Packaged Stories (Moving Images)

What we have done

This weeks focus has been on the book chapter and we have worked really hard to finish it. Even though we started with the text quite early on in the project we still felt that there wasn’t enough time left to finish the text. We managed to get it done however and handed in a version we were not totally happy with.

Then there was the proof-reading session which went really well for us. After that we had some more time to make changes in our text and hand in a new version of it. We took this opportunity to not only correct what had been pointed out at the proof-reading, but also to change the things we weren’t happy with. After all we handed in a, in our opinion, good text.

We knew pretty early on in the project what we wanted to call our solution, but this week we designed a logo for it. We also created some graphics for our text which hopefully will help explain some parts of it.

Packaged Stories logo

The rest of this week will be dedicated to the movie to really get the work going.

What we will do

Next week we will work a lot with the movie to have it done by the 12th of December. We have a lot to do with the green screen and putting it all together to a movie that is both informative and fun to watch. Hopefully there won’t be a problem to finish it in time since the text is done and it is just preparations for the presentation left. However, when working with movies things always tend to take more time than planned.

Challenges in the project

The challenge this week was definitely to finish the book chapter on time. The problem was not what to write but more how to write it. And also to be finished in time before the deadline and to keep within the limits of characters in the text.

Human Senses

What we have done:

We had quite many intense meetings to discuss the book chapter. There were some ideas about the contents and key points we would like to mention. This year’s theme is storytelling so we wanted to add a storytelling element into our book chapter and it was quite challenging to draw the red thread, and explain all our ideas within a story. We finally found a narrative that gives a glimpse into our future, rather than doing a commercial for our product, so we presented how people will use Scent-O in the future, and what its consequences could be. A short glossary for our concept was also created so that the audience could have better understanding when we mention new future technology. In addition, we did a little more research to clearly state the grounds needed to argue for our scenario.

We designed a logo and mock up for our product concept. As mentioned before in the mid-critique, we would love to explore more of the life style in the future when our concept is used than how awesome is our product is. Thus, we also discussed and presented the strengths and drawbacks of our concept in the chosen scenario.

Next step:

We also met this week to finally move on to the very last part, about how to present our concept. A video would be an obvious choice but we have to see what exact experience we would like to give the audience when showing our concept.

In the meeting we came up with the major outlines of our presentation and will continue with the production of it next week.

Challenges encountered:

Presenting smells and odors in a presentation. But we are getting there.

Attention Span

This week we made a lot of progress and worked on two different jobs:

Ulrika and Désirée were focussing on the chapter, since we started with it already last week, there were just some final adjustments to do.

Leonie has further been working on the interface of our Goldfish app. We have created “screenshots” for each functionality and step of the user flow. The look and feel of our app will be consistent with our corporate design and colours and promote our brand ambassador, the little goldfish.

We also took a meeting with our journalist student Teresa. She has produced great emotional video documentaries about the topic of the Finnish War children and we are thinking about ways on how to best incorporate her content into the app.

Finally, we started to set up a prezi and thought about a rough outline for the presentation. We have defined our mission and vision more clearly, in an easy way to understand.

Until next week, Anton will be in charge of the mock-up of the app. He will use the marvel application and integrate our screenshots. The result will be a “programmable” app which will display our functionalities and the user flow. We would like to make a short video about the user experience to explain the functionality better.

Next week, we will finalize the mock up of the app, film the user experience and finish the final presentation. We enjoy the group work a lot, especially how creative we can be. We are very motivated to find an interesting and attention-capturing way to present our solution to the audience on the 17th.

Point of View

What we have done

The last week we have continued working with our text for our book chapter. It required most of this week’s time to finished the chapter. This might be because we changed our idea back and forward or maybe because our solution is pretty heavy on the technical side and required a lot of research. Anyway, the book chapter is finished and we are all happy with it.

Sofia also attended the proof reading session. She felt like the session was a good idea but it would have been nice to have had two occasions instead of one. One occasion a bit earlier in the project were you would be able to give feedback on the idea and text, and another session a couple of week later were you only correct spelling.

We have also started on working on the storyline for the movie we are making for the presentation.

What we will do
We will continue to work on the storyline and creating of the movie. The upcoming week we will also prepare our presentation.

Challenges encountered

Nothing new here. We have our idea and keep on working on it. We also have a good working environment within the group were all of us are happy.

Changes in the project

None at this point.

Resources

We are currently looking at old FoM-presentation videos and other videos on the Internet to find inspiration for our movie. Here are some good ones:

Viktor’s movie about Media technology: https://vimeo.com/139554663

4 minutes in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcbXg1JBJ8M

Future of storytelling: https://vimeo.com/138986112

Virtual Reality

This week has been all about writing the book chapter. When the week started we had written most of the essential parts, but the chapter wasn’t complete yet. So we meet, like half a day, and finished everything. The day after that we all read it through and changed some parts that might have been unclear. It is always hard to know if someone else understands our text. We understands it because we all have been discussing it for some weeks now. No major things was changed during the last day except some rephrasing and spelling. During the last day before the deadline we also created some picture, such as the logotype for We Are News.

Johan attended to the proof reading and we got help with some spelling issues. The proof reading session was a good idea but we believe that it would be better if you had time to change more after the proof reading and that the proofreading was not only spelling and grammar correction but actual feedback about the understanding of the text, which we kind of doubted. The day after the proof reading we meet and solved the spelling errors and submitted the text.

There hasn't been any major changes to our concept and therefore nothing about it to mention here in the blog post. We have however started to look at different opportunities with the video for the final presentation. We believe that it will look silly if we are suppose to pretend to be actors in the video instead we are looking at different options. The video will be made next week, so we have scheduled a meeting on monday, to create some sort of script and storyline.

Question: What is the recommended length of the video?

The concept is finished so now it is all about finding a good way to present it in.

Computer Games

What we have done:
This week we have been finishing the text. There was still a lot of work that needed to be done on the text despite us finishing the draft last week. We reworked our formulations, added parts and took away some that were not necessary (to be able to get to less than 17000 characters). We added pictures to the text and added the proper references. We actually managed to do pretty well in our own grammar reading but there were 1 or 2 things that could be better formulated we discovered after the grammar meeting.

No response came from the mail we sent to Daniel from Gurugames but we managed to find other quotes from the market that were well suited for our topic.

We also decided that we want to "act out" part of our presentation. We did not feel a movie is very suitable to illustrate our concept.

What we will do:
Now it is time to devote our full attention to the presentation. We need to decide the structure of it and what we are going to do on it. So far we only decided we want to do a Powerpoint/Prezi and that we want to act out the story part of our game.

Eyewitness Storytelling

Hallå där!

As we mentioned last week we've been held up with the text (basically until today, thursday) since we've finalized the first draft, and after the proof-reading seminar corrected the few mistakes we had made. Thus, we haven't been able to start working with the presentation video yet (as had been planned), but we'll do so this afternoon and potentially tomorrow (friday).

We've decided the framework of our final presentation, and sent it in to the management group. The fields we're looking into are animated video and a simple powerpoint presentation. Hopefully, we'll be able to create an animated video of our future scenario + explaining Lit's function in this future society of about 5 minutes, and then having the remaining couple of minutes for explaining things in further detail using powerpoint.

We feel like this approach (using the majority of the presentation for video) is probably the best for several reasons. Mainly since it removes some potential of human error during the presentation, and thus givis us a better chance of sticking to the strict time-slot of maximum 10 minutes.

Now we have to get back to work!

SEEYA