Monthly Archives: November 2019

Week 11: Video Project Documentation —— Yunhao Ye (Edmund)

Concept —— Rationale and reasons that you have chosen this project

The word we got is “enhancement”, and we firstly discussed about which kinds of thing can be enhanced in our film. We first want to show the enhancement of a person’s ability, but we think it is too monotonous. Then we discussed about the enhancement of some artificial things. I think it is a nice try, but we cannot find a good insight and position when filming an object. Finally, we thought maybe concentrate on some imaginary and abstract concept. And then we got the topic “the enhancement of luck”. Even we want to describe abstract concept like luck, we decide to relate it to a specific, physical object. Then we choose the coin as the symbol of luck. We want to let the side of the coin decide people’s luck, for example, the head represents good luck while the tail represents bad luck. The name of our project is “Sudden Enhancement”, I do not think it is good and accurate title, but it at least fits our project since once the character pick up the coin, it luck has been changed suddenly.

Development process/ methodology —— What did you make, and how did you make it?

Generally, we have four parts of videos, the intro and the experience of three different people. We combine the videos we have taken together with some transition. Because the videos we shot for the first is not completely satisfactory, so we have to make a second try. And we change the color and the light in the editing process program to make those videos look like they are shot at the same place and the same time. We want to show the users the intro first, letting them know the story happens on the bridge. And then it will lead the users to a new page, expecting them to make the choice of coin’s side. And different choices will cause different sequences of the videos. Once the users make the choice, it will lead them to the major part of the project, showing the three main videos in a certain sequence.

Analysis of tools used —— Technical analysis, problems encountered, and how where they solved

I do most of the coding part of this project. The constraint of our interaction is the controller. In addition to the basic play/pause and stop button. I make a switch of light, you can change the background color to black by clicking it. And I think this can give users a better experience when watching the videos. I also make the volume controller with the mute button and the draggable block. The users can activate and cancel the mute mode, they can also drag the volume block to adjust the volume. Similarly, I also make a draggable block to adjust the current time. The block automatically move along with the current time of the video. Also, the users can drag it to control the progress of the video. The logic here is not very complicated, but it took me a lot of time to debug this part since it is very easy to ignore some details. 

I also make left and right arrow buttons after the videos end. Once the user click them, it will automatically lead the user to the next or the last videos. I use this by basic judgement statement and the  the recursion of a scroll function.

Critical Reflection —— What do you think about your finalized work? What things would you change now?

I think our videos are not so satisfactory, it does not emphasize luck well. And we also can focus more on the coin. Since we are not skilled at tracking shot, and there is kind of crowded, some details in our videos is hard to discover.

For the website, I can choose some better images if I have more time since the images I use now does not fit with each other and the videos. And I can also separate each video into different parts and put them into different blocks. If so, I think it can be much easier for the users to understand the plot. Moreover, I can make the value of volume and current time visible.