Mass email to BA animation students

In addition to the Facebook group I've sent out an email to ALL of the animation students, and hopefully I'll be able to get a response from a fair few of them shortly! If at least 25+ (over half the class) people are interested in having their work in the book I'd go ahead and create it to give a good incentive to own it, but if I can't manage to get that many peoples work in the little amount of time we have been given I'll continue the project after the unit.

Facebook group: Group members

Very quickly going up! 30 members now have joined the group which is positive and motivating for the project!

Facebook group: Responses

That was surprisingly quick! I've managed to get a lot of interest from my class, and they seem to be very keen in submitting work for the project and also keen in purchasing such a book in the near future.



I had to respond to some of the questions, but it's good to see people are interested in purchasing the book upon completion!

Let's get this show on the road!

Facebook group: Outline Post

Just posted up on the Facebook group the message that the group members will see (which is now at 20 people!), which I've attached to the post below.



I made sure that I was as professional as possible, and I'm hoping people will soon respond back!

Facebook group

In order to get the word out I've devised three methods of communication that I think will work well. Asking for their work in person, by email, and by Facebook.

I today set up the Facebook group, and I've already invited people to it. Hopefully people will join!



I'll be writing a post so that people know EXACTLY what the book will offer, and it'll start the process of getting everyone's work together.

Work in progress: Front cover of book!

Here's the current front cover of the yearbook, so far I think it's looking pretty decent, though I'll have to get some outside feedback before considering it final. I'll also post up my alternative designs.



The stylized portraits are of each of the BA Animation students, but with a theme that reflects the logo of Ravensbourne with its sharp cut edges. I will ensure the page is less white, and I'm thinking of having the tessellated logo throughout the background. I am also not quite happy with the font yet, but I'll pull that around.

Project Plan 2.0

We've changed the project after getting feedback from the formative, so I've attached the most recent adaptation of the Project Plan below.

BA Animation Yearbook
TOM RITCHIE – Project Manager, Author, Designer, Illustrator,
Editor
GUY MORGAN – Researcher, Author, Illustrator, Editor
The business opportunity we will endeavour is to publish a book
based upon the works of the animation students in the BA year of
animation. 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 at the collaborative work created by the BA
Animation year. We want the third year animation students to be
able to look back on the times we've had over the past three years.
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
20 books by the end of June. Social websites will be used to notify
the animation students about the book, and to gather their work to
be featured in the book. Word of mouth will also be a useful way of
advertising, since the large majority of animation students are easy
to get hold of. We both see this as going beyond making money,
and we want the animation students to be able to continue to
purchase this when they wish to.
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 animation such as potential students
or adults will be an equally valued customer.
Students who might be contemplating whether or not to go to
university may see this as an eye opener as they can delve into
some of the work that animation students within this particular
college generate. The idea merges yearbooks with art books, in this
case similar to a Pixar art 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. That’s 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 from students which can go into
the book, so even if we were unable to work on including more
artwork we would still be able to walk away with a worthwhile book.
The reason we're investing more time into making 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/