with our naming convention, we’re borrowing story-writing terms to describe the relationship between nodes. These terms have specific meaning in our workflow so be sure to review our glossary document, or ask your supervisor if you have any doubts.
Naming Rules
Each filename is restricted to 8 characters, always.
Character 1 is the Story: L for the Lab story; A for the Action story, B for the Bunny story, and G is a General category)
Character 2 is the Act within each Story. Depending on the story structure this may be a letter or a number.
Characters 3 and 4 are the Scene.
Character 5 is always an underscore: _
Character 6, 7 and 8 are the Beat (which corresponds to one specific node/deliverable within the story)
Node Index (excerpt)
Lab Story
HQ Scene
L1H1_STR – Lab HQ Start Button.
L1H2_INT – Lab HQ Intro – Job title choice point: Fun Person/Play Agent.
L1H3_JFP – Lab HQ Fun Person, transition into the Lab.
L1H3_JPA – Lab HQ Play Agent, transition into the Lab.
Lab Scene
L1L1_JFP – Lab Area, Lab guy’s introduction with Fun Person job title callback
L1L1_JPA – Lab Area, Lab guy’s introduction with Play Agent job title callback
Experiments Picking Scene
L2E0_INT – Experiments intro,
L2E0_ONB – Lab guy introduces experiments and onboards user on experiment buttons
L2E0_PCK – Pick experiment
Experimentation Scene
L3E1_RVL – Experiment 1 Reveal
L3E1_AN1 – Experiment 1 Angle 1
L3E1_AN2 – Experiment 1 Angle 2
L3E1_END – Experiment 1 Ends
L3E2_RVL – Experiment 2 Reveal
L3E2_AN1 – Experiment 2 Angle 1
L3E2_AN2 – Experiment 2 Angle 2
L3E2_END – Experiment 2 Ends