Project Milestones

Creation of non-linear narrative
We had quite a few false starts during the initial brainstorming phase, creating storyboards and then scrapping them (Conceptualising Narrative Blog Entry). Our problem mainly stemmed from trying to create an interactive storyboard without first creating a model of non-linear narrative that accurately reflected the legend of the spectre. Therefore I think our the group first project milestone was creating our circular model of narrative.



Creation of interactive storyboard
Our next project milestone was developing our "murder mystery" interactive game idea and developing our interactive storyboard around this. Unfortunately I don't believe that our interactive storyboard worked as intended as we deviated from the circularity that we originally were focusing on in order to create a game that would work in a real world situation (the circular part f the game would men the player dies every time he/she plays). Nevertheless in terms of milestones in the development of this product this was very important.





(Conceptualising Narrative Blog Entry Part 2)


Paper Prototyping
(Paper Prototyping Blog Entry)
Paper Prototyping was the next major project milestone. This assured us that players understood our game, the majority understood the story and feedback in general seemed pretty good. It also pointed out some usability issue that were easy to implement in the final product.

Product Development
Our next milestone was establishing how would we develop the product, capture the action on digital video and work out who would do what. Using puppets and composting the background was a compromise on not being able to use stop motion animation because of the trouble sourcing props. This was a group decision but I was a little disappointed as I was very keen on trying out stop motion animation and spent a lot of time researching methods and downloading framegrabbers.
Developing the actual product with flash was a no brainer really, the other alternative was using html and javascript and this would have caused far more work and the end result would be no different at best.
Roles in the group established... but these were not strictly stuck too, with being such a small group we pretty much had to help each other out with everything. This did give a wide exposure to a lot of different areas of production though ad despite this mixing of roles it was useful to have leads on all major areas of production.

Film & Sound Editing
(Filming & Editing Strategy Blog Entry)
Filming the puppets in front of the green screen (green card) was relative straight fwd, not a huge amount of puppetering skill was needed, the only thing that caused a slight problem was keeping the puppets in the middle of the screen and making sure no hands were seen. Recording sound was very straightforward, we just used a dictophone accessory for an ipod. In hindsight though it would have been beneficial to use a better quality recording device as our sound quality in our final product was poor.
In terms of composting the background of the video's I was not sure how well the imovie plugin would work, but it was effective enough for our prototype, with just a small amount of distortion when the puppets move very quickly. We used audacity to balance out the sound levels of the dialogue and then inserted this into the main timeline in imovie.
We now had a set of video's all that was needed was the flash development.

Compression
Compression was completed in imovie. This was very successful in terms of size visual quality but we had some issues surrounding sound quality. Results can be seen here: Video Compression Blog Entry


Prototyped Developed - time to test
After flash development (Scripting Efficiency Blog Entry)we tested our prototype. This test highlighted some big flaws in our design and was generally not very well received (Technical Testing Blog Entry)

Reflection
For me one of the most the most important project milestones was reflecting back on the project and the product we made after the testing was done and I was writing up my reports. I think by deviating from our original intention of basing our product around our non-linear model of circularity, our product was ultimately a failure in the sense that it did not fit what the brief asked and also it did not do what we intended which was help the player learn about the the legend of the spectre.

Group Production Techniques

Although being a small group had its disadvantages in terms of work load, I think it also had its advantages when it came to organising the group. From the start of the brainstorming stage we worked together as a group and from this it was really a case of assigning roles, establishing tasks that needed to be completed at each stage and dividing the tasks accordingly. During the actual production phase these roles became slightly blurred but it essentially meant that each team member was responsible for a specific area of production whether they were working alone or with other members of the group.

We used our team blog to keep everyone up to date on what had been completed and what needed to be done. Our project manager used this to inform the team of times and locations to meet.

As we were all working with multiple video, sound and flash files so it was important that our naming convention for files was the same for the whole group. We incorporated a system where we saved each file in iterations; _1, _2 etc and put our initial at the end. This meant that we knew which was the latest version and who was responsible for it.
Asset Management Blog Entry

Software Inter-Relationships

Technically it has not been a particularly ambitious project partly as a result I think of the lack of technical know how on the team. Despite this the softwares used have done the job required and I found no major issues working between different softwares for this project. The major software packages used were imovie for video editing and compression, audacity for sound editing and photoshop and flash for creating the final product. We captured video on a panasonic mini DV and sound on a dictophone ipod accessory.
Particularly useful was imovie HD6 which although being a very lightweight video editing software, allowed us to do all the editing we required and its ability to accept plug-ins such as the composting one we used was very useful.

Flash's video import feature is very straight fwd and adjustable so importing video was hassle free. Lastly with flash and photoshop being part of the same CS3 package, integration between the two is pretty seamless. So all in all, pretty straight forward.

Debugging & Modification

As a result of the simple construction of our flash game (see earlier in blog for explanation), debugging has not been much of a problem. We did have one actionscript issue during our testing where the popup for the instructions wouldn't appear when called upon. I created this pop-up as a class in a separate as file and the code worked fine until i changed the popup movieclip with an updated one and it seemed to not recognise the new mc. Time was getting on and a simple fix for the prototype was to simply create the instructions as a separate swf that could be called upon with a button.

Product Testing

Our product test of our prototype product was reasonably successful. It highlighted some points where the narrative of our product could do with being improved upon. I felt that an issue of our testing was how the testers seemed to only want to point out technical issues. One tester in particular (a sound art student) was determined to point out that the sound quality needed to be improved. While being true, our compression had resulted in a poor quality sound and it was useful to find out that this did impact upon the usability for certain players, it was more useful for us to find out deficiencies in the interactivity and narrative of the game. This was not the testers fault, as they were not to know this but it may have been beneficial if we'd oulined this at the beginning of the test.

