Introducing the Kids of the Rocket Fund: Shawn and Shawnee
Ahimsa Media is comprised of a cast of interesting characters, so it isn’t a stretch for us to develop a new plethora of personalities – online characters that is. Our inaugural lady was Emme Rogers, and since then character development has become a creative niche for us. Amazing how it helps us to deal with all our own multiple personalities by creating characters online from novels, movies and television series; in addition to those for non-profits and businesses. Incredible how liberating it can be for an organization to have a voice that can have fun, and doesn’t have to wear a tie or an uncomfortable set of heels.
Our latest delve into character creation has been with the Shaw Rocket Fund. They are already known throughout Canada as a champion and funder of children’s, youth and family television programs. However, much of their exceptional research into youth, media and technology was unknown. This year also saw changes in their annual Rocket Prize judging to include any entry’s digital content, in addition to the TV show. This set the stage for the Fund themselves to enter the digital space and begin participating in both interactivity and convergence. Enter Shawn and Shawnee Rockett.
Shawnee enjoying herself at the beach.
Shawn playing it cool
We built this delectable duo and have raised them to the stage of passing the reigns back to the Shaw Rocket Fund, who will now guide the cousins on their future path. To accompany our new friends, we also introduced interactive feeds for the company itself. In a time when convergence is becoming a crucial key to industry success, the CMF creates an experimental funding stream and broadcasters are learning to navigate the digital space, character driven online narrative has helped place the Shaw Rocket Fund amongst some of today’s broadcast industry innovators. Despite still being only a few months old, the digital world is beginning to embrace Shawn and Shawnee. So here they are:
The Characters:
Shawn and Shawnee Rockett are cousins. They were both born a few years apart, but on the same day of the year, their great grandfather’s birthday – hence their names. They are both named after their Great Grandfather, Shawn Rockett. And yes, their pops, whom are brothers had a bit of a spat over this, but both are terribly stubborn and he was both of their favourite grandfather. The cousins, on the other hand, are the best of friends, and although they tease each other incessantly, they have gone into business together and love working together. Their company is a Canadian Production House focused on creating children’s and youth television.
Shawn Rockett
Shawn Rockett
In his late twenties, Shawn is still young at heart, a personality trait often reflected his work where he focuses on youth programming. He loves his music, bickering with Shawnee and pushing life to the extreme. He considers himself a bit of a Casanova, much to Shawnee’s amusement. Shawn also loves being at the cutting edge of convergence and keeps an eye out for new and exciting technology.
Shawnee Rockett
Shawnee Rockett
Shawnee is a couple of years younger and places more focus on children’s and tween TV. She’s a lover of everything Disney, her cats and and is a bit of a giant kid at heart. She still loves to climb trees and splash in puddles in her bright red wellies. Quirky would definitely be the word for her. She loves her folk music. Yes, she still watches Saturday morning cartoons. She already is hooked online, chatting with other characters and youth programmers like Seth on Survival and Ruby Skye PI
We loved developing these two, and are sure the Shaw Rocket Fund will equally enjoy creating their voices…
…as for us onto the next character!
Tips for Creating a Personalized YouTube Channel
In July my knowledge of personalizing YouTube Channel pages went up by about 100 percent. Erica assigned Liz and I the task of creating and personalizing YT Channels for Ahimsa characters Shawnee and Shawn Rockett (of the Shaw Rocket Fund), and for Shea, Ahimsa’s teenage character online.
I’d never tried my hand with personalizing YT Channels before and thought it should be easy, just like personalizing one’s desktop background. To my surprise, I found that just learning the ropes of YT Channel personalization takes a significant amount of time and experimentation. After spending many an ungainly hour on the project I thought I must just be YouTube-challenged, and so sought Liz’s help to speed things along. I was relieved to find that Liz – talented as she is with manipulating digital photos – uttered as many expletives as I did while we worked on getting the YT background image just right. Erica calmed us both by assuring us that personalizing the web page takes much longer than you’d think it would, and that after it’s completed, things move much more smoothly. (They do. And it’s such a pleasure to admire the finished product in the end).
I always admire the colours on Shawnee Rockett's YouTube channel
So to save all of you some time when personalizing your own YT Channels, here are some good-to-know tips:
1.There is no real ideal size for a YT background image, so don’t bother Googling it to see what size picture other YT users are using. This is because as you add more material to the Channel, the page will grow longer but your image will not. You can cope with this setback by choosing a background colour that will soften the line where the text exceeds the picture. The width that Liz and I found worked best for her photos was 1300 pixels.
We chose a deep grey background to blend in with Shawn Rockett's teal and deep blue channel colours.
2. Depending on the size of the computer screen being used, the sides of the image displayed may be cut off. So while the edges of the image may show up on your screen, they may be lost on smaller monitors. For this reason, don’t pick images that have a lot of the subject on the extreme edges of the screen as they might become invisible to other viewers.
3. This restriction poses the problem of having a very small margin in which to display your subject on the Channel page. Pushing the subject too far towards the centre of the page will make the image disappear behind the wrapper, and moving it too far towards the edges is risky as well (see tip 2). You can increase how much of the background image is visible by making the wrapper totally or partially transparent. Do this by clicking “advanced options” under the Themes and Colours tab and adjusting the “Wrapper Transparency” option with the drop-down menu given.
We made the outer wrapper 100% transparent and the inner wrapper 40% transparent so that more of the background picture would appear.
4. When you’re picking the colours to go in the fields in “advanced options”, you need not be limited to the 56 colours offered in the YT grid. There are 216 html colour codes you can find online. Enter the codes for the colours you like in the grids to give yourself more freedom when designing your page. Name and save the combination of colours you decide on in the top left field of “advanced options” so that you can apply this palette with a single click on other YT Channels you might personalize.
5. Now comes the easy part. When you’re done with setting up the background and visuals, you can start favouriting videos, creating playlists and putting in a channel description. To display your playlists, you need to click the “Videos and Playlists” tab and select which playlists you want displayed. You have to do this every time you create a new playlist and want it on your channel page.
Under the “Videos and Playlists” tab, click on “Playlists” and then “Arrange Playlists” to decide what order you want your playlists shown in.
You can click "Arrange Playlists" to edit the order of your YT playlists
You can also edit your playlists and arrange the order of individual videos by clicking on one of the playlist icons and then clicking “edit my playlist” (this last one took me a while to figure out).
I hope these nitty gritties are useful to any enterprising YT users out there. Good luck creating your personalized YouTube Channel page!
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