Project plan

I've attached the project plan for the unit below, which outlines exactly what both myself and Guy will be accomplishing for E&E this term.

The Art of Unhatched

TOM RITCHIE – Project Manager, Author, Illustrator, Editor

GUY MORGAN – Author, Illustrator, Editor

The business opportunity we will endeavour is to publish a book based upon the works
and making of the short film Unhatched. This can be exploited in various ways such as
book shops, stalls, boot fairs, online (internet) and as an electronic book. To make a profit the book can be bought and printed for a fixed price and then sold over the making price. Our main unique selling point would be that it's a one and only book showing an in depth and detailed look into the process of making the film Unhatched. Our mission statement would be to successfully capture and record the development of the film by including original works.

To promote the film to an audience we will establish a website designed just for the film, this will link to a website where you can buy the book. When the film is complete we will upload the film to the site itself so that anyone can watch it for free. Ultimately this will entice customers to buy the book having seen the film.

The cost to fund the books and sell them online is £0. This is due to the website earning a part sum of the profit for the labour of the book. We hope to achieve a sum of £50+ in profits selling around 30 books by the end of June. Social websites will be used accordingly to advertise the book such as Facebook, and Twitter. Word of mouth will also be a useful way of advertising with also flyers and other mediums being dispersed around the college and locally. In the long term, the book will mainly be published continuously online as long as people purchase it.

People within the animation industry or wanting to be have always been inspired by others work in the field. With this in mind, the book will be enticing to these people in particular as they can gain an insight into a unique style of work and process. To reiterate, our target customer will be animators and people of similar interest though anyone that is a fan of the film such as children or adults will be an equally valued customer.

Children and adults may want to have a book of this type much in the same way that they may want an Art of Pixar book . The books by Pixar are superbly made, and although we doubt we'll be able to get a quality that matches that I believe we as a group will be able to do a good job at creating something worthwhile. We will ensure the book will be readily available through the social networks, our websites and general word of mouth. All of which I believe will work in selling at the very least a few copies of the book.

We will be creating the books from a website I found called Blurb.com, Blurb.com is not only easy to use but having seen the quality of the books in person myself they are superbly made as well. We will ensure that we sell the books £5 more than the price of the books, with one of their easy to use features called “Set Your Price”. For example we will most likely create our book in a square format, which costs £9 to sell, but with “Set Your Price” we could add however much to it as we would like, and from the discussion we've had we believe £5 extra will not only be a small sum added but in total make the book a
worthy purchase.

This means that the books we will sell will most likely be sold at £14, with a profit of £5 per book. As long as we sell at least 10 of these books we will have both have made £25 each, but of course the more we sell the better. The good thing with the website is it gives the viewer the chance to preview the book, so as long as we have good artwork in the book I believe we will be able to accomplish 10 books having been sold, if not more.

Another good thing about creating the book is how some of the additional artwork that will go into the book will also be eligible to go into our project folders for our final submission.The budget for the book between us will be £20. This is because of a £1 monthly fee for when you create the book through the “Set Your Price” setup.

“Fees: There is no charge for enrolment, but monthly payments are subject to a small
processing fee (USD$1/£1/€1/AUD$1/CAD$1 for PayPal, USD$5 for checks) so we can
cover our costs. Thatʼs it.“

We both feel this is small enough and worth the investment, especially since this is
something we could both use in many ways to sell the film to people. We set £20 as the
budget because we doubt we'd keep this going on for 20 months, and most likely only until
the end of the year.

The worst case scenario for this strategy is to have none of the books sell, but alternatively
we will not walk away with any damages made to us at all. Especially since the £1 monthly
processing fee only applies if you've sold books. In our opinion this is a “win win” situation,
especially since we will have created additional work for it that can also go into our project
folders for the end of the year. The only true “worst case scenario” I can see is time being
wasted when the time could go into working on the film more, but even then all of this will
benefit our film one way or another.

We already have a lot of artwork which can go into the book, so even if we were unable to
work on more artwork we would still be able to walk away with a worthwhile book. The
reason we're investing more time into making more artwork is so that we can get the
standard of the book to the best possible quality and to also aid us in our final unit.

Our individual blogs can be found below:

Tom Ritchie: http://tritchie-ee.blogspot.com/
Guy Morgan: http://gmorgan-ee.blogspot.com/