Quick questions on The multi-platform content project: QCE Film, Television and New Media

The treatment is the written core of the project. In it you set out the concept, the intended audience, the two platforms, and crucially how your technical and symbolic codes will engage and involve the audience across both. A strong treatment names specific codes and connects each to an audience effect or a participatory action. It justifies why these two platforms, not any two, suit the story and audience.

The two platforms must be interconnected: they should complement or expand the story, not duplicate it. An original example: a story called "Reef Keepers" about young volunteer marine carers might run as a short documentary series on one platform and a participatory map where viewers log their own clean-up sites on another. The documentary builds emotional investment; the map turns viewers into participants. Each platform does a job the other cannot, and a viewer who experiences both gets a richer story.

You produce a storyboard (commonly in the range of a dozen to two dozen shots) that communicates the narrative idea visually: framing, angle, movement and transitions. The storyboard should already express your codes and your participatory intent, not be a generic shot map. It is the bridge between the treatment and the pilot.

You produce a short pilot sequence (a brief production, commonly under a few minutes) that demonstrates the idea in moving image. The pilot proves your codes work in practice and that the participation you described in the treatment is achievable. Most of the footage should be your own; confirm the exact footage requirement against your syllabus version.

Because this is Unit 3, the participation must be designed in. Plan how the audience acts on each platform and how the platforms hand the audience to each other: a prompt at the end of the documentary that sends viewers to the map, a contribution on the map that feeds back into later episodes. Participation that flows between platforms is what distinguishes a true multi-platform project from two separate products.