Ten Ideas for an Internet Youth TV Station

Ten Ideas for an Internet Youth TV Station

Decided a title - pick a theme and style, consider branding, content, corporate ID, demographic

The first of this years projects was to design an internet TV station, aimed at a youth audience. The first thing I had to do was find out what an Internet TV station actually was - and despite haranguing the lecturer - couldnt get a substantive answer. After some research (on the internet) it seemed to me internet TV stations were things like BBC IPlayer, MTV Videos etc. So how to transfer this into an interesting TV station idea? I brainstormed the following ideas:

1. Can't Cook? Can Cook! - Student cooking site - with everything from how to boil an egg to how to cook on a tight budget. Easy to follow videos. 
2. Student Union TV - Forum for student concerns with a relevant authority to discuss
3. Come Hang for Ten - A platform for not broadly televised sports, giving accessabilty to a wider audience
4. I'm with the Band - Independant music platform for unsigned bands - but from a friends recommendation
5. Every Goal's our goal - Never miss a goal, try, putt again. A website showing only the actual action of a sports game. 
6. Rampent Ranting - A forum for all the rightous and opinionated out there who need a platform to let it all out. 
7. Zombacolypse - A survival website in the event of a Zombie Apocolypse
8. Tadpoles Den - For young entrepernuers - much in the style of Dragon's Den
9. Cut and Paste - An ongoing project, creating a story from submissions in a variety of differnt mediums
10. Revolution around the World - Young peoples hopes and fears for their cultures - a comparison between different issues that are subjective to each situation. 

I decided to focus on the Zombacolypse Website as I felt this was perhaps the most interesting and I didn't want to do anything to do with a talent competition (I blame X-Factor for the decline in original ideas in Media). It came to mind as my friends and I have spent many hours speculating on the best course of action in the event of such a disaster. It was always hypothetical but after frequant discussions I felt I could perhaps impart some advice. To get my project off the ground I did some broad research on the subject matter, researching different historical information including quotes taken from religious texts that could be interpreted as pre-luding to the raising of the dead. For example:

"And the lord will send a plague on all the nations that fought against Jerusalm. Their people will become like walking corpses, their flesh rotting away. Zechariah 14:13"

I also read some fictional works to help prepare me for my website, including both World War Z and How to Survive the Zombie Apocolypse by Max Brooks. Of course, a research into a zombie survival site could not be completed without watching films such as '28 Days Later', 'Dawn of the Dead' and 'Aaah, Zombies'. I think the Zombie genre endures because of humans natual thrill at gore, and our own morbidity, and also the self belief when watching films like this that we would do things differently, we would be smarter and we would survive. 

My website needed to be informative, visually attractive, and have factors that would be attractive to an outsider. Nearly all Zombie films used the colours black and red so I designer my website around those colours. I took images of Zombies and civillians from a variety of films and outlined them in black, sometimes adding a splash of colour that would give a nod the the film they came from. For example, on the page referencing Film and Literature I had drawn an blacked out image of the character JIm from 28 Days later in his iconic green scrubs (if you are unfamiler with the film the story focuses on Jim, portrayed by Cillian Murphy, and how he awakes from a coma to find zombies have taken over england).

The website was split into five sections - About, History, Science, Film and Literature, Survival. The aim of the website was to have various "experts in their field" to give advice on what to do in an event of a Zombie Apocolypse. I wanted David Starkey to give a history, and had people like Ray Mears and Bear Grylls giving survival advice. The website was designed in a slight 'tongue in cheek style' but obviously with the hope that it would be of actual use in the unlikely (or likely in some peoples opinion!) event that Zombies take over the world.The full website is shown below: