How the worldwide expertise of Rock Content created an interactive Playstation story for WIPO

At the end of 2019, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) approached Rock Content with the aim of increasing its brand awareness in North America.

This marked the start of a worsening global pandemic that forced businesses and employees to reassess the importance of remote working policies, with countries like Australia, France and the UK around 47% of their population work remotely.

The usual face-to-face meetings and brainstorming sessions for large projects have increasingly been replaced by conference calls – except for the few of us who have already lived in this remote work paradigm.

However, this was already our reality at Rock Content. As a global company with teams in 17 countries, we have carried out complex content projects remotely for many of our corporate customers. We have years of experience in leveraging our highly tested Global Talent Network and extensive productions to quality.

Liz Vickers, Senior Manager of Talent Manager at Rock Content, who firmly believes in the power of remote talent, told me in one of our conversations that “Freelancers enable companies to be agile, adapt to market needs in real time and seize growth opportunities otherwise that would be unattainable. “

This new challenge that WIPO brought to the table was familiar, we felt at home and ready to deliver in a global and distant mindset. Your intention was a … create digital storyat outlines how intellectual property laws affected the launch of the first Playstation console in Japan in 1994.

The WIPO team wanted something unique, new and visually striking. As a gamer myself, I naturally loved the challenge and opportunity to work closely with the WIPO team and leverage visual assets approved by several legendary gaming companies like Eidos and Square Enix.

As a producer, I wanted to make sure I was putting together the best possible team that can help WIPO achieve its goals.

The assembled team

After considering the general approach and structure of the digital parallax story, I thought we could use more creative flair and brought my long-time colleague into the mix, Nick Vaka, our own late night showman (yes, he’s the host of Rock tonight. If you haven’t seen it before, go there right now – and come back later of course!).

Nick lives in Virginia, USA, and being a seasoned animator, producer, and creative director himself, he put together a collage of images that should inspire the experience. The “Neo Tokyo” concepts were presented to the program director Donna Hill, who was at the forefront of the project on the WIPO side.

Rock Content’s Global Talent Network did the editing, illustration, web design, and front-end development for the experience. Livia Giorgini (Brazil) led the project through Visually, Rock’s proprietary platform for cloud-based production collaboration.

The content was based on a 10,000 word article written by the legendary David Greenspan, author of “Mastering the Game: Business and Legal Questions for Video Game Developers“. With over 25 years of business and legal experience for some of the premier video game publishers, David was uniquely qualified to make the story of. to tell how it came to the IP of the PlayStation.

Jorge Ignacio Castillo (Vancouver, British Columbia) worked with Donna and David to adapt the content for a digital story. This was a huge challenge as David’s original article was extremely factual and full of relevant information. This eventually paved the way for the design and development magic on the visual side.

Lisa Eyo (London, UK) was tasked with bringing the original creative direction and vision to life. By designing her own wonderful illustrations and utilizing assets approved by game companies that Donna has worked closely with, she managed to deliver an eye-catching neo-Tokyo landscape that animated over a whopping 30 Parallax / CSS Screens extends.

The front-end development was carried out by BrainyYack (Toronto, Canada) who worked on the CSS, SVG, and JavaScript animations; Brings the landscape of Neo Tokyo to life with a barrage of flickering lights, meteorites, rocket launches, waving samurai swords, and more. This talented team made use of the following libraries and frameworks:

• HTML5
• JavaScript
• SCSS for compiled version of CSS
• Swiper library for scroll effects and horizontal directional navigation
• Screenfull library to switch the screen to full screen mode
• Browser library for recognizing and applying specific settings depending on the browser (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, IE)

After extensive collaboration with WIPO, processing copy and design optimizations, asset research and approvals, and an extensive development cycle, the experience is live and ready to be viewed here.

Collaborative effort that brings results

See what Donna Hill of WIPO said about her experience working with Rock Content:

“Rock content obviously rocks! The team we worked with to create the first in a series of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) initiative to create interactive digital stories for audiences worldwide was exceptional. The team patiently listened to our explanations of what we wanted to achieve and where we had doubts they stepped in to make sure we could achieve our main goal of reaching an audience that was ignorant of intellectual property and wanted to learn more. We wish Rock Content continued success in their endeavors! ”-Donna Hill, Program Manager at WIPO.

As you can see, the interactive experience was well received on the first day of its launch and is well on its way to helping WIPO achieve its goals. Talent networks have the potential to achieve great things and this is one of many examples.

In addition, the power of connecting different cultures and languages ​​can produce amazing and creative results. We brought people from the US, Canada, UK and Brazil together. Everyone worked remotely but was synchronized. This is the beauty of technology and collaboration that Rock Content believes in and embraces.