Lara’s project experience
My role on this client project was Project Manager. My duties were two-fold internally, I was responsible for all the paper work (meeting minutes, creative brief, functional specs, AI documents etc.), time lines and communication within the group. Externally I was the liaison between the client and the group. The latter job included the similar type of work as the former. I thought last term’s client project was a pleasure, the client was pleasant, kept in touch frequently, had few changes, and our group worked well with little friction to deadline. This term’s experience matched last term’s with regard to client relation and exceeded it in relation to working with Adrianna and Anne. Both ladies are creative, congenial and professional. Though my adult career has been filled with both positive and negative group/team experience I can honestly say that working with Adrianna and Anne has set a bar for the types of group experiences I hope to have in the future.
This isn’t to say there weren’t some administrative challenges aside from the need to get class assignments and our portfolios completed we experienced some minor bumps which acted as positive tools for learning and feedback. The one that stands out most for me occurred with regards to our initial concept presentation. Drawing on the familiar icon of the light bulb as a symbol for innovation we created our PowerPointpresentation from a template that utilized an incandescent bulb. After our presentation our client (the Ministry of Research and Innovation) pointed out that the government had just spent a lot of money on a campaign to eliminate environmentally unfriendly incandescent bulbs and the use of them in a presentation reflected a lack knowledge on our part about them. This for me made for an excellent lesson on the type of research that should be done in the future, even the most mundane image, one with a banal connotation could be taken wrongly resulting in an inadvertent controversy which could cost an account/client.
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Just when you think it’s over, they can’t write any more, I mosey on in here and write another blog. Verbose much? NO, I’m not! In fact I don’t want to do much writing here. There’s that saying “a picture speaks a thousand words” so I’m just going to let the pictures speak for themselves. I will however add one more sentence (other than this one). Talking about our project is very nice but you can’t begin to grasp what it looks like without seeing it in action. Since we can’t actually show you how our Innovation’s timeline will work I thought posting some images of the design work would be fun. And yeah that’s right, I lied, there are 3 sentences instead of the promised 1, oh well.
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Ahem… the title of the post in no way is against the boy group who are equally awesome. So I’m late to the blog posting party, but now that I’m here, I can put in my two cents on our group project. I think our group clicked from the get go and once we figured out our roles we were off to the races. Lara took the helm as the project manager and Adrianna and I decided to split the programming/ design duties. Both Adrianna and I had been project managers last semester so it was nice to work on something besides creative briefs and corresponding with clients.
I wasn’t really sure exactly what the technology could do, but once we had our trip to GestureTek I had a better idea of what we could do with their Wall FX. The demos that GestureTek had were pretty basic. Ok, very basic. They had the ability to use swfs with AS2 in Dazzler (the program that displays the effects), but they didn’t have way to use the program with AS3. Uh oh. But we only know how to use AS3. Never fear though, Dan was able to come up with some code to mimic the effects of tracking using blobs to initiate the hit points. From these blobs we were able to set up hit tests and add event listeners to different movie clips to trigger the various animations. It was around this point when we were both setting up the basic animations that we decided, based on Lina’s advice, to hand over the design reins to Adrianna. She did an AMAZING job and although I was a little down at first, I was blown away by the final product and am SO happy that we made that decision. Plus it gave me time to play around with the programming some more and not fret over my artwork. I can’t even begin to describe how much of a relief it was to be given those beautiful finished photoshop files and then just figure out how to apply movement to them.
One of the challenges that I encountered with programming was playing an animation that would continue even when the hit point was triggered again. Dan showed me how to set up a checker that would check to see whether the animation was already playing and then take the correct action based on that information. Another challenge was playing a series of frames along the timeline that would smoothly peter out. I found that I could get the frames to play and stop, but they would stop quite abrubtly once the hit point was no longer recognized. Again, Dan came to the rescue and figured out a way to make the animation skip frames to make it appear as if it were moving slower and thus the movement ending wouldn’t be as jarring. Overall, the programming wasn’t incredibly challenging since we aren’t the strongest coders in the class, but I think the final product definitely makes an impact. Also, the client LOVED it, so it just goes to show that superstar coders or not, the girl group can deliver the goods in the end.
