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The Film Development Council of the Philippines (FDCP) is the country's national council to nurture and develop the local cinema. In 2021, the Council decided to digitize it programs that promote the growth and development of the local film industry.
I was tasked to lead the creation of an online learning platform that will give access to film and audio-visual courses which will cater to aspiring filmmakers, practitioners, and enthusiasts.
There are only a handful of recognized film and art schools in the Philippines, most operate on traditional classroom set-up, entail on-ground physical activities, and demand lengthy time commitment with high costs.
With the onset of the global pandemic in 2020, many of the schools’ operations were directly affected while others completely ceased.
While most people are in the safety of their homes, the FDCP has seen heightened interest in filmmaking among Filipino talents. The number of participants in our workshops have doubled or at times become ten-fold, reaching thousands, when we have conducted them online since 2020.
This proved that there is a demand to be satisfied, a problem to be solved, that is the lack of access to film education.
Since this is a new product/service in FDCP, we do not have an existing product team to undertake the project. Nevertheless, we have our own Creatives Unit and Production Unit that were assigned to the project. We have also outsourced a consulting agency who is in charge of the development of the product on Moodle.
I handled the following tasks:
Since this is a new endeavor of the Council, I have benchmarked first on the best practices of existing leading online learning platforms and see how these can be taken in our context.
After my research and benchmarking, I have aligned with the Chairperson and CEO and the division leads who will be working with me to kickstart the project. We have sectioned the work phases, identified resources needed, and set milestones to be met.
To set the foundation of the product, we conducted quantitative and qualitative research through an online survey and a focus group discussion (FGD). The goal of the research was to identify the following:
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We listed the content to be developed based on the results of the survey. I also led a series of workshops with my team using our data from FGD to create an Affinity Map. We have also identified two (2) User Personas that represent two target markets:
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With the team workshops, we turned every pain point into a user goal, brainstormed and ideated a design solution for each, and created user scenarios.
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With the design solutions that we listed, we then proceeded with the low-fidelity wireframes. We started with paper prototypes, tested it with people from the office, then finalized the design in Figma.
With the low-fidelity wireframes, we then worked with our in-house Creatives team to design the high fidelity wireframes applying the branding guidelines we have set. Afterwards, we turned-over the design to our outsourced developer to build it on Moodle.
With all the data we have and the design solutions prepared, we have developed an online learning platform with the vision of having a globally competitive film industry with film talents empowered by accessible film education.
