The Rez podcast and comic: Combining co-creation with high impact

The Rez is a sci-fi adventure drama, podcast-centric transmedia project for 7- to 11-year-olds.  Its goal is to make a dent in the adolescent mental health crisis (surging since 2011) by messaging, modelling and providing opportunities for young people to practice kindness and healthier ways of relating to and using media (particularly social media).

While co-creation and participation are often used to make deep impact on small cohorts, they are typically seen as obstacles to significant engagement and impact among large media audiences. Therefore, one of the research questions guiding the productions has been “on a project designed to be primarily public facing and to have significant impact on a large number, what are the best approaches to participation and co-creation?”

The creation process is centred on co-creation workshops and follow-up future-facing ideation focus groups (eight in total).

These workshops and focus groups have produced:

• Two seasons (25 total episodes) of podcasts (15-20 minutes each)
• Two comic books
• An extensive website with games, puzzles, activities, ways of interacting with the characters, and extensions of the story world
• Two  primary school lesson plans with Special Educational Needs adaptations  accredited by the UK’s Personal, Social, Health and Economic Association.

This practice-led project is based on pro-social, kindness-and-wellbeing, healthy media diet research done at the CRESS Lab (University of Sussex) and the Digital Wellness Lab (Boston Children’s Hospital).  The production is based at the University of Sussex and relies on strong set of academic, third sector and industry partners and collaborators, including:  University of Brighton, PSHE Association, 52 Lives / The School of Kindness, Hopscotch Consultancy, Make (Good) Trouble, Millipedia Ethical Digital, Periscope Design, Gen-Z Media, ACA Leicester, Theatre Workshop Brighton, The Anti-Bullying Alliance, The Multitrack Fellowship, Soaring Penguin Press, The Centre for Research on Kindness, and Sonica Studios.  Along with children and teachers, the project’s work has drawn in a range of influential people working in different industries and disciplines including audio professionals, actors, authors, comic book producers, and artists.

Since its launch in 2021, The Rez has made use of £215,000 in cash contributions, mostly from Arts Council England, but also from UKRI Higher Education Innovation Funding, AHRC Impact Acceleration Account and the School of Media, Arts & Humanities (at the University of Sussex), plus an additional £235,000 in in-kind contributions from its partners.

Hoping to continue the work further, The Rez currently has two live grant applications for subsequent iterations and research into parasocial relationships and AI among children.

What happened

The Rez is practice-led and not a typical research project, with the primary aim more focused on engagement, impact and change, with a secondary aim of learning through making and dissemination.  Many projects have specific target audiences that are smaller in size, but to achieve the aims of the project (to shift the needle on the adolescent mental health crisis), The Rez was ambitious in its scope and targeted international impact. A key focus of the project’s research questions was an exploration of the roleparticipation and co-creation can play in projects that are ambitious with scale and impact.

For this reason, the project team used mixed methods, running participatory creative workshops with children alongside qualitative interviews and quantitative surveys.

Each iteration of The Rez begins with co-creation workshops with young people in costal poor, economically challenged and/or ethnically diverse communities in England. 

The main focus (and appeal) of these workshops is to get kids making things and to boost their creative skills, largely around comic strip/book writing and drawing.  Professional artists and writers do demonstrations, give some tips and guidance, and then go around the room supporting the kids as they create.  Warm-up activities included groups drawing the silhouette of one of their peers who is lying down on a big rolled-out piece of wallpaper, then everyone adding funny superhero-esque characteristics to the silhouette.

The facilitation team introduce The Rez story world and prompt the participants to imagine characters and events.

In addition, they discuss, in safeguarded ways with psychologists or educational experts, their main concerns of the moment (for example, transitioning to secondary school, dealing with bullying, academic stress, worrying about missing friends during a pandemic, the climate crisis, etc.)

Workshop findings are brought into the writers’ room sessions for The Rez, where a team of professional writers used them, along with summary findings from the project’s research partners in psychology, social work and education, to construct a coherent narrative across a podcast season and for a comic.  Scripts were then written for the podcast series while the comic book was created in parallel.  The podcast episodes were professionally recorded, produced, edited and distributed, and then promoted on partners’ networks and also via bespoke social media and legacy media campaigns.

