Monday 21. 01. 08

I'm waiting for Shira's decision about in what application to build the product. Because of complexity and complicated way how it should work she is spending hours on the tech blogs to find out what and how to do. I have finished animation of the button-controller but except that I have nearly nothing to do.
I asked Michele to send me comments about how the design should be changed so I can do the final version for building.

Sunday 20. 01. 08

I have picked up everyone from Liverpool Street station. At the end the team decided to use my location which I thought would work the best. It took them a while... All managing of stuff we need to bring for shooting was managed by mail just in the morning. And we didn't have the policeman hat. I don't call it good project management...
Also battery run out - I would expect that this would be checked before shooting...
But the shooting went quite OK, I have managed to get policeman hat from Spitalfield market and after charging the battery we have finished the shooting quite quickly.
I would personally use another angle for shooting and I don't believe that after so short shooting all the possibilities were shut. There should be lots and lots of possibilities. I guess that because of the time for project there was made decision to keep it simple.

Saturday 19. 01. 08

Nothing happened. I didn't get any mail or info about what is going on. We suppose to do video shooting and obviously it's not going to happen. I'm worried we'll be behind the schedule.

Friday 18. 1. 08

I have started designing the interface of the product. I couldn't find an example of illustration or image of the the rotating handles on the internet! I'll need to simulate and improvise. I was choosing good colour scheme to express the story, also good font for the title.
Shira introduced me Adobe Director, the software we will use for building the product and I've never used. I'm very excited about the software, it seems to be very clever and useful.
I have found that Adobe's trial download is temporarily unavailable so I need to look for some crack I'm afraid. I need to go through tutorials before I start building the product.

Thursday 17. 1. 08

I have finished the prototype for our tutorial with Mazy. The prototype got lots of attention from our classmates and Mazy really likes the invention of using film sheets to animate the seen. While showing her how the prototype will be used I found some problematic issues. The tutorial was generally very positive, we need to be careful that we know what we are testing. She raised the question if we'll be able to create the feeling of moving time and not the characters by the scroll bars. This point is very difficult to solve on the paper prototype but I believe that this innovative prototype is the closest possible prototype which would express the idea of the project.
After the tutorial I did those changes to increase its usability:
1. I made handles for controlling the film sheets longer and thinner so they are not covering each other.
2. I draw different characters in different colours to help tested users to understand that they are different characters. (Two of the characters appear twice and all of them are just silhouettes.)
3. I have removed arrows from handles into the side (above and under) - I need to be careful when designing the digital prototype that those don't look clickable.
It was quite surprising to see how this paper prototype actually shows issues the design could suffer from and it's easy to change them just with erasing the pencil and draw-test new design. I didn't expect that it would be that helpful.

Wednesday 16. 1. 08

We were discussing the timeline and how to emphasize the ambiguity. Shira came with some good solutions for video, I have highlighted the zooming into the detail of facial expressions would be also good. Agreed.
I agreed that I'll do paper prototype. I decided to use one of the paper rolls Jophie used to help visualize storyboard and timelines. We'll use masking for video mixing in the real time and I believe it's crucial to get these into the paper prototype too. So I decided to use film sheets with handles on the side, one per each character and draw characters in the correct positions on each film (one character = one film). This gives us opportunity to animate characters during testing. The background - street - is drawn on the quarto paper.

Monday 14. 1. 08

I came up with one possible concept for the project but it's just rough and needs to be expanded. I came up with an idea of building the story by objects, no characters. Discussion was very helpful to find weak points of the idea and gave me new ideas how to expand it into more interesting project which includes more media.
Also Shira came up with very interesting idea for project. It's very interesting concept and it took quite a lot explaining to get what she is talking about. We all really like it but it needs lots of planning and I see too many questions about it's functionality and result that it needs really think through.