Assignment: Interactive Video project
Project name: Robota
Partners:Skye, Zane and Candy
Professor: Ann Chen
Date: 11/19/2018
Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~xg679/Commlab/videoproject/
Description:
For our video project, our group use stop motionto tell a story about a small robot. The story is about a robot who is charged (by users) has live at the beginning. It went exploring the world for a while and met some other toys. It thought other toys should be alive as it so it tried to play with them. But it turned out that when its battery went out, it also returned to be a dull toy.
The original idea about the video as well as the website was to have a crank on the robot which the user should scroll to wind it up at the first place. As the crank being winded up, the video will be start playing and finished without other interruptions.
The mood of the story should be a little bit sad. With a robot narrative, the purpose of our project is to set people thinking about the meaning of life that human endow to robots, thus to reflect on the relationship between human and robots.
Process:
We first wrote down our main storyline and visualized it with story board.
(Storyline)
(Storyboard)
As our main character is a small robot, we ordered the robot model on Taobao. However, the delivery had some problems so we did not get the robot until Wednesday.
Since our original idea about the interaction is scrolling to wind up a crank, we 3D-printed a crank with online model. However, when we started to shooting ,we met several challenges.
First of all we found it really hard to attach the crank with the robot. Since we are doing stop motion, we need the crank to be stable but changeable on the robot. Considering tape will appear in the scene (which we did not want to see), we tried to dig a hole on the robot, however the robot is made of hard plastic so after several trails, we have to give up on the idea.
So to maintain our storyline instead using a crank to power the robot, we decided to use a charger and modified the story a little bit. So that when the users see the website, they will need to click on a blog to activate the video.
Also, we always could not get a 500mm camera lens for the first two days, but we finally managed to get one at last.
The whole shooting process took about 3 days, we used the Dragonframes to shot stop motions. During the process, we added some scenes while also deleted some in consideration of the practicality and consistency of the whole video. And here are some shots from the process:
After we finished shooting, me and candy added sound effect for the video while Zane added background music and worked on the website. The sound effect we used are most from iMove. We cut, reverse and modifies tones to create ideal effects.
Considering the time limit, the ultimate outcome for our project is quite simple. We only let the users to click the plug to start the video and watch it to the end.
Reflection:
All three of us have dedicatedly contributed to the project. I really enjoy the final outcome of the video. However, from self-refelciton as well as audiences’ feedback, we also have a lot to improve:
Because of all kinds of issues as mentioned before, we started our shooting really late, which is main the reason that we did not have enough time to implement more interaction. Also, because the quality of the video is compromised through WeChat and email, I had to send the audio to Zane for combination. However, through this process, the level of sound effect is not adjusted well, thus during the presentation, the sound effect was almost inaudible.
So for future improvement, I think we can add more interaction during the video, like scrolling for the robot to land on the ground and clicking to help the it climb up books. Also, we need to add more texts or scenes to make the story more explicit, since people get confused with the ending.