Ariana's Blog

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.

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.

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.

I decided to change some parts of the movie. This movie was about arranging notes in a hierarchy. Arranging notes in Tinderbox is a process very difficult to understand or discover. Personally, even though I discovered this in the huge manual, I did not manage to get it right from the beginning, since some parts of the process were very tricky. I needed Elin to show me and explain me those tricky parts of the process. I figured out that this should be difficult for other users as well, and I should therefore give more attention to it.

Initially I was simply describing the process showing the action on the screen at the same time. However, I thought that this process mostly involves psychomotor skills. It was a process that the users should learn and then automate such as what steps you should take to save a word processor document. Thus, it might be better if we broke that task into steps (a procedural analysis) and presented those steps clearly rather than simply describing the whole process. An example of this analysis is:
• Drag the note over the note you want to turn into a container
• Move the note over the right third of the container note
• The cursor will change into a right-pointing triangle
• When you see the right-pointing triangle drop the note.

I started the second movie. I have captured the necessary screenshots, imported them in iMovie and made the first draft with transitions. This movie seemed long, so we would probably break it down into two separate parts. However, I could not figure out at which point it should be broken down.

I have also slightly changed the script once again, something that is expected after making the first draft of a movie. I considered helpful at the end of this movie to have a short summary of the main points that users should learn. This would achieve two things: First, the users would have the opportunity to revise what they learned in this movie and review all the main points in a single screen. Second, this was also a good way to replace the parts of the script where the narrator would have appeared since we finally decided not to include a narrator.

I have eventually finished the first movie. The results were much better than the first draft. I thought that some things could be improved such as one screenshot would be better to be redone as well as a part of the voice-over due to some noise, but I thought that nothing could be perfect and each time I will find other things that I have to correct. Overall, this movie was good enough to achieve our purpose.

Exporting this movie into QuickTime was not as easy as I thought it would be. At the beginning the quality of the movie was too low. I found out that iMovie could accept only DV movies and thus, when I was importing the QuickTime screen captures, iMovie converted them from QuickTime to DV and when I exported them, it converted them from DV back to QuickTime. This was disastrous for the movie quality. However, exporting it to DV gave us a better image quality but a really huge file: 600 MB.

After searching in the Internet, we found out that what we should do was to export the movies to QuickTime using “Sorenson Video Compression”. By using expert settings in iMovie we managed to both export the movie with a very good quality and to reduce the output’s size. Since the size of the file depends on its resolution, we decided to create a 640*480 (30-40MB) movie for the CD-ROM tutorial and a 240*160 (5-8MB) movie for the website since most of the product’s users presumably have low-bandwidth Internet connections.

I started revising the scripts for the third time. I had to correct the mistakes that I had made with the Note tool, and I realized that I should reorganize the order of the short movie clips. The best order for the tutorial according to my opinion would be: “Make a note”, “Turn a note into a container”, “View windows”, “Make a Link” and finally “The note tool”. I realized that this was not the final script again, since I would need to add and revise them continuously as I would move on. However, I thought that this was natural and should be happening since each time I would be more familiar with Tinderbox, something that would allow me to improve the scripts.

Nevertheless, the more familiar I was becoming with the software, the more tempted I was of falling into the mistake of wanting to put everything I knew in the tutorial. Fortunately, I had realized that soon enough and I decided that a line should be drawn and that some features should be left out for the users to discover, after learning the basics of the Tinderbox.

After finishing the scripts, I wrote down the voice-over for the first movie and I recorded it with Elin, who was the narrator. I then imported it to iMovie and tried to adjust it according to the picture. This was definitely easier than adjusting the image to the voice but not as easy as it initially seemed. However, the fact that I left some scenes to be longer than they should be was very helpful since cutting something was easier than extending it.

I have captured the screenshots today. Firstly, I tried to follow the narration and do the tasks the narrator described. However, this proved to be difficult since some times I had to wait without doing anything and sometimes I did not have enough time to perform an action. Thus, I decided that the voice-over should be placed after the movie was done. After taking the shots illustrating how one can make a note, I imported them in iMovie. However, although the quality of the image was very good, after importing it in iMovie it became low. In spite of this we decided to continue and fix it later. Thus, I began the editing. I put all the segments in the right order and used transitions.

The first movie was finished but its quality was very low. The screen shots were not clear, the narrator scenes were not well shot and some parts of the movie were without narration. Nevertheless, although the result were not so good, it was a good beginning and a good experience that showed us what the problems are, how the process would be for the rest of the movies and what we should be careful in our next efforts.

I continued writing the scripts about the basics of Tinderbox. Explaining the six views was more difficult than the previous tasks. Each view has its own features and also shares some common features with some of the other views. Thus, it was hard to classify them in order to explain them in a more effective and meaningful way that includes repetition and common features, something that makes learning easier.

However, despite the fact that I was still writing the scripts we spent half of the day to make a draft of the first movie. We began with shooting the narrator and the voice-over. We used a small digital camera for this purpose. We used one of the meeting rooms for the shooting, which proved to be efficient. The light was good and the noise was controllable. However, the problems started when we finished shooting and we tried uploading the movies to the computer. The machine did not recognize the digital camera and thus did not upload our short movie clips. We tried different computers but no one let us do this. Thus, what we did was to shoot for again, this time with a webcam. This time we managed to have movies into the computer. However, even though the sound quality was good, the quality of the picture was very low. Nevertheless, we decided to use this video initially to create a draft movie.

I have spent three days so far writing scripts about Tinderbox's tutorial movies. The plan is to finish all the scripts about the basics of Tinderbox and to then start making the short movies. Today I have just started writing about the six views that Tinderbox offers, which is the last part of the basics. So far I have written scripts about notes and how to make them, how to turn a note into a container note and how to make links to other notes, to external files and to URLs.

Making those scripts was not easy. Although it seemed easy at the beginning, it was tricky and sometimes time-consuming. First, we should decide what to include and what to exclude since making a note could be simple, but how far should we go? Should we just teach how to make a note in the simplest way or try to add a little more such as shortcut keys and context menus? Moreover, we should figure the most optimal way to explain them and sometimes the way that Tinderbox works is so complicated that explaining them only with sentences was not easy. However, the fact that with movies we could also show the action while we would be describing a step was very helpful.

Finally, today I tried to get familiar with the software that we will be using to capture the screen shots: Snapz Pro X. It was very simple and user-friendly software with great results. I loved it from the first time: no frustration, no questions, and no confusion.

Second day in Eastgate, and I continued learning Tinderbox, in an effort to learn the software so that I would be able to teach it to others. I thought that if I keep notes of what I did not understand from the tutorial, or what took me some time to figure out, it would be helpful later, since I suspected that I would not be the only one with the same problems. Thus, I started taking notes of what I would found difficult or not easy to understand.

I went through the whole manual again for the second time but this time more carefully and more intensively. However, as soon as I thought that I had learnt this software, I discovered things that I did not know. On the one hand, the opportunities that this program offers you were so many, but on the other hand in this vast number of features the consistency was lost and thus to learn them was more difficult and confusing.