A long-time dream of mine was to work on a resource that would help students with their essay writing and deal with every single stage of that journey. Since the pandemic, and with assessments being done online, students have had more choice in the type of assessment they tackle. Many will opt for a problem question in preference to an essay question. For some this may be because it feels more ‘lawyerly’ to be writing an answer to a problem question, providing legal advice and not just churning out the essays as you did in your A-levels. However, for many I think it is because they have lost confidence, and a problem question provides a ready-made structure of sorts.

I began to work through some ideas for the many different elements that are required to write an essay and knew it was going to be my most challenging project yet. Giving guidance about writing as a skill was going to be difficult to make engaging and instructive, never mind enjoyable. I knew also that because of the perceived view of essays as hard and ‘to be avoided’, any resource needed to deal with student mindset and tapping into how they might feel.

Empathy was going to be crucial.

Emily Allbon, creator

Empathy was going to be crucial. Students needed to feel that it was ‘normal’ to feel frustrated, confused, and lacking confidence. What was clear was that we needed a main character – a law student - so we could get all of this across. It felt important to bring in a student to work on these early stages with me, and that student was the fantastic Kyla Donnelly, a recent graduate from our LLB programme. She and I worked together on the early stages of the project; brainstorming content for each of the steps of the journey, planning and sharing the writing of some of the initial script. Her insight into her writing process and the challenges facing her and her peers was invaluable.

Format of the map

Back in 2019 I launched Coltsfoot Vale – a virtual village to help students with their understanding of land law. You can see this online via landlawstorymap or here on TL;DR. This gave us our platform to reuse and redevelop which was ideal for presenting writing an essay as a journey.

This also tied in with my ideas about presenting it as a somewhat treacherous journey, each stop represented by a geographical peril – I was thinking about any number of films, but as a child in the 80s The Princess Bride and the snow sand/fire swamp scene probably ranked highest in my mind!

When I began talking to Steve McCombe from our Learning Enhancement and Development team (LEaD) about their possible involvement, he was enthused and described it as being in the ‘Tolkien Middle-Earth style’. I envisaged each place on the map would act as a jumping-off point for the main guidance about that particular skill, but also feature an ‘Extras’ section for downloadable additional support materials and potentially a quiz to test understanding.

The Cast

From the start, it was important to me that the content included varied types of media and that, although Kyla was the main character, she would interact with others in every scene.  Students needed to be reassured that they weren’t alone, and that others would support them along their journey. Mixing up of characters would also prevent the resource from feeling dull and monotonous too. So, I decided upon:

• A friend of Kyla, called Tyler
• Kyla’s lecturer
• Kyla’s academic adviser/personal tutor
• A recent graduate acting as a mentor to Kyla

This mix meant we would be able to convey advice in different ways.

To keep characters familiar, we used the same mode of communication for each of them. Tyler always in WhatsApp, the lecturer in a straight talking to camera approach, the academic adviser via MS Teams and the graduate mentor appearing in a slightly ethereal way (with a glowing, spinning halo). Each character also has their own unique background created in a water-coloured textured style, with a specific colour palette. For the final video their speech also has a themed captions box with all dialogue subtitles burnt in.

Illustration

The illustration was all done by Lawbore and TL;DR stalwart, Adam Doughty, who'd worked on several previous projects for us, including the Coltsfoot Vale game. The map of course needing illustrating, but all of the videos created for each of the places on the map would also feature illustrations within them. This was important to keep interest up and add some elements of quirkiness and fun into the learning. Each of the illustrations was designed specifically for this resource - none of them feel ‘churned out’ or ‘mass produced’. Adam drew a unique image of Kyla at each place, visually summing up how she feels at that point.

Process-wise, I outlined (sometimes sketching) the requirements for each, and Adam worked up the final image to fit. Some of these were later animated (sometimes with audio too) by Steve within the LEaD team – examples of these include a rattling conveyer belt, a head flipping open to reveal a brain, sound waves and various alarms.

