This week is a hectic week spent mostly on the DIP project as Thursday is the DIP Product Launch! From Monday to Thursday, it was spent on getting ready for the Product Launch, then from Friday to Sunday, I went to Huang Shan to play.
On Monday, there is the weekly Design Fiction course. This week, the focus shifted from pictures or sketches, to more animations. The class started out with some simple sketching exercises on sketching out 1 or 2 images of “the future of the healthcare industry” or “the future form of communication” etc. After getting warmed up with sketching, the real assignment for the day was to create a short animation on the previous week’s “How to make a toast” series. Now the animation we create this week can be a form of stop motion, or having a main character move around using the special effects of premiere pro/after effects. We also need to include appropriate sound tracks as well as the right sound effects to make the animation more entertaining. Our group decided to go with a stop motion kind of video where we had to fill in more scenes to show the motion of our main character, Thomas the Toast! The entire process of drawing more sketches, importing into premiere pro, animating certain aspects of the video as well as matching unique sound tracks is a lot of work to be done within a day. However, when the video starts coming together, the satisfaction of watching our sketches come alive is really something and makes me quite proud of the end result. After showing our short animation to the teaching assistant, we could leave the class but I had DIP immediately after and so I rushed over to work together with my groupmates in this last stretch before the Product Launch!
For the next few days, I have been rushing the videos and presentation together with my team before the product launch on Thursday night! The plan was to have 3 short videos within the presentation, one to start off the presentation by giving the audience a rough idea of the main problem our product is targeting. After which, we follow up with a product showcase video where we film our product being used by different users giving the audience a rough idea of how the product is used and how it looks like in a proper setting. Lastly, we end it off with a video that gives a breakdown of the different components of that forms our product, covering a more technical aspect of the product itself. I was very impressed by the professionalism there was in taking these videos. My group had a strict requirement of having proper lighting, fixing the camera position for static shots with a tripod as well as having a proper backdrop for the shoot. It was almost as if we had created a remote professional photo booth for our product. Hence, a lot of time was spent making the videos but the result was worth the amount of effort we put in. Even up till the last minute before we got on the stage, we were still putting in effort to memorize the script, perfecting the PowerPoint slides and editing the videos. Through this project I have learnt many things from using Unity and Leap Motion, to making videos more professionally and getting to experience how much effort is needed to prepare a quality presentation. This was a valuable experience and I am glad to be able to work with my group here.
After the presentation on Thursday, we went to Huang Shan for a short trip! Although it rained for most of the time there and we got really wet and uncomfortable, being able to walk in the clouds was quite the experience and it is really cool how the view is so much different within the clouds compared to without. It felt like everything became much more mystical, although the trade off was that we couldn’t really see the view that would be there if it was sunny and not cloudy. It was an intense experience braving the rain but still a worthy experience nonetheless. All in all it was a great week and looking forward to working on the research project next week!
