Overview of Project
Synopsis
What was our project?
Our project is an interactive video about a student named Joe. Here the viewer follows him around as he lives one of his normal days. This includes options such as waking up; making breakfast and going to university, as these are daily activities that a normal student does. Along the adventure, the viewer has options to break away from the classical normal life of a student, such as leaving university early. However, as the story progresses it slowly transitions from a ‘day in the life’ to more of a story driven adventure, which will be the crucial link for other interactive videos that we have planned for the future, tying all of them together into one big finale episode.
What we liked
What went well about the project?
When the project was completed, we liked how smooth each video transitioned into the next. This was a big concern for us when discussing if we wanted to do an interactive video, because if this was not done correctly, the flow of the entire story would be ruined. Therefore, to counteract this, we made sure that each sound, whether it was a piece of dialogue, a sound of an object moving or background music, it would be synced well enough with the last video. This was achieved by compiling all of the videos together into one big edit, then slowly breaking them down into smaller videos which would later on be uploaded to YouTube.
Another aspect of the project we enjoyed was the challenge it presented due to the complex nature of ‘choose your own adventure’ videos. It took us a few days of brainstorming to really get our collective heads around the idea, but eventually found a way in and formed an idea around it. Trying to think of all the different storylines that we could explore was a fun experiment in seeing how far we could take these abstract ideas and fleshing them out into actual narratives.
What we could improve?
Where we went wrong and how we would do it differently if we could do it again?
There are many ways that we could have improved on this project, one of them being with organisation. One of these was utilisation of other pieces of equipment. The original plan for our project was a mixture of third person and first person, switching between a camera such as the BlackMagic Ursa Mini or Sony FS7, and a GoPro. However, due to complications of equipment availability, we were unable to achieve this goal. Another piece of equipment we were unable to fully utilise was the Insta360 Pro 2 camera. This is unfortunate because we feel this would have been excellent for micro content, especially for behind the scenes footage of us setting up the cameras at certain locations, or see what each crew member was doing when a certain scene was shot. Another way we could have improved is communication. This was a big issue one the first day of recording. Even though we all had the same idea of how the story would flow, we were not on the same page when it came to how each shot would look, as we all envisioned each scene looking very differently. This set us back quite a bit, however quickly made us realise that we would need to create a shot list, making each day of filming smoother and allow us all to agree on the shots that we wanted to achieve.
The flow chart of the script
Time Management
This is the Gantt chart that we created when starting the project, outlining how much time we gave ourselves to complete each individual task. In the early stages of the project, we were quite consistent, as we had already created a script, contacted actors and scouted locations which we assumed could have been used for filler shots also. However, after these tasks, time management broke down drastically. The actors that we had previously contacted, except for our main actor, were now all unavailable for the times and dates we wanted to film. This set us back majorly, meaning we had to go back to the planning phase of the project, losing us valuable time for filming. The next issue we encountered was filming itself, as we left this too late. This unfortunately led to poor quality videos and sound, meaning reshoots had to be done in an attempt to fix these. Some of these issues couldn’t be resolved in time, leading to lower quality content being released to the public. This poor time management also led to us heavily editing the script, forcing us to leave out many different endings that we had planned originally.
Gantt Chart