Video process and production

In terms of production values, the video content was shot using the innovative LEaD-designed Presentation Station system which allowed simple, streamlined high-quality capture of all the original videos against a greenscreen with the use of the built-in autocue for the actors. In post-production, there was extensive use of Adobe Premiere’s AI morph transition to join pieces of the recording together where mistakes or surplus material were removed. The team made use of Premiere speed tool to produce seamless extensions and contractions of delays in the actors' delivery.

Project collaborators came with varied abilities in audiovisual production, and as such, methods needed to be basic. The process of storyboarding was a joint effort between me and the LEaD team. The script was converted into a simple PowerPoint file with each slide representing a snapshot of a video. The beauty of this was that it didn’t require any artistic skill (just ClipArt and text boxes), it could be narrated and then exported as a video file and shared with the team. Professional actors took three of the main parts (academic advisor, lecturer and graduate mentor) but additional dialogue/narration was recorded separately with university staff (not actors).

In terms of accessibility, captions were fully automated within After Effects by linking to caption text files, so spelling mistakes could be easily corrected with the changes rippling into the films themselves. All relevant on-screen text is vocalised (and all dialogue is transcribed). Similar to popular RPG games, dialogue boxes provide additional consistent support for viewers.

What do you see when enter the Law Student Essay Journey?

When you fire up the map, you hear a narrated introduction to the resource and how it works. We hear what lies ahead, how you can navigate around the map and get further help. There is a help icon visible on every page taking students to more detailed guidance and a breakdown of which skill is covered at each place on the map.

As you enter each of the 22 places, you will get a narrated introduction to what specific skill you will encounter. You will then be able to click on ‘Advice’ for the key learning resource, the video. Depending what is available (and this is a resource which will build over time), you may also get an option for a ‘Quiz’ or for ‘Extras’ where you’ll find further guides on that particular skill.

H5P quizzes and other additions

In our previous Coltsfoot Vale map we had small interactive "reveal-the-answer" style quizzes for the students to test themselves. For Kyla's Journey we wanted to go one step further and have the quizzes fully interactive, with scoring and a social media-sharable final screen that showed you how well you'd done.

We also knew the game might be too large for students to play in one sitting, so we built in the function for you to continue your progress where you left off last time. Your progress is stored only locally on your computer using browser storage and  without any identifying data, for privacy reasons. The browser remembers what your audio options are, which hotspots you've been to, and what you scored for each one, and restores these if you choose "Continue" in the opening screen.

To implement the quizzes we used the free Open Source H5P package that lets you create scored quizzes in your own Wordpress installation. We set up a Wordpress for this specific purpose, and customised it so that it would send scoring from each quiz back to the main game using browser "postMessage"s.

Please note: currently the game scoring and quiz features are not fully complete, but will be added to the final game by the end of April 2025.

Development credits:

Thanks to everyone who worked on this massive project. In terms of responsibilities:

• Emily as the creative lead and writer of the whole production, with lots of help from Kyla!
• Emma & Steve for their video production and animations
• James in the producer role – keeping us on track in relation to the planning, script development and ensuring visuals where they needed to be
• Adam for illustrations
• Howard for web design / programming

Acting credits:

• Kyla – Kyla Donnelly
• Tyler – Tyler Austin
• Lecturer – Katrina Beckford
• Law Graduate Mentor – Rory Hobson
• Academic advisor – Angus Watson

Voiceover credits:

• Comic strip helper – Angelo Weekes
• Academic 1 – Alex Giles
• Academic 2 – Snigdha Nag
• Olivia Fox
• Mat Sayer
• Victoria Brew-Riverson
• Romilly Edge
• Kathryn Drumm
• Emma Guilbert

Would you like to help us grow this resource?

We’re hoping this will become a resource that law schools all over the UK can help develop. So if you’d like to write a guide for the Extras section or maybe put together a quiz get in touch with Emily - she’ll be delighted to hear from you.

We also want to make the source code to the game freely available and usable for your own purposes. You can find out more by emailing Howard at sequential@sqtl.co.uk.