Scripting Efficiency & Product Optimisation

Although in terms of efficiency in both the running of the final product and the size of the final product, it would be far better to write it all in actionscript 3.0, due to time constraints and only being a small team I don't have time to play around with the new techniques that I would have to learn to complete this in the required time. Therefore I am creating quite a simple timeline based fla file in actionscript 2.0, and embedding the video in the slides that I have created in photoshop - see below for examples:




I have also created some movieclip animations to enhance the experience.
Despite this drawback in the efficiency of the product, the use of streaming video and the simple design is allowing for quite a lightweight yet smooth product.

Video Compression

Video Compression has been quite successful. I was not involved in the process my self but we have managed to get each of our 13 video clips down to between 1-5 megs each. An example of one of our clips is below:

Video/Sound Editing & Asset Management

After a lengthy lesson in imovie7's inability to handle plug-ins we imported our video into imovie HD. The green screen composting was quite successful and has apart from a few scenes where characters move quite rapidly the result has been quite distortion free.

As we are embedding the video clips separately into different parts of our fla file we felt it best to create 12 separate i movie docs. So we created these projects with the naming convention: spectre_character_scene number.

I have saved these files in our project folder in the server where Jenny is adding sound effects and syncing with the audio which funmi has edited over night. Funmi split our audio recordings into the same length scenes as the video to ease this process.

This division of labour seems to have worked out quite well in that it has been fairly even in terms of work load and we have all been exposed to the editing process.

Strategy for Digital Sound & Video editing

We decided to use puppets with a green screen background for the video aspects of the interactive game. The game will be structured like an interactive digital book wher you can see video clips on each page to learn new aspects of the story and help you on your quest to solve the mystery. These clips will only be around 30 sconds to a minute long each so hopefully this shouldn't cause too much of a problem in terms of storage.

We have decided to recored the audio and video seperately to allow us to give us more freedom in the post-production. I have decided to add the background with a composting plug-in for imovie - Stupendous Software
The Characters in our story are below:

Paper Prototyping & Production Planning

As a result of our initial paper prototyping tutorial with Mazy, it is back to the drawing board with the narrative structure of the game. We have decided to make our game slightly more self contained so we are designing like part1 in an expanding story designed to let the player learn about the legend of the spectre and solve the mystery and find out who is behind the murders in the village.

Ou papaer prototypeing was quite successful (see picture below). We got mainly positive feedback but also got some important points to enhance the usability for our players.

In terms of actual production planning, this is proving quite difficult as a result of us having a severely depleted group... we are all essentially doing everything. Though we have made a skeleton plan for the coming week (see below), this is fairly optimistic in terms of time but hopefully it will be ok.

18 - Friday - Usability testing with paper prototype (all), Start characters/set creation (gail/funmi).
19 - Saturday - Website (Dan), Stage (Gail/Funmi)
21 - Monday - Shooting. (all)
22 - Tuesday - Sound recording (Jenny?, Dan) and Video Editing (Dan/Gail),
22 - Wednesday - Compressing the final footage (Dan),
23 - Thursday - Finish the final product, Usability Testing (Tutorial with Mazy) (all)
24 - Friday - Planning presentation, Presentation Run through

We are on schedule, as of the 18th - usability testing with a paper prototype is done and have started on character creation. The next steps are mocking up the structure of the game in flash and mocking up sets for our "actors". I will also research whether it will be possible to use a green screen type of background for the filming and then insert a background digitally with i-movie or aftereffects. I hope this is possible and not too time consuming as this will help us out tremendously.

Oh and we have finalised the storyboard for interactive game, it is laid out below:

Conceptualising the narrative & Storyboarding Part 2

As a result of paper prototyping and after a discussion in the groups tutorial we realised that the very linear narrative style structure was essentially missing the point of interactivity in this particular product.

We were only including interactivity as a gimmick really and it was not actually adding anything to the story. We questioned why someone might want to take part in our story and that we had to give them motivation. We came upon the idea of a"murder mystery". You are a policeman sent to the village to solve a murder, you have to find out who killed your colleague and at the same time learn about th legend of the spectre. The main outline of our story, well the 1st iteration of our story is below. (Note if we were to develop this further we would far more branches to the story which would allow you to explore the legend further and get the most out of it but this skeleton structure should work for now.)



... but unsurprisingly this is liable to change. However in terms of style of narrative, I think this classic linear branching narrative suits what we are trying to achieve.

Conceptualising the Narrative & Storyboarding Part 1

Our initial task in the conception for the narrative behind our product was to take the set text - The Spectre of Erigle Truagh, write it out in text order and then understand what the story order behind the text is.

We then made flowcharts such as shown left, to illustrate differernt ways we could make this into an interactive story:

We played with different structures of narrative and agreed on a "network" style narrative, a big influence on my thinking behind this structure was The 7 Sons interactive documentary by Florian Thalhofer (7 Sons). I felt its structure would work well with our story, which would essentially be composed of three interlinked stories based around the three central characters and an interlinking common event. We were drawn back to thinking of the Spectre narrative as essentially looping - without a beginning and an end

We followed this by creating storyboards for the main characters:

Conceptualising the Product

Mobile or Web?
We decided to base the main function (the narrative) of our product on the web as opposed to mobile devices. We considered in what circumstances people would want to visit our site and take part in the story, and it would probably be that they are interested in taking part right there and then as opposed to downloading onto a phone and using on the go. However it would be good to bring a mobile aspect to the experience so this is something that I will keep in mind.

Type of filming to use
We have decided to use stop motion animation to capture the action, in particular I have been influenced by the stop motion films made for the Channel 4, nineties tv series - The Adam & Joe show:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xff1pSGGNqs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX9crnz6vQg&feature=related