Final Cut
Siegel and Walsh began by digging into the material to figure out what the user experience should be. They looked at competitors, primarily InsideSessions, an e-learning program created by the Universal Music Group and Penguin Putnam and directed at aspiring musicians. In addition to the Internet, InsideSessions utilizes CD-ROM, DVD, and VHS tapes. "That was really the only competitor, entertainment-wise," says Siegel. InsideSessions students also pay $70 for each program.
Then Siegel and Walsh had to decide what the approach should be. "It's a book," says Siegel. "What was the best creative concept? Do we deal with the book? Do we deal with the two people that are giving the lesson? Do we deal with their notoriety? Do we deal with the fact that this is a course?"
Promoting the book was the primary goal, but visually, the book didn't provide them with any cues about how the site should look—the cover hadn't even been approved at this stage of site design. But that meant that the sky was the limit—there was no key art to follow. Interactive Jungle produced a set of comps, and Peter Guber chose the one he felt best represented the book and course.
The building phase, from initial meeting to live site, took three months. Interactive Jungle worked with Mandalay and Yahoo to design the look, feel, and layout using Training Management Studio, Yahoo's webcast training technology engine. The templated construction meant that content could be easily added months later—and that's the way it had to work. The launch of shootoutonline.com happened before the UCLA course on which it was based had finished. As classes unfolded in the spring 2002 semester, the site had to be flexible enough to accommodate whatever material might arise from the organic course. "You never know what's going to happen," says Siegel. "People don't rehearse teaching."
Each week's lesson plan includes video from the stand-up course (lectures by Bart and Guber, as well as invited actors, directors, and producers), multimedia pertaining to the week's guest (film clips, sound bites, and image galleries), and additional resources such as articles, papers, and suggested reading.
"It was amazing to me to put together an online learning course that had as much supporting material as this did," says Walsh. The user interface integrates audio, video, and text, all of which was provided by Mandalay. "For each lesson, there were approximately five segments plus support streams," says Siegel. "If Ali McGraw is talking about the making of Love Story, one of the support pieces might be a trailer for the film."
The site cost less than $40,000 to develop—most of which went toward design—and costs less than $5,000 per month to maintain.
