App Progress

Today I have restarted developing the app, I will continue tomorrow. I have a period off  due to being overloaded with work from other subjects with other deadlines.

So far I haven't got a huge amount of work done on the app.  As we said in our presentation and on the blog before the app will work on a Point-of-View basis, I mean that you will be able to control a camera view around the desk looking at what you want to, but along the way you will see four videos.

I have been informed that I can use something called VCam which is a camera view, basically its a box, which is transparent and what ever you see within the centre of is in the 'cameras lens'.
Although I have found an up to date version and have put it in my app, I plan on doing some research on loading it dynamically, then being able to make it move around the screen depending on where the user tells it to go to. I hope on being able to allow the user to control the 'camera' by using their direction keys.

I have been messing around with the visual effects, layering, etc, which I can apply within flash to the paper and the video to make them blend and seem realistic. plus at the moment I have the VCam moving around the stage but via tweened effects instead of manual input.

Client meeting/Easter plans

Today was our last class/meeting before the two week Easter break and we received feedback from the client. He suggested we add to our holding screen by putting in more items (such as cups, phones, pens), to make it look cluttered and more interesting.

We've divided the holiday work up as follows:
Nick will create the titles for the Creative and Collaborative videos, continue to work on the holding screen.
Callie will create the titles for the Confident and Challenging videos, complete the final 3 animations.
Tom will work on the video editing and have them near finished.

Interviews

Me & Nick met up today to film some interviews. Nick managed to arrange for us to talk to a past student who now runs her own business and we got lucky in that a different integrated project class was taking place in 2303 so we asked if we could borrow some students to interview (which actually worked!).

We didn't manage to get any tutor interviews, as both John Hayes and Adam Shepherd declined but we plan to ask Danny Bacchus tomorrow.

Running behind schedule

We aimed to have all our footage done by this week but getting interviews is easier said than done, so we're just going to work with what we've got and get our interviews done over this coming week instead. We have 2 tutors and 3 students willing to be interviewed so far. Woohoo.

Nick's started on the introductory animation, Tom's cutting up the area footage for the beginning of the final videos and I'm going to get as much animation done as I can before our next class.

Filming update

We spent this week filming general area footage for the opening of our videos. We've decided to film whatever interview footage we can individually over the coming week so that in next weeks class we can bring all our footage together and pass it onto Tom to see what he wants to do with it.

Update to app background

So far we plan on having a plane wooden desk feel to the background, I'm probably going to use this as the image. (the image will be in landscape view)

We also plan on using pieces of paper as the background for the videos to make it look as if the video is being animated on the page/book. This is the page that we plan on using. 

The page will be on an angle making it look like the book was thrown down on the table uncarefully,  We intend on blending the image a little so the video won't stand out too much.

Before I took the picture of the piece of paper, I carefully scrumpled it to make it look fairly used but not too much.
Going back to the desk image I wanted it to look as if the shadows from the 'rooms' light was shining realistically upon it to seem believable and allow the user to temporarily discard their belief.