Friday, July 29

 

Last day in Eastgate Systems

This was my last day with Eastgate Systems. It was a great experience working with these tutorials both because I gained a lot of experience and because I now feel more confident about the future. Before coming to Eastgate I was confused about my education so far. I knew that I like working with children but what I really enjoy is building learning materials using technology. I was not sure if I had chosen the right path and I was thinking that I might be better off choosing a computer science degree rather than an educational science degree from the very beginning.

However, working with Eastgate these two months, I realized that what set me apart of all the other expert users of software such as iMovie and Final Cut Pro was my educational background. Furthermore, what I was really enjoying, it was not merely the use of the software that demands some technical knowledge but the actual process of building learning tools for other people using the software.


Thursday, July 28

 

Starting the last movie

I started today the last movie, "Linking to external files", which we planned to finish before I leave. It's a small movie and thus I hope that I should be able to finish it tomorrow.

Wednesday, July 27

 

Finishing the demo

Building a demo was a good experience. It was definitely easier than building a tutorial. Firstly, the main purposes of a tutorial and that of a demo are totally different. Although you can not put a clear line between a demo and a tutorial, a very rough distinction according to my view would be that a tutorial should teach people and thus should be built according to educational and psychological theories and principles, while a demo aims to inform users of what is new and persuade them into trying it.

While building this demo I did not bother highlighting the important concepts or details that users should notice. I did not aim to make users learn how to build a blog with Tinderbox. I simply showed the process very quickly, even skipping many of its steps. The narration was focused mainly on highlighting the advantages and the new features that Flint offers to Tinderbox users.

However, building a demo was not as easy as it seemed. In our case, it was a little tricky since the product that we wanted to show was not completely finished yet, and we used a pre-release version for the demo. Some features were not functioning properly or sometimes they were not functioning at all. I can now see that a tutorial for this product was impossible. However, a demo was feasible even with these obstacles.


Monday, July 25

 

Bulding a demo

The plans have changed a little. Eastgate is making a new product that they wish to attach to Tinderbox. The new product is called "Flint" and it is a weblog builder for Tinderbox. Since the product will be new they thought that a demo would be helpful in informing Tinderbox users about it. Thus, we decided to postpone the last of the four scripts that we had chosen for the two remaining weeks and to make the demo of Flint instead. I thought that this was a good opportunity to create something different from what I was doing until now and to see the differences between building a demo and building a tutorial.

This time Elin wrote the script of the demo since I was still working on the seventh movie. She showed me how Flint works, we recorded the voice-over and I started building the demo.


Friday, July 22

 

The power of editing

This movie was surprisingly finished very quickly. Everything was falling into place. I was really surprised that in only one and a half day the movie was finished.

While making all these movies I felt the magic and the importance of editing. You can completely change what you have recorded. You can change the order and the pace, delete unwanted noise and create a perfect world. It's really fascinating. Initially I would try to get the video and voice to match by repeating the captures over and over. Over time, I have changed my strategy to capturing the video and audio just once or twice, and then perform lots of editing to achieve the same result. Editing saves one lots of time since it is almost impossible to get something perfectly right altogether. After all, this is exactly what the purpose of editing is.


Wednesday, July 20

 

Finish the 6th movie

I finished the sixth movie, “Adornments”, and wrote and recorded the next two scripts.

Monday, July 18

 

Selecting and droping scripts

Elin would take some days off, so we decided to write down three or four voice-overs and to record them before she would leave. Thus, I would have the voice-over and I would be able to work on the next movies.

There are only two weeks until my internship in Eastgate finishes and we decided to choose what movies are more urgent to do before I leave. We chose four movies: “Adornments”, “Making a link”, “Linking to external files” and “Linking to URLs”. So far the average work is three movies in two weeks but I think we can try for the fourth one too. Thus, I spent the day writing the two first voice-overs.


Friday, July 15

 

Finishing the 5th movie

Finished and revised the 5th movie.

Wednesday, July 13

 

Conference:Mac World

Today, Elin and I visited the Mac World conference in Boston. I noticed that there were not many women visiting the conference, but surprisingly there were many products targeting women such as beautiful bags in different colors and sizes with a case for a portable music player or fancy cases for laptops. However, I still did not see any product directly aiming women as buyers in software or hardware. They were just creating feminine outlook in their products but nothing else. And it is worth thinking that indeed the market in this area would benefit more with women rather than men. Men would not be as much interested in buying fancy cases in different colors for their products. A black leather case is enough for them.

In addition to the above I would like to add this little story: Elin and I were heading toward the conference entrance. In front of us were around 12 men. They passed and no one told them anything. Then was our turn, but the woman in the entrance stopped us and asked us: "Can I help you please?" Maybe she thought that we lost our way to the stores inside Prudential. We replied that we wanted to visit the Mac World conference and then she just replied: "Ah! Ok, I am sorry."


Tuesday, July 12

 

3rd Meeting with advisor

3rd meeting with my academic advisor.

