Author: Karen

 
Magic of film is a platform that enables users to generate their own movies. I was thinking about the visualization of a certain culture and help people to convey the features of their cultures. So that’s why I was thinking of using the landscape of the country and the picture of the user to represent the culture. I want to enhance the cross-culture communication part in my project and thus help people to convey their own culture and also gain a better understanding of other culture.
The music and the puppet show together with the audience’s voiceover created an unexpected outcome. It created a sense of humor that I wasn’t expecting. First, I thought that it might be the puppet or background music. However, after I have done some research, I figured that the according to the analysis data of Harvard Business School researchers, the percentages of the human brain receiving external information through five senses are 1% taste, 1.5% tactile, 3.5% olfactory, 11% auditory and 83% visual. I actually figured that visual is a great way of conveying the message. Thus, helping people to visualize and convey the features of their countries is the core of my project. Also, when I was conducting interviews, lots of people wanted to visualize the features of their own countries and make a movie. However, they don’t have the skill set that was needed to make a movie or they find it was too much trouble to do so. This project is an easier way for people to generate their own video project and share it with others. Especially for students and expats who felt forging in another country and wanted to adjust themselves into the new country and also introduce their original country to others.
When I was doing projects before, I never thought about project significance and also how people can share messages in both directions. I believe that not only should cultures be introduced to other regions; people should also learn how to start a culture exploration by themselves. This is a good way of keeping people learning and shift from passive intaking to active learning. Having people voluntary learn about another culture is crucial since it will certainly raise the joy of the process and help people to gain more.
Furthermore, this project is more subjective rather than objective. With the development of the internet, people can google all the information about a country with few seconds. However, I found that it’s also extremely important for people to get some objective information, like what do other people think of their own cultures. So that people can learn about a culture from more perspectives instead of merely data and other descriptions that can be found on the internet easily. This will leave a deeper impression on people and help people to be more empathy and also associate themselves to the culture that they want to know more about.
However, there’s something that I can defiantly improve. This time, I focused too much on the technology difficulties instead of the user experience. I had lots of difficulties in terms of OpenCV, mailing authentication, video export, image search API, playing the reference video when doing the voiceover etc. However, the buttons was over sensitive and I was not giving enough instruction to the users. Since this is something that I hope to live beyond capstone, I will sure polish the user experience afterwards.
Next time, if I am doing another project, I would be thinking more about the user experience and find some solution to optimize the code and provide a better user experience.