Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~sk7383/videoProject/coding/default.html
Partner: Ruby, Tenielle
Instructor: Moon
Project Idea
Our video project tells the story of two boxes choosing the date for their anniversary. Starting from a scene of calendar, the user will go through different ideas raised by Mr. Box and Mrs. Box. Finally, the user will make the choice for Mr. Box and Mrs. Box for their date.
We choose to make a silent film style video since the box can’t talk. But the audience can still get the idea of what is going on for different scenes and engage in it.
Process
In terms of teamwork, I shot the video and edited all of them. Ruby did the web coding. We three together discussed the project idea, developed the storyline and storyboard as well as collaborated with the video shooting.
Since I’m in charge of video shooting and editing, I’ll mainly talk about this part. We have 5 scenes to shoot – park, movie, game, family mart and commonlab and we also need to shoot the opening and transitions. At first I shot a demo for the park one but the light turned out to be too dark which affected the video quality so I shot it again in the daytime. We showed the rough cut of this scene and made adjustments based on the feedback we get from the recitation.
Many interesting ideas actually came out during the shooting process. Before that we only have a general idea of which place we might use and what kind of shot we might need. When we were actually shooting for the story we tried to make the most of the thing we have. For example, in the game scene the idea of using the model and the head model just came out when we saw them.
We also had lots of discussion about the facial expression of the boxes. At first we tried to draw it in ae but it would be too much work so we chose to use the a4 paper to draw the emoji and then stick it on the box.
In terms of editing, it took me some time to find the proper bgm. After finishing the collaging, I also added some animation using After Effects to make the video more vivid.
Reflection
We made several adjustments after the user testing. The feedback and advice we received are really useful. I added the ending video listing the staff and credits and also adjusted the volume and brightness for some scenes. And we also changed the background layout as well as adding more instructions to make it clearer for users to interact with. Besides, we change the cursor from having both the “pause” and “play” button to having only one function. (When the video is played, it will show the pause, vise versa.)
In terms of video shooting, maybe it’s better to use a tripod for some scenes. In terms of video editing, it may be more interesting if I have time to add more animation or effect. But in general, I’m satisfied with the final result we have.