Monday, July 11

 

5th movie

We recorded the voice-over for the fifth movie and I began making the movie. The process was now well-known and more efficient:

- Record the voice-over
- Capture the necessary screen shots
- Insert in iMovie and make a draft movie by putting everything into place
- Revise the movie until the result is satisfactory.

However, the whole process of making a movie is very time consuming, and demands much patience. No matter how expert you are, some time is always required to finish a movie to a satisfactory degree.


Friday, July 8

 

Seeing the forest instead of the tree

I spent the day writing and revising the scripts and the voice-overs as well as revising all the movies we have finished until now. Watching them after almost one month I was more objective in criticizing them and I began seeing the big picture of the project. Now everything falls into place and the idea of an interface in Macromedia Flash seems more meaningful.

Thursday, July 7

 

Movies or images

When I exported the last movie, I was surprised from its size, which was relatively much bigger than that of the previous ones. However, this time I had avoided using any still images and I used only video clips. This resulted to a much better movie quality, but also to bigger movie size, something that we have been trying to avoid so far. I started wondering what one should do, choose good movie quality or prefer the small size of the final movie. There must be a line between these two, but where should one put the line? It probably depends on your goal. I thought that the most optimal would be good quality since the movie size was not too big. However, in our case we wanted both good quality and the smallest possible file size. Thus, the decision is again to the designer and what he/she thinks is more optimal each time, depending on the specific movie.

I can now understand what I had once read in an article, where the author was observing that most people today think of movies as the best medium in educational software. However, the author continues by saying that the space a movie takes can be used more effectively with other means of learning such as text. A picture is a thousand words but as he observes, in the new information society a picture takes up much more space than a thousand words do. The bottom line in my opinion is, before you use a movie or a picture or a text, think what is more suitable and better in your case and choose the more optimal one.


Wednesday, July 6

 

Revising movies

I spent most of my time revising the movie. The amazing thing with editing movies is that as soon as you think that you have finished and that they are perfect, the next time you see them they are completely much farther from what you consider perfect. You can find many things that you don't like. The voice-over is not synchronized well, or there is noise that interferes with the audio, or a video clip is not long enough. However, the trickiest part is the transitions. Personally I was never satisfied with them. They were either too slow or not smooth enough. The more I worked with them the more confused I was getting.

Tuesday, July 5

 

4th movie

We eventually decided to integrate in the tutorials some existing Tinderbox documents in order to show the capabilities of Tinderbox. This was a good solution that satisfied most of the expectations about these tutorials. Thus, I moved on to the next movie.

In this movie I had to use many still screenshots of the different views. However, the compression we chose to export our movies was good for video clips but not for still screen shots. In the previous three tutorials we used more video clips than still images. Thus, the problem was not so obvious. However, this time the low quality of the images created confusion around what we were trying to show.

To solve this problem, instead of using still images, we captured the screenshots as video clips. However, this was a little more time-consuming because still images are manipulated more easily in iMovie than video clips.


Wednesday, June 29

 

Separating the second movie into two parts

Watching the second movie again today, I realized how big and confusing it was. It was a three-minute movie but it introduced so many new concepts and features. We would definitely have to break it down. I watched the movie over and over and I figured out that the best point to break it down was after the narration about the container notes. After all, the part about extracting a note from a container was mostly about how to arrange notes into the outline view and not how to make a container note.

I did not have a script ready for the second part of the movie. I had the middle part but I was missing its beginning and its end. I therefore wrote the voiceover and figured out what to say at the beginning and at the end. Elin insisted that it was not so important, especially the end, because later we would probably change them depending on the order of the movies in the Flash interface. She was probably right, so I wrote a very quick end to this movie. I did the same with the first part of the movie. I left everything the same and just gave it a brief ending.

However, making this movie I realized one thing: How important it is to have a script before starting a movie, even though this script is probably going to change.


Tuesday, June 28

 

Finishing the second movie

I spent the whole day revising the second movie and improving it. I managed to finish it and I exported into QuickTime. However, this time the movie was approximately three minutes long and I was not sure if we were going to leave it like this or break it down into smaller clips.

Monday, June 27

 

Voice over for the second movie

I wrote down and recorded the voice-over after Elin revised it. The fact that Elin changed a lit of bit the order of the movie and added some extra things forced me to start taking new screen captures again and importing them in iMovie. Although I had to change almost the entire order of the captures and to add new ones, the revised movie took me less time to complete.

However, I decided to change my way of working for the third time. The first time, I first created the movie and then recorded and added the voice-over. Adjusting the voice-over on the movie was too difficult and time consuming. Thus, the next time I decided to create a very draft movie with extended screenshots at the beginning and at the end, something that would allow me to add the voice-over more quickly and easily. However, once again I had to change some of the captures since Elin would change them slightly while narrating. Even a small change in the voice-over such as reordering some parts of the script would result in time-consuming modifications to the movie. Thus, in the third movie, I will first record the voice-over and then capture the screenshots and compose the movie.


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