Week 10 reflections
From CTIN482
Finally, after weeks of planning, brainstorming and trimming, I feel like we've established some concrete achievable goals. Given the time constraint, our projected prototype is a bit lean -- it still embodies our core ideas in terms of emphasis on education through gameplay elements, but a lot of our earlier grandiose notions would have to take a back seat. The whole goal-setting process can best be described as 'humbling' as Ben stated earlier on. But ideas are meant to yield results, and it's good to see everything come together slowly. My task is to implement sound for our prototype, and I must say, after soliciting $400 Linden dollars from Bjorn, I'm feeling pretty powerful. Since it costs $10 to upload a clip, I should make my choices carefully. It was a lot harder to find a simple, instrumental version of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" than I expected, I think I would have to resort to ripping guitar tutorial audios from YouTube. The last thing I want is to have yucky MIDI sounds come out of our beautifully modeled guitar. I can't wait to get feedback from my team so I can start editing sound and get some Second Life ready clips.
-Maria
The Stage - Filming
We completed our first tests of the video capturing software compatable with Second Life. Since our scenes require one avatar to "act" and one avatar to film, one of us acted in the scenes while Ben captured video from his computer. We ran through several takes, with Ben filming from different angles.
What became immediately apparent is that our video quality would be pretty low. In addition to being very low-resolution, the framerate (whether it was Second Life's slow rezing time or the program's processing speed) was pretty choppy. Instead of being one smooth animation, my avatar jerked across the bike ramp (sans bicycle-peddling animation), and Warren's avatar awkwardly stumbled down the Indiana Jones tunnel missing a few animation frames. That being said, it was very fulfilling to see our scenes come to life. At this point, we've accomplished the biggest goal in our project by providing scenes which can be filmed from different angles.
Though we aren't able to provide scenes that can be used by a single person, the cooperative element of filming the two scenes (director and actor) actually made them more enjoyable than using them alone. It was fun to run through many different takes, talking back-and-forth about the scene and trying different things. The video quality may be pretty poor, but it was fun (for us at least) to use our completed scenes to stage and film a short action scene. With this milestone reached, we now focus on refining the project and making it accessible to outside users.
-Jeffrey Pfingsten
