RE:SHAKESPEARE

TitleRE:SHAKESPEARE
BrandSAMSUNG & THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY
Product/ServiceRE:SHAKESPEARE
Category B01. User Experience Design (UX)
Entrant CHEIL UK London, UNITED KINGDOM
Idea Creation CHEIL UK London, UNITED KINGDOM
Production UNIT9 London, UNITED KINGDOM
Credits
Name Company Position
Malcolm Poynton Cheil Worldwide Global Chief Creative Officer
Tom Evans Cheil Worldwide Executive Creative Director
Mark Fretten Cheil Worldwide Creative Director
Rob Perham Cheil Worldwide Creative Director
Andy Day Cheil Worldwide Design Director
Oliver Wright Cheil Worldwide Executive Producer
Chris Chalk Cheil Worldwide Chief Strategy Officer
Laura Cortes Unit 9 London Creative Director, UX
Marc d Souza Unit 9 London Executive Producer
Pierre Trochu Unit 9 London Project Manager

The Campaign

RE:Shakespeare is a free Android app from the Royal Shakespeare Company & Samsung. It helps students explore Shakespeare’s work through performance - standing up, speaking out loud – the way he always intended it to be experienced. As they work through a series of immersive 360° and interactive challenges, hosted by celebrity influencers and performance experts, they’re transformed from passive readers to active performers, discovering his stories, characters and language in engaging new ways.

Creative Execution

The RE:Shakespeare app has been created to help students engage with Shakespeare – a subject many find “Boring” or “irrelevant”. The UX is designed around three primary modules – Play, Practice and Perform – each with its own unique interaction design, encouraging a certain type of learning experience. PLAY introduces Shakespeare through games, hosted by actor David Tennant, rapper Akala, spoken word poet Indigo Williams and Shlomo the beatboxer. Each of these games incorporates elements from Shakespeare’s works into popular game mechanics. PRACTICE explores Shakespeare’s intent, guided by RSC experts, Nia Lynne, Tamsin Greig and director Iqbal Khan. They focus on one play – Much Ado About Nothing – preparing the user through a focus on language, intention and emotion. To further engage, this section features a world-first 360° performance on the RST stage. Students can select one of two passages from the play and watch RSC actors performing, aided by on-screen titling and augmented hotspots containing further information about characters, themes and historical context. Finally PERFORM allows interactive on-screen performance via a first-person POV camera angle, opposite an RSC actor. Again, the challenge contains prompts and performance aids to allow multi-ability interaction. As they work through the challenges, Students experience a visual form of interactive storytelling that’s both quick and intuitive. By engaging directly and physically with the words and rhythms of the text, complex thoughts and language start to make sense to young people. It is this kinaesthetic approach – through doing and feeling – that shapes the UX of the RE:Shakespeare app throughout. Since launch, RE:Shakespeare has been utilised in the RSC’s education outreach programme, reaching 1,200 schools, 2,000 teachers and over 530,000 young people a year. It has also been made available to anyone interested in Shakespeare, free of charge via the Google Play Store