Abstract:

In 2013, the university Development Department and its Faculty of Communication Sciences in Nebrija University, Madrid, achieved a collaborative agreement with Tuenti Technologies S.L., owners of the social network Tuenti, with the aim of creating an innovative educational campus, where the students would develop real projects of interest to this company. Within this framework, the first collaborative project in which we are working is the accomplishment and production of contents to create a fictional series for mobile devices as well as a study of the different audiovisual formats for these contents. Thus, this is a collaborative experience oriented to the students of the degrees on Comunication and the Master’s degree on Direction and Realization of fictional series of the Communication Faculty.

In the field of the research, we are generating a qualitative study in two phases: in the first stage, we intend to know the level of commitment of the young college students in the so-called “participative culture” and, at the same time, analyse their attitudes towards the audiovisual contents through the mobile phones in order to discover their preferences. As for the second stage, we will test the audiovisual materials elaborated by the students.

With regards to the development of the series, we organized a contest of ideas among all the students, and a professor’s jury preselected the best ideas. The students presented a professional pitch before the jury and two of them were therefore selected. The Master’s degree students worked in group in the enhancing of both ideas, which were finally presented before a new jury formed by specialized professors of the different areas involved --screenplay, direction, creativity, production-- with the colaboration of Tuenti. Once the winning idea is chosen, the pre-production phase will begin, in which the professors of screenplay, actors direction, production, art direction, photography direction and plan shooting are involved.

The series will be recorded in the production stage. At this phase the Scenic Arts students will participate as actors, while in the post production stage the editing will be efectuated. In the milestones of the creation project – screenplay, casting, first version and final version of the editing – our partner company will be involved.

As a complement to these actions, the Audiovisual Communication degree students are elaborating an audiovisual making off through their own blog and social networks. Advertising and Public Relations are in charge of the promotional campaing of the project, Journalism will cover the written as well as the graphic and audiovisual breaking news.

To sum up, Nebrija Valley Tuenti project is a collaborative experience university-company in which, in a cross-curricular method, different Nebrija faculties participate and several degrees related to Communication converge. As a result, this is an activity with benefits both for the company and the university.

Keywords:

Audivisual Communication, innovation education, skills, research.