Milestone #3, and Capstone Testing Plan

Here's my updated Gantt chart. I have finished rendering for my animation (sound the trumpets!), and all that's really left that needs doing is for me to finish the audio for it. I have the voice acting done for it, performed by my friend, but it lacks any sound effects. It shouldn't be too hard to finish at this point, though. I'll have all four of my layers ready to present tomorrow in class.

And now for the more important part of this post: capstone testing plan. By March 31st, I will have completed all my testing required for capstone. So without further adieu:

My Capstone Testing Plan

• Audience: I will target new media and studio art students and faculty. I will also ask Jason Walker if he would like us to target other groups, such as computer science students/faculty. I will ask Owen Smith if he has any recommendations for people to contact.
  
• Deployment: Since our project is an installation that can only be experienced to its full potential in person, we will plan on setting up a time and place for people to come and test it out. We will be contacting other capstoners who are doing installations (Kristina Younan and Dan Sprogis, maybe Dana Ransdell if he's setting up his project as an installation, and whoever else might be doing installations. I'll have to research), and we will try to coordinate having the same time/place. I know it is possible for us to use the Collaborative Media Lab as a place to test, but I'm not sure if it is the most ideal spot for the other capstoners yet.
  
• Promotion: I think the most effective way to get the word out is to send out posters for the event. The printed posters would be placed in key locations, such as the 4th floor of Chadbourne Hall, the Collaborative Media Lab, Lord Hall, and the Memorial Union. Other locations may become important depending on the opinions of the other capstoners with installations. In addition, the posters would be sent via FirstClass email to the "NM Major", "Art", and "Announcements & Alerts" folders, would be posted on the New Media Website, and might be announced in the Maine Campus. I think if we offered FREE snacks as well, more people might be keen on showing up (although such a thing would be difficult to pull off at the Collaborative Media Lab, if that's where we end up having it, given the library's ban on food... but there's always the possibility of being extremely sneaky about it).
  
• Feedback Mechanism: Probably the easiest way to do this would be to give out a hard-copy survey for the user to fill out upon testing our project. As the installation really needs to be experienced in person, it would only make sense to have a physical survey, as opposed to an online one. Questions would include "How was your overall experience?" and "What did you like/dislike about the touch interface/animation?", among other questions that we'll need to think up, and would also include an "Other comments" section for anything else the user feels like adding.
  
• Feedback Summary Format: We would have to custom collate our results, since the mechanism used to collect the results is very much not digital. The results would consist of written testimonials (most likely whatever is written down in "Other comments", but it may come from other questions asked) and charts (such as to show everyone's rating of their overall experience, from "Excellent" to "Terrible").

Poster, First Draft

Here's my first draft of my poster. I did not have all the information I needed in order to fill in the details, but the layout of it should be enough for the critique tomorrow, I hope. I'll need to edit this and have it printed by class on Monday.

Milestone #2

This is my Gantt chart as of Tuesday night. I forgot to post it to my blog, though, but as it turned out that my milestone was postponed due to a snow day, I will be presenting tomorrow (Monday) anyways. I have more done than my chart states, though--more specifically, the voice acting is over and my animation is 99.9% done (just need to finish up a tiny bit of lip synching and fix the gravity field for the dirt so that it doesn't "float" down like it currently does). I might have it finished by tonight, except that I also need to work on a promotional poster.

My project has been tweaked again for a number of reasons (one being that it will take me less time and fewer headaches the new way...), and now instead of it switching from one style to another, it has become switching between different levels of "detail" within the 3D animation (wireframe mode on top, followed by a low-quality default light render, and then a hardware rendered low-quality version with scene lighting, and then finally the high-quality rendered version). In order for the viewer to see the higher quality versions, they will need to "dig" away at the lower quality versions. I'm still working out the details, but this would give me a lot more time to focus on the project, since I'm not spending all my time simply animating.

So anyways, this is what I've gotten completed since my last milestone:

• Storyboards have been scanned to .pdf format, and can be found here.
• Voice acting *finally* recorded.
• Animation is nearly complete.
• Sound effects search has begun.

What I still need to do:

• Finish animation.
• Render (yikes!).
• Sound effects/foley work.
• Editing.
• Acquire an ambient music score.
  

Milestone #1

My first milestone review is tomorrow morning, so I'll post here what progress I've made and what I still have left to do. But first, an updated Gantt Chart again:


So my 3D animation is nearly complete and ready for rendering. That's the good news. The bad news: it's going to end up being about a minute long, instead of the projected 20-30 seconds. Whoops. That's around 1500 frames. Each frame seems to take a solid 20-40 minutes to render (it depends on what computer I'm rendering from, among some other factors), so it doesn't take a math genius to figure out that it would take an entire month's worth of rendering if done from one computer. Yikes! Thankfully, I'm not doing it from only one computer--I plan on hijacking a bunch of computers from the Collaborative Media Lab for this sole purpose (a feat I can probably only get away with solely because I work there). However,the big consequence of all this: a longer animation means less time to make more styles to switch back and forth from. I am still doing the 1920s style one next, but chances are very slim that I'll have any others done before spring break. I only really need two different styles for this project to work anyways, but having more would still be nice. Perhaps if we're to continue working on it after break, I'll get more completed.

So anyways, enough ranting. Here's what I hope to have ready to show tomorrow:

• Storyboards
• Hardware rendering of my 3D animation (or at least parts of it)
• Production-quality rendered still images
  

Gantt Chart Revision

Here is my Gantt chart revision, as requested for Wednesday. It will be re-updated before my milestone review on the 31st, where it will hopefully look like I'm not as far behind as it seems (isn't it sad that I spent almost 120 hours working only on the 3D animation, and I'm still not done with it? This project is going to destroy me).

Winter "Break"...

First semester of capstone is finished, and the next one will unfold in a month. It has been a rough semester for me, but I managed to develop a capstone idea that I am excited about (and probably more importantly, one that won't fail me at the end of the year).

The lack of time that I have remaining before capstone presentations has me worried, though. I would feel so much better about my project if I knew I had more time to work on it, but I feel that too much time was spent in areas that I feel are not very important to the overall piece. This is not to say that I've been slacking--I must've spent over 100 hours working on the 3D model of my character--but simply that animation is a slow process that requires a lot of patience and time. On the plus side, I have all of winter break to work on this, and I am hoping to get a lot of it completed by the end of it, but at the same time I know that the chances of me getting "enough" completed by then are pretty slim. But that's my plan for this so-called "vacation".

Fun.

Multi-Technique Animation Media Proposal

I forgot to post this a few days ago to the blog (I think I posted it everywhere else that I needed to), but anyways, you can find my media proposal for my project here. It also has my prototype on it, made in Flash. The ActionScript behind it was quite annoying to work out, but after a few hours of kicking and cursing I managed to make it work.