Glowinthedark

Designer

Web application for production planning

BBC R&D

2011

Designer was a research project at BBC Research and Development looking at innovative television production planning tools. My intention was to create a generic tool that could be used for scripting, storyboarding, scheduling, logging and editing. The result is a web based collaborative authoring tool for creating comic book style documents. These documents can include diverse media types; image, text, video, music and provide dropbox style file sharing. The pages themselves are hierarchically organised and can include to-dos for production planning.

Technology

Python

Javascript

Flask

CouchDB

Backbone

A key element in the design was the desire to offer programme makers a flexible tool that gave them more control. The creation of meta-data schemas is handed over to the production teams, as with traditional production paperwork and Designer's interface uses grid based drag-and-drop arrangement of elements to positively encourage inventive and varied syntaxes to be developed by different teams and departments. This approach is informed by the belief that production technology needs be cleverer and to "hold on looser" if it is to become more relevant and responsive.

Part of the development included working with others to define a generalised RESTful resource API for R&D's ipStudio and the creation of Bolster, a simple object store integrating CouchDB, Flask, and Backbone. This robust back-end made development of rich interfaces with HTML5 and JavaScript fast and easy.