Wow. Been months since I last posted. We are back in class now, and the name change from Interactive Media Design to Digital Interaction Design is imminent! Just had our first brief today with Ewan, and are to work in groups to research interface designs.

All the groups in IMD showed their group’s rough cuts. As I have not been the main one editing, as it is done on another’s MBP, this was pretty much the first time I saw the whole film all at once. After showing ours on screen, I felt that a lot of work could be done, such as cutting. Our first scene (waking up) was too long in my opinion, and really roughly edited. The colour correction needs to be sorted so that the light saturation is much lower, so that it does not look like a filter has been applied. Our film lacked in immediacy and interest; there was nothing drawing attention to the whole piece and keep the audience’s interest. There was also no sense of time in our sequence, so work must be done such as voice-overs to interlink the 3 different parts of the day. There was also one part of our film which the soundtrack jumped from one to another which clashed and didn’t sound good.

One particular documentary that stood out, I felt, was Findlay’s group. The raw audio and video at the start of their documentary was well shot and edited. It grabbed the audience’s attention right from the beginning and looked and sounded professional. The start just gave the audience an insight into the camera/sound and preparations, etc, before shooting a documentary.

After viewing other group’s documentarys I felt that there was quite a lot of work to be done. -goes off-

Today we filmed the last scene of our documentary. It consisted of Gordon playing on COD on the xbox 360 and getting bored. He was supposed to get a short video of the scene on screencapture for today for the virtual reality scene, so that we could match it up for the xbox 360 scene; however, he sourced it from a video on ign.com, so it has the site name in the video - if we do use this we will have to crop it proportionally, but that means part of the screen will be gone. A close-up shot of the stock cube was also done today.

All-in-all, it went quite smoothly. As for the COD video off ign.com, we will only be able to tell how that will come out when we edit it. A pointer in documentary making is that everyone in the team should be committed to the task and be organised.

Today we captured* footage into FCP on the G5 in IMD. At first it wouldn’t capture because of dropped frames so we tried capturing onto FCE and iMovie on a MBP, but to no avail. Panicking we googled for answers but they still didn’t really help - we had to turn to Ali. It seemed to be a setting problem in the conversion on the camera itself.

Lesson of the day: You will encounter many technical problems before and during post-production;- As said by Catriona.

When trying to edit, the footage kept needing to be rendered, even when initially placed onto the timeline. This has never happened before. Perhaps it’s because our clips are in HD format?

Lesson: Before using new technology or equipment, etc; try, test, practise first. Be prepared.

* Not sure why but we called this digitising in Media Studies last year; but now nobody seems to understand this term whenever I mention it. (Also, as opposed to ‘capture’ in FC, it was called ‘log’ in Avid Liquid 7).

Lesson: There can be more than one term to a particular process and we must quickly adapt and learn these terms to work efficiently.

In one IMD session we were put into groups of 3 and one person from each group called away. That person was to be the interviewee and among the 2 remaining, one was the interviewer and one the recorder. Our task was to try and ask the question to the interviewee, “What’s your most embarassing moment?” I saw both sides of the whole thing because I was the recorder.

Tips made for the interviewer:

Try to make the situation more relaxed and more like a normal conversation.

Don’t be too pushy.

Ask background questions first.

Ask some broad questions.

Don’t be intimidating with your pose and body language.

Always be friendly.

Treat it like an act, like being an actor, don’t be embarassed.

Don’t always start questions with “What?”

Try to follow up on questions.

Be flexible on questions.

Etc.

I knew most of these as I had made several documentaries before but I also learnt a few things in the session, for example, anecdotes make a documentary more interesting as it is usually detached from the usual questions and are usually found at the start and end of an interview.

Another session in IMD was with Ali on sound equipment and production. He talked about the importance of sound and which mics to use for different situations. One type of mic I didn’t know about were shotgun mics. It was interesting that you could very accurately pinpoint a direction to pick up sound from (although from the name “shotgun” I would’ve thought they weren’t that accurate over a range).

I suggested to our group to use tie-clip mics for our scenarios as they would work fine and because I have used them before. The producer said we should use a USB mic but I told him the sound wouldn’t be in sync. He ended up booking cameras without booking a mic. However, we were using the Sony Z1E so the sound should be reasonable.

Our group met during IMD and decided to come up with a group name. We wanted something that would put through to the audience what our production group was about. The best we came up with was “garc”, the first letters of our names… not very original.

The group was feeling slightly restless at this point, not really wanting to get on with work. Not much was done.

When we met up with Catriona we told her our ideas and what we were going to do.

