Case Studies Frieda River Project
Background
Real Serious Games was engaged by PanAust to develop a series of stakeholder and community engagement videos for the Frieda River Project. The Frieda River Project is made up of several projects including:
- Sepik Infrastructure Project
- Frieda River Hydroelectric Project
- Frieda River Copper-Gold Project
- Sepik Power Grid Project
Scope
The initial objective for producing the videos was to communicate the state and layout of the mine site to PanAust’s commercial stakeholders. However, the scope was later broadened to focus on:
- Promoting awareness and understanding of the project and its impact on the local community and its surroundings.
- Facilitating relational, operational, and programmatic engagement with the project stakeholders.
- Demonstrating project’s measures and initiatives to support the environment and reduce environmental waste.
- Highlighting road, air and other transport development projects and show their value for the economic benefit of the region.
- Explaining the overall project and its ecosystem consisting various projects.
- The legacy of the project in relation to skills development and job creation.
- Translate sensitive and complex information to many and varied stakeholders with distinct levels of understanding while maintaining the integrity of confidential data.
- Communicating complex engineering practices to local stakeholders, in the local language.
Approach and Delivery
The Frieda River Project extends from the Port of Vanimo to the station town of Telefomin. Therefore, the project covers a large area in the least developed North-Western region of Papua New Guinea. Real Serious Games began by aggregating diverse spatial data inputs, optimising these, including non-optimised models, drawings, survey data and client interviews. The initial efforts ensured that the information represented the accurate state of each project. The initial videos focused on infrastructural and layout changes as they happened over time. The freshly optimised models were integrated into the videos acting as a support for the visual illustration of information.
The final video focused on including the many and varied stakeholders. A staged approach was considered best for story narration with the bird’s eye views explaining high level information and close ups adding more clarity through detailed 3D representation of planned infrastructure, operations and processes.
Flythroughs were supported by animated overlays as they were used to signal the involved paths, projects and locations as well as iterate their significance to one another. Whereas high detailed 3D illustrations were beneficial in communicating major developments on Seaport, Airports, Roads, Bridges, Mine Sites and other infrastructure. It was important to feature more detail as it helped to describe the respective roles of the individual projects in the Frieda River Project and how they would look in operation/completion stage but most importantly, outlined the value they were to add for boosting the economic growth of the region.
The final 20-min video was delivered in English, Mandarin and Tok Pisin, all maintaining a consistent flow in the story telling despite the language differences. The translation to Tok Pisin was the most challenging due to a lack of accredited translators. However, a timely delivery was ensured through consultation with the local stakeholders and an iterative review process.
The final video was segmented in episodes to better channel the message to different audience, and therefore achieved its objective of successfully connecting the message with many and various local and global stakeholders of the Frieda River Project.
Real Serious Games modelled a sizeable portion of Papua New Guinea to meet the visualisation demands of a project as substantial as Frieda River Project.
