The City Resilience team

The City Resilience e-learning team

This is the learning team of the online program on the fundamentals of City Resilience units, formerly known as disaster management. When the subject matter expert (SME) submitted the content, originally built in PowerPoint (PPT), I knew we had to discuss the program further. In the first meeting, we had already agreed we could break the program in four parts, if not five, make it more engaging by designing a few characters to walk you through the program, and that PPT would not cut it. With a plan in mind, I developed 2-3 characters to host and facilitate the learning and called for another meeting to present the strategy and production plan. She approved it all and like the characters so much that the scope went from three to 13. Long story short, here they are. Each one represents a business unit, and will tell you all about what they do, why they do it and how their work fit in the grand scheme. Fun and informative.

Okay, team photo. Everybody say, safe!

The characters started on paper, as usual. I have added a few of the original sketches below. The original plan was to get them animated in Blender, but production time would never allow for it. The solution was then to rig them in Photoshop and animate them in Character Animator, which proved to be quite okay given the limitations; and the time it saved when redoing the animations were invaluable.

Contract Management Fundamental

The Contract Management Fundamentals is one of the animation-based trainings I did with cartoon characters. Instead of reading chunks of text, two senior contract experts, John and Kate, pictured above, explain to the learner everything they need to know to get started in this field. After a number of changes and with the project changing hands, eventually we moved the production from Blender to Adobe Character Animation. Understanding the limits the new system imposes, with a few workarounds the production did become easier and faster.

“Some people say our voice sound flat or even… robotic! Can you believe it?”

That is John, prompting learners they are about to hear a computer generated voice-over throughout the course. And he is right, there are many users that can’t stand a robotic voice. But with the AI-based text-to-speech getting better and better, the usual resistance to computer generated voices is getting less of an issue.

Information Security Awareness

Lara strikes back

This project first came to me, as a request for advice for potential external providers. By the sounds of it, the business unit responsible either didn’t know or didn’t trust this kind of work could’ve been done in-house. So, the team took as a challenge to show off some of the capabilities we could offer, and I did a small teaser. The briefing was impress the customer but don’t spend too much time on it.

Instead of adjusting the existing e-learning package, I re-wrote the script to a scenario-based animated story. In the original training, the main character had to escape the cyber traps created by Lara. Your job was to keep him safe, by succeeding in the quiz questions. This second iteration, I designed it so she was not only really annoyed you helped our hero to succeed but also much better prepared. She has new technology available to her, learnt new tricks to deceive you and are fully invested in stealing your money and identity, better if both. Beware, Lara Strikes Back.

Long story short, although the concept was well accepted, it would not fit the timeframe allowance. However, it did win us the project, we got to revamp the current version of the training and the online team is now working on a version for team leaders and managers, likely to be sure targets given they have better access to the organisation systems, some including decision power over budgets.

But… the whole thing looked so real.

Yes, it normally does. Hackers will disguise their traps into products and services that look almost like the original, if not identical. In this learning program, the user receives emails and messages that look very ordinary, and even from people they know and trust. Their job is to identify signs that will hint the whole thing might not be what it looks like. The message might not even come from the sender it says it does. At times, they trust their source, follow the instructions and before they know it, they get their identity stolen, dodgy charges on their credit card and their reputation compromised. It is good people being targeted for just being good. Sadly, in this business, if you trust others easily, you are a good target.

Some tips that could be useful when judging whether a content is safe or not

If you hover the link for a little while, a info may pop with the real address. So if the link says “yourbankname” but it points to “someplaceelse“, don’t click.
If an existing supplier asks you to change their banking details, call them and confirm this.
if an offer looks too good to be true, good chance it is.
If a lawyer from wherever chooses you, out of the blue, to transfer a large sum of money from an unclaimed inheritance… like, seriously? Just report it.

Lara releasing viruses in an office environment

SPASA SA 2013 Awards of Excellence

“We are extremely pleased with how the event turned out and it was a wonderful evening made possible by our generous sponsors and platinum sponsor, SoftSwim. The exceptional quality of the award entries is a huge credit to our members, solidifying that we have the best in the industry.

Polvo Digital Arts was an integral part of the evening, providing the digital presentation for the awards ceremony. Kudos to San for creating a presentation that fit our brief perfectly, it was exactly what we were looking for.

On behalf of the Committee, we would like to thank everyone involved for making the night such a success, particularly MC Lindsay McGrath, the sponsors, our members, the awards judges, the staff of The National Wine Centre and the entertainers. If this year is anything to go by, next year is going to be even more exciting!”

S. Rowley, Association’s State Manager and event organiser.