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Design is not easy.
Both Anne and I struggled with coming up with really neat and beautiful designs for this project. Early on our group decided (unanimously) that we would focus on making this project visually appealing. We aren’t Superman coders (at least I’m not, I’m starting to think Anne is the Clark Kent of coding) so we wanted the design to stand out more than the gesturing.
Call us selfish, we are both designers and we wanted it to look pretty!
But how do you make phosphates look good? You can’t even see phosphates without a microscope!
We began with the one royalty-free image we owned: the Niagara Suspension Bridge. Initially, our idea had been to import images into the Dazzler (the Gesture Tek application that lets you run their pre-designed gesture effects). So the bridge picture was imported in, we popped some clouds over it and added ripples to the water and that was it.
We knew it wasn’t an amazing design but we were satisfied. I don’t think Jenna was. And after speaking with Lina our fears were confirmed. Let me make this clear, she didn’t hate our design, I think she just wanted to see it spiced up a little more.
So Anne and I took a trip to our friendly neighbourhood library, stocked up on design magazines, figured out our key words (‘kitch-y’, ‘collage-y’, ‘grung-y’… all the good ‘y’ words) and took off for home to create our beautiful designs.
What we came back with was two different designs that didn’t seem to mesh well. Neither design was bad (they just didn’t go well together) so yet again we had given ourselves another challenge.
Did I mention I loved working in this group? Had this been another group we might have had design wars, or created a huge commotion throwing papers in the air, tackling each other to the ground, or refusing to continue the work.
None of this happened because we are all professional, self-assured women/designers. After some discussion, we chose one design and spiced up the other images so they all came out looking like they had the same flavour. The overall design is fun, light-hearted, collage-y, kitch-y, with just a touch of grunge.
Like I said: Design is hard.
– Adrianna
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Out of all of the client projects Sheridan’s IMM class got, I feel ours ended up being the most fun. But lets start at the beginning….
I don’t want to speak for anyone in my group but I am by no means a great coder. I can make things move, I can make things tween, but I am not great at complex coding. That being said, when I found out that I was in a group where none of us had much experience coding (i.e. many of the other groups had individuals who had been coding for many years) I was a little worried. And knowing that I was getting into a group where both Anne and I wanted to do the design, I was a little more worried. How would we split the work? Would we step on anyone’s toes?
I was worried for absolutely no reason (thank goodness!).
Our group meshed so well. Right from the start we agreed to split the design and coding, leaving Project Management to Lara. This way everyone got the role they wanted. Perfect right? Well, yes and no.
After spending many days and holding lots of fun brainstorming sessions we came up with our concept: a time line of innovations born in Ontario. Would Jenna like it? Would she think it was lame? Did we even care? (I’m just kidding, of course we cared!) On a cold, cold day in February we set out downtown to meet with Jenna and sell her our concept. Thankfully, she bought it and we were off!
Many people say coming up with a concept is the most difficult part. I’d say that in this particular instance many people would be wrong. We had a great idea but bringing out the visual design of this concept was something we struggled with. That and the fact that many innovations, while very important and boy am I glad they were invented, are kind of boring (or at least very difficult to depict).
We also needed to take into consideration that Gesture Tek technology captures broad gestures. There is no such thing as being able to ‘click’ on a button. A great way to think of broad gestures is to think of your shadow puppets. The top part of your hand is what you’re looking at, but the rest of you arm is still there making a shadow. Well Gesture Tek’s Wall FX captures your whole arm, not just your hand, and it interprets that as a gesture. So if your elbow is moving, it’s also affecting what’s on the screen.
Taking these two challenges and trying to figure out a way of making them work, and work well was difficult. But we did it! Because we are fantastic.
– Adrianna
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