Friday 13 December 2019

Mission 3 Reflection

I can say I am quite happy with the overall video and outcome after watching it in class. I am glad at what we accomplished as a team and that we were able to work together quite well.

One of my favorite parts in the video is the intro and I'm pleased with how it turned out. I was inspired by the marvel intro's to their movies and thought it would be a good way to start the video presentation. The music I found in the background for the intro helped create the atmosphere too!

I felt the visuals i had generated where quite nice and looked good and was really happy and impressed by the work that Khang and Ron had with the research and video editing.

Although all was well in the end, there are still a few things that I felt would have made things easier or could be improved next time. One of the main things was that it took us a bit too long to actually get everything together and start the editing process. We ended up having to finish the video in one day which caused us some stress. One of the reasons why I believe it took so long was also because all three of us are from different groups and our timetables are different, this made it more difficult to actually meet up and discuss. We should have started on the video editing much sooner and that would have given us more time to process through it all.

I also feel that maybe we had concentrated too much on the video and its outcome too much, stressing about it when in fact the video was just the presentation part and not the actual mission part. It's something that I feel the majority of the whole class felt so its something to be aware of in the future for similar projects, to concentrate more on the content rather than the visual outcome to a certain degree.

When it comes to what my tasks where within the group I happy enough with generating the visuals and analyzing the text. Where I had struggled a bit was with the recording. I had first tried to record without and notes and just looking at the visual I had but gave up after re-recording a few times. I had then decided it would be much easier to make a script and read it rather than coming up with something on the spot. After writing up the script, I had to wait a few hours to borrow a friends microphone, which was a downside but I wanted to get a clearer sound recording for the video hence why I didn't record off my phone.

With the final outcome of the video I was happy with how it turned out overall. If I were to change some things, I would probably lower the background music as I felt it was a small bit too loud, but for the rest I was happy enough. I feel it was a good start and experience and from here we can continue to grow and produce even better videos for the future!

Friday 6 December 2019

Mission 3 Product

Our final product for mission 3 was a video around 5 minutes in length. In this video he had included an intro, research, the analytics we made and a small clip showing how we made the video presentation.

As our team was split into each doing different task it made it easier to gain all the information we needed for the video. I was in charge of analyzing the text and getting visuals. Khang was in charge of research on text analysis and Ron was in charge of the video editing process. We started the video with an intro which I created by screen recording the screen while scrolling through a digital book. It gave it a cool effect to start off the video.



From there the video moves on to the research. Once Khang had researched on Text Analysis he recorded his voice on his phone reading out what he had found out. He then proceeded to make a PowerPoint with some information and visuals there. He then screen recorded the PowerPoint being presented in real time with the recording he had of his voice to sync them together. He sent the final product to Ron, which was then added to the final video.

After the research came my part, the Analytics and visuals created. For my part in the mission I first started by copy and pasting the whole text from the eBooks into separate word documents for each book. I did that for 5 books. 3 from Philip Pullman, whom I have read before and 2 from Stieg Larsson, whom I haven't read before.Once I had all 5 word documents it was a matter of copy and pasting the text into Voyant Tools to generate visuals and analytics about each text. I saved these Visuals and also screen recorded the full process for one of the books which was then put in the video and sped up. For the voice recording I had written down what I was going to say and borrowed a microphone off a friend to record the audio. I sent everything to Ron and he got started on the video editing.


Once the video editing was finished we checked it a few times to edit any mistakes and submitted it on time.