Description
For this project, we decided that we wanted to make an interactive comedic murder mystery. We thought that it would be an interesting take on a normal murder mysteries, by allowing the user to guess who the murderer was based on clues we gave them and also allowing them to view evidence which is talked about in the video. We thought to ourselves that our acting is not very good at all so we thought that it would definitely be better to make it a comedic murder mystery, in that way we could just have a lot of fun filming the scenes and just be goofy without worrying that our acting isn’t looking too good.
Process
Based off of our strengths we decided to separate the work for our project in three different ways; I and Grace performed and did the acting, I made the Nemesis letter as well using the Wacom tablet, while Selina worked on the video editing and Hanna did most of the coding. There was some crossover, of course, we all helped each other a bit but for the most part that was our division of labour. We started out by making the storyboard for the murder mystery, however, we found that we mostly just filmed according to whatever came to our minds rather than following that along. We had some trouble starting out using the camera and tripods as we could not figure how to attach the camera to the tripod, so we decided we would just hold the camera when filming instead. The lighting was also a bit of an issue when filming, as we filmed at the Academic Building and it was hard to find places that had good lighting for filming. We were then however able to fix the lighting for the most part through editing so that didn’t end up being that much of a problem. Another problem that we had was that when we filmed the videos we could only see the video we had just filmed on the little camera screen, because of this, many times the video looked good when we saw it on there but then when we would watch it on the computer we would notice it was actually blurry. This was quite annoying because we would then have to refilm the whole video which was hard due to our differing schedules which made it hard to film in the first place, so filming again a scene we had already made was quite annoying.
For the interactive part specifically, I made the letter which you see in the pop up which happens when the Nemesis is writing the love letter to my character David. In the beginning, we originally had a photograph of a handwritten letter we had made pop up, but after user testing and hearing back from our peers we decided that it would look better and that it would be cooler if we made the letter digital. Since I had used the Wacom tablet before I decided that I could make the digital version. The letter actually took me quite a while to complete especially the handwritten fancy “T” at the beginning because it was all drawn from scratch so it took me a couple tries to get it to look exactly the way I wanted it to. The handwriting part also took me several times because I was trying to figure out what kind of handwriting a deranged stalker would have so I tried several and finally decided on that one. Finally, to add a special touch, I went and erased all of the dots of the “i”s and made them into hearts to just add a little more to the craziness of my nemesis.
Conclusion
In the end, I had a lot of fun making this project. Me and my partners had really good communication with each other and we got along really well together so it was a really great experience coming up with the whole storyline and working on it together to make our finished product. If we would’ve had more time I think that it would’ve been nice to try and figure out how to use the tripod for filming because I think it would have made our final product just a little bit better. I think that if money wasn’t an issue I would like to have been able to buy some costumes for our different characters so that it would have been more obvious who was who in the film. Maybe a police outfit and a mustache for the police officer and some fake blood for the murder scene. Besides that, I’m overall really proud of the finished product. I think that we really succeed in our mission in making a funny interactive murder mystery!