Some children from the workshops have been keen to participate in the production process. Some have taken part as voice actors in “Pastlings” characters – as the series is set in the future, “Pastlings” are children from the 2020s who offer advice to the two main characters. This advice is 100% generated from the children in response to prompts, such as “what advice would you give two of your friends who were arguing?”

Young producers from the Multitrack Fellowship were also trained in sound effects and contributed to the real sound design of the podcast, bringing with them fresh ideas and perspectives that made the series better and more resonant with the audio worlds of the key beneficiaries.

After the production of the audio and the comic, the project team deliver further workshops as a validation and feedback process, using more creative activities.  Alongside these, they facilitate surveys of children and teachers to find out if the end products resonate, and as the project has an explicit impact focus, how they are being used. Adaptations to existing iterations are made based on this evidence, as well as feeding directly into future grant applications.

Findings and new knowledge

An important, specific, finding from the workshops was that while some aspects of “funny” have remained constant (for example, fart joke and absurdly logical robots) other aspects might be evolving across generations.  Comedy about painful misfortune and casual humiliation seems to be on the wane.

The Rez online quantitative survey revealed that primary users of the comic showed the greatest gains in the kindness and confidence matrices, primary users of the website showed the greatest gains in the happiness metrics, and primary users of the podcast showed the greatest gains in the connection metrics.  Perhaps not surprisingly, people who reported using all of the components showed the greatest gains across the board (more than a third of total respondents).  Qualitatively, teachers noted after-the-fact participation in the story:  informal “Rez Clubs” formed on playgrounds in which children took on the roles of characters and extended the story.

The Rez template for efficient and effective production of (and outreach for) children’s wellbeing media projects which include co-creation will be out in 2025 in a peer-reviewed publication.

A brief summary of its 10 key points is offered here:

1. Integration (in all its forms) is the most important consideration. This means:
   1. using co-creation workshops to identify contemporary concerns;
   2. consistent messaging across various media components (the same story on different platforms) has the highest impact; and
   3. integrating real-life experiences into stories, even futuristic stories.
2. Production and outreach need to be incredibly niche and focused to maximize impact.
3. Podcast listening is extremely intimate; use this characteristic.
4. Use narrative characters already familiar to children and social situations and dynamics already present in their lives.
5. Schools are the route to consistent high engagement.
6. Use the language of direct address.
7. Clean, repeatable formats that can have long runs are the most effective.
8. Brand loyalty is very important in a sea of limitless media.
9. Social promotions should be minimal and “shop front”.
10. Advertising and commercial funding is unlikely to fully fund a children’s wellbeing media project.

Lessons

In answer to the research question – “on a project designed to be primarily public facing and to have significant impact on a large number, what are the best approaches to participation and co-creation?”- the team decided that, to give the project the best chance of widespread impact on mental health.  professionals needed to guide, reform and direct the children’s co-creation contribution in the final production.

When speaking to peers in the audio industry, the project team found that any involvement of children in production is considered high risk. Using more wholly and completely character and story ideas generated in the co-creation workshops produced derivative and disjointed scripts that did not test well. However, basing individual episodes around the in-the-moment real-world concerns of the workshop young people proved extremely fruitful.  Character and situation ideas were incorporated, but in a small-scale, mix-and-match way, by story professionals.

Key benefits of the participatory methods here were understanding and inhabiting the concerns of the children, and being able to incorporate those concerns into the narrative using their detailed and precise words.  That made the project resonate with children and produced an authentic representation of their concerns.

The project team felt that, given the scale of the problem at hand (a transnational adolescent mental health crisis), their combination of co-creation and professional input paid off. While co-creation workshops and focus groups have taken place in the UK, The Rez podcast has been widely listened to across the world (nearly 1 million downloads) and the lesson plans have been downloaded 8,500 times. Nearly 200 schools (from Canada to Singapore) have requested free copies of the comics to supplement their PSHE teaching.