PBS In Search of Shakespeare
In Search of Shakespeare Home Page
Our wonderful clients at Maya Vision produced a major PBS/BBC documentary series called 'In Search of Shakespeare' last year. In it, Michael Wood did an excellent job of exploring what is known about Shakespeare as a real life human person (as opposed to a woodcut of a bald guy with a ruff).
Maya Vision asked us to put together a pitch for the production of companion site for the pbs.org website. We did. They liked it. PBS liked it. We went ahead and made the site.
In Search of Shakespeare Timeline Page
We got collectively carried away with planning the whole project and set about producing a site that was to include a timeline of key events in the world of William Shakespeare that would interconnect and link to biographies of the people he knew, video clips and synopses of his plays, details of the places that he knew and information about the historical evidence that leads us to know these things. And a whole other section for 'Educators' containing Lesson Plans and a multimedia database. And an interactive role-playing playwright game. And a guide to the show's episodes..
We designed and built the whole thing. Images were sourced from Maya Vision's original footage and original artwork was created by Tommy. Editor and writer Mark Love was hired, appropriately, to write and edit the bulk of the content, with input and assistance from the ubiquitous Tommy. PBS, thankfully, provided us with the Educators content.
In Search of Shakespeare Playwright Game
We used the a prototype of Weblobe to assemble the site and create the links and navigation. The system was then persuaded to output a complete finished version of the site for upload onto the PBS server. The system saved us massive amounts of time and effort in assembling what turned out to be a site of epic proportions. Really huge. By far the biggest thing we've ever made.
It's also one of the sites that we are the most proud of making.