Week 11: Making videos

To educate students in the University of Hawaii about energy conservation we're creating a competition to encourage lower usage of electricity..

For the past two weeks my teammates and I have been working on video production for the Kukui Cup Energy Dorm Competition. Since we decided to work on a video about Energy Pong, a game designed to increase energy literacy and for fun, we needed to focus on the screenplay first. Here. This screenplay has since been refined from the one I drew up from week 9. John Mack has included a lot of details about how exactly the video proceed. Through discussions we agreed upon the time allotments for each segment and what goes into the explanations of Energy Pong.

A lot of what I learned through researching on this is about how to make a better video. Yes, watching videos on youtube is research. Putting a lot of attention on the subtleties in transitions and other techniques used in other videos is important. That makes it more pleasurable and rich to watch. Although I am currently in an software engineering project, I think the attention paid to the quality of this work is just as crucial.

Now that the milestone is coming up sooner than we'd like, shooting the video needs to be our main priority. As we polish the screenplay further, I think we'll definitely have to plan out the shoot and add that into our documentation as well. With the milestone coming up, we can't wait any longer. That is one of the challenges we face as a team. I don't have that much experience with shooting videos, but I think have good instincts about placing good shots and angles to produce good videos. We just need to give this some more thought.

Week 9: Content Development

To educate students in the University of Hawaii about energy conservation we're creating a competition to encourage lower usage of electricity..

In our project milestone last week in ICS 414, we finished up and packaged our deliverables to show what we had accomplished. We were also split into different groups to work toward new things. I am currently in the content development group. We create videos or any type of content that will inform the students of the Kukui Cup Dorm Room Competition how to play, activities, and possibly information on energy literacy.

This week we decided on starting on the idea of making a video for the game Energy Pong. Jack Mack my teammate had come up with this idea which is a more acceptable version of Beer Pong. Energy Pong Wiki I have created the wiki for the video. It's not much now, but I have laid out the specifics of the video we want to make.

As we started on content development, I had to think about what exactly we would need. Professor Johnson provided some good wikis for us that gave us an idea of what a screenplay was and how the video process looks like. I followed that process. I hadn't thought about before but video making and screenplay writing does require a linear process. I wrote up the screenplay and had to learn how to detail segment by segment on what the person sees. I described each segment and what it is about.

On my research with videos I came across an original video about Beer Pong. It was interesting and gave me some ideas for the requirements. I don't know why it didn't occur to us, but we do need an extra cup for rinsing the ping pong ball when it falls to the ground! Gross.. For those who don't know what Beer Pong is, google it. The rinse cup idea is very logical and of course makes sense now that we know it.

I think I'll need to learn a lot more about video making. I don't have that much experience with it. So I'll research into that next.

Week 8: Our deliverable product is here.

To educate students in the University of Hawaii about energy conservation we're creating a competition to encourage lower usage of electricity..

As our design group continues to create mockups, we're also refining the ones we created to fit one look. Our second milestone is approaching as well, so we're making changes in order to create a packaged product that can show what we have done these past 8 weeks. Although all our timeline mockups may not be done we have made three distinct timeline mockups to show how the Kukui cup dorm energy competition will proceed.

During our discussion about uniformity, we discovered that there was a login in the mockups for 9/6/10. It was an error we didn't discover until now. Since the competition shouldn't ideally start until 10/4/10, we plan to make changes to that and other things to work toward the "one look."
Things I've changed in order to do that include:

• changing the url ihe mockup to match the navigation
• updating details to the 10/4/10 mockups that I had previously made for 10/11/10

At this point, the project has grown and it's quite impossible to upload every picture for our mockups, or even my own. Take a look at them in our project site.

This link will show you how our milestone process has been.

http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/wiki/mockupMilestone2

This link is for my own wiki page for my part in the design process. I am responsible for the energy data that a user sees in the dorm energy site. Since our material in the milestone2 wiki is quite a lot, I transfered all my information into another page to explain my progress there. I also left a link in the milestone2 wiki explaining that.

http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/wiki/DataPresentation

Week 7: Mockup complexity

To educate students in the University of Hawaii about energy conservation we're creating a competition to encourage lower usage of electricity..

Making mockups getting more and more complicated. As our group continues to map out the design of the Kukui cup competition site, I'm creating more and more mockups to kind of string together a story of how this site will work. My part in this is the energy data page. The technical stuff is really what's taking up so much time. I'm creating mockups to show exactly how the selections and also how clicking on an image will enlarge it. That's why Balsamiq the mockup software tool is really becoming a bothersome program. It's not good for large projects. If there's any way to manage all these mockups that would be great, but there isn't.

On the other hand, I finished creating a third timeline for the competition. This set of mockups is what the site will look like at October 11, 2010. Since this is the second week into the competition there's a lot more data and also more functionality I can show off. That's why there is so much trouble in managing the mockups. I'm having trouble updating the mockups everytime I get a new idea.

Right now, our group has created yet another set of mockups for this particular time. It might be necessary to create all the mockups and wrapup this part of our project. Milestone 2 is fast approaching it's end. It's something to discuss with the mates.

As always, I added images of the mockups into our wiki pages on the project site. This too is becoming a large collection of material. It'll be necessary to start partitioning off our mockups just to keep things. The wiki itself is quite large.

That will be my goal for this week along with the ongoing process of making mockups. I'm going to start organizing the mockups so that we know who's mockup are who's. The number of mockup pages are growing very fast.

http://code.google.com/p/uh-dorm-energy-competition/wiki/mockupMilestone2?ts=1267510898&updated=mockupMilestone2#energy_data_10-11-10