We soon had to make an AV script, but it wasn’t made in enough detail.

My group briefly presented our film and what it would be on to all of IMD. Our theme, idea and concept was good. One thing we just failed in, was in regards to the details. This on top of other things would haunt us in the future.

I told my group we wouldn’t be able to finish filming everything in one day but they kept saying it could be. I knew it couldn’t because I previously had experience in filming.

When it came to filming the group finally realised it couldn’t be filmed in a day. The group was also unprepared not having taken out some tape beforehand and so we were forced to record over previous footage (which they said we would record again - of the IMD studio for an hour).

The filming done that day was mostly made up there and then because the AV script was not complete. The director didn’t direct, and the producer didn’t fully understand the conventional ways to filmmaking and so kept suggesting shots that didn’t make sense or work. Basically, we were unprepared but still went to film - a mistake.

We managed to get quite a lot of ideas down in our first meeting. Our group looked decided to look at the ways in which everyday products could be improved in the future in respects to how we interact with them.  I suggested we split the day into 3 parts: morning, afternoon, evening; and concentrate on what an IMD student does during those times. A brainstorming session commenced and some quirky ideas were put through. These included a fridge with a TV, mood sensors, etc. There was also the TV screen on the microwave.

We met up a week later and other ideas were put forward, such as glasses that you wear everyday that made mundane things we do everyday like walking home or the supermarket, etc, more interesting. I got this idea from a program I watched a few years back. It was a blend of virtual reality and reality, or more accurately, augmented reality - where maybe dragons could be flying in the sky to make life more interesting. It was decided something like this would be too hard to do; we would have to add special effects in post-production which we had no idea how to do, and it would take a lot of time (which we didn’t really have).

This one idea was then changed to gaming in a virtual environment. We got our idea slightly from The Matrix so it had some influence on our decision. Another idea was a mobile phone or alarm clock sprouting legs when you tried to switch it off or put it on snooze to make you wake up. We decided to just use stop-motion and not have the legs because it would take too long. Lastly, we had the idea of putting a stock cube into the microwave and it turning into a roast dinner, which we later changed to pies.

We also decided to make comparisons of an IMD student’s day without the ‘future interaction design’ involved compared to it being involved.

Our three scenarios throughout the day we decided would be in respective order:

IMD student keeps putting alarm on snooze and being late for class vs. alarm clock running away and student chasing after it.

IMD student playing COD and being bored vs. interacting with COD virtual environment through glasses.

IMD student waiting for dinner in microwave which takes a long time vs. putting a stock cube in and it is quick.

A video we had to make at the start of our course in IMD.

Another interesting day in IMD today; we briefly presented the concept of our documentaries to the class in the morning and worked on its development up until lunch. We got some filming done - just of IMD using the Sony Z1E mounted on a tripod looking over the room. We are applying a timelapse over it and using the footage as material with voice-overs at the end of our documentary.

After lunch we watched the documentary, “The Scots Who Made The Modern World”. It was interesting in the way that although it was a low-budget film, it still worked in the way that the attention of the audience was kept by using effective use of transitions.

Ever since I was young I had a passion for documentaries, especially ones about nature and wildlife. My enthusiasm in documentary and film grew when I took Media Studies as a subject last year. It taught me many skills in film making and changed my perception on films.

Although I haven’t watched that many documentaries since then, it has been a bit peculiar these past weeks as the amount of documentaries I have watched has exponentially increased. We watched “American Movie” and also “Helvetica” in our IMD classes recently - I really enjoyed Helvetica and own a copy on DVD myself from about a year ago. Helvetica showed me the importance of design and that it is everywhere and that many people do not realise its significance.

Adding to this, I also bought the “Objectified” DVD before it was even shown in the DCA (Dundee Contemporary Arts). It was very exciting! Although it focuses mostly on aspects in Product Design (which I have studied), it was still relevant to IMD.

To say the least, I have been surrounded by documentaries in the past while! I could go as far as saying it’s taken up part of my life, and it has.

My mmmmmmmac donalds is not as good as cassie’s. strangeeeeeeee. i like to eat apples occasionally. very mchly do i like apples. its like, over the TOP.

i also like to munch fish fingers. i like fish fingers on bread. with sauce. mmm.

do YOU like fish fingers as much as me? i realllly doubt it! rod pod.

lighting is fun to expose!!

EXPOSURE.

over exposure.

DO you like to CAPITALIZE everything? i use it for EMPHASIS!!!

we all like cake. do you like cake?

SPEICAL ME.