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