Team 2 Blog

This week my group and I have not been able to much due to the fact that the Coronavirus has been taking over the country. We have a start on the website, but we cannot capture any media because everywhere is closed. This will be our biggest obstacle for the remainder of our project because we simply do not know how long places will be closed for.

Also, since I was forced to go back home to Chicago it is very difficult being so far away from everyone. In our zoom meeting I think that it will be beneficial for my group and I to try to create a schedule to follow for the rest of the semester that will ensure that we complete all of our tasks. I believe if we do this it will make the whole online thing much easier and we will be much more organized.

At the end of the day I really am not sure what to expect, I just hope that we will be able to capture some more content before our project is due. I also hope that the Coronavirus goes away soon because it makes everything way more difficult than it should be.

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE Now that this CO-VID is really starting to take off it is going to become more difficult to get more media of us skating due to it either being closed, or having limitations on how many people are in the area at once. This will slowly become more of an issue due to the fact that some of the media that we have will not do the job in order to get this project done to its full potential. But we will be able to work something out in order to get the best grade out of the project as possible. Our group will need to meet up via zoom or even over GroupMe, in order to get a good plan laid out so we can get this done. Especially since Dylan is back in Chicago, it will become a little difficult but with all the technologies that we have available we should be able to get it all made in no time. We already have a start on the website and also have a little media to make sure with as well. So we can see where it will take us to figure it all out and accomplish our goal.

In this week’s interactive website presentations, the one main factor I saw was that they had a track type of theme. They would move a character or piece of the site to show the rest of the environment and other features. I liked the simplistic approach to the ones shown. You can make the coolest website ever, but if no one can navigate it or find what they need to, it is useless. We could do something similar by having someone skate across the screen to find our videos and tips.
As a group this week we focused a lot on how we want the layout of the site to be. This has been a lot easier to do after seeing some of the great ones that have been shown in class. We talked about it a lot more with the recent changes and challenges that come with the university closing too. Since I was the one that created the initial site layout I made sure that everyone had the link and was able to contribute to it as well. That way we can always work on it without necessarily in person.
It will be an experience to see how everything goes now, but I think with how my group has been communicating and cooperating so far, I know we can get what we need to do still.

This week was a very interesting one to say the least. I had to present my storytelling project on Tuesday and I was lucky enough to have someone else with the same one. It overall was a very good website but it needed to have a few more features in my opinion. I was hoping they could have used actual video to maybe see the skyscrapers in the skyline of London. But I did like how the website itself actually worked. It really gave us an interesting view and facts about the sky line itself. 

As for the group project, it was a hectic week and we are scrambling a little right now but we have everything under control. We will be able to capture media however it will be without one of our group members who will be moving back to Chicago. But we will find a way to get everything worked in and it will work perfectly fine to give us the best chance possible to get everything in order. I believe about 4 of us will still be in the area so we can go back to the rink in order to capture some more media but hopefully it isn’t closed due to the virus. 

This week we were able to look at some very interesting interactive websites during presentations. My favorite website that we took a look at was the site that gave interesting facts about London. I thought that the use of graphic design that had was amazing, and all though I am not talented enough to create the things that they did I think that it would be awesome to find a way to incorporate some things like that into our project. Something else that I find out when looking at this website is that pictures are very important. The london website gave a lot of interesting facts about the city but there were no actual photos to look at on the site. I believe if they had photos the sites visitors would enjoy that a lot.

This week my group and I decided to plan on going ice-skating next week but unfortunately our semester got cut short so we will not be able to do that anymore. I also was told that I have to go back to Chicago this week so I plan on figuring out which ways I will be able to help my group out the most from there.

Overall, with all the changes that have come up in the past few days I am very confident that my group and I will be able to complete all of our tasks successfully, I am just very disappointed that we will not be able to all be together when it comes to capturing content.

Katie Squier

This week I really loved the presentation about London. I thought that site was really interesting. I liked how you rode the subway through the city and as you travel, you can click on different tourist attractions. In that presentation it would be cool if my group could somehow incorporate a figure skater or hockey player skating down on the bottom of the site. I don’t know that this would necessarily fit the aesthetic of the site that our group is creating. I also liked the sound effects that the Santa site had. I think an audio aspect adds a new level to a site and I think it will be important to incorporate this into our site.

This week we briefly talked about the layout of the website. We had planned to skate again today but due to a class conflict that I had, we decided to move the next skating session to next week. I really appreciate my group being flexible with me and allowing us to reschedule for next week. Though we did not gather more media, working on the website together proved to be helpful with our ideas. Talking through the different pages that we wanted to add allowed us to continue to expand on our ideas and looking forward to next week, we can have a better idea of really specific media that we will want to gather.

Ranya Aribi

This week, we had interactive storytelling website project presentations. I quickly have noticed a theme through all these interactive storytelling websites. They seem to really focus on animations, transitions, and sliding objects that move the background with them. While I really enjoy this type of website, it’s getting harder each week to say something new out of the presentations. This week though, I did really enjoy how one of the websites incorporated actual images taken by a camera, as this is the most similar to our projects. I did not notice any major problems with these websites, I just like to see more of a use of individually taken images and videos, because like I mentioned, it is the closest thing to our projects. I did however not like how some of the websites, I feel like the use of audio might have overshadowed the actual material of the website. Using audio can be tricky, and needs to be done in a way where there is no risk of it being too much for the website to handle.

If we are being honest, all the cool animations and movements these websites incorporate are a little too advanced for our skill sets, and as much as we would love our website to look like that, we can only do our best.

That being said, this week, we started a more realistic picture of what we want our website to look like. We are going to add the pizazz and fun into our website by using colorful colors, placement, interactive pieces (hover images, scrolling background changes, etc), and a fun environment.

Looking back at the first part of the semester as a team we have really capitalized on getting a good head start of what we have ahead of us. We are all working very delightedly and have a great grasp on this Ice Skating project. Our group has really meshed well to create a good team. The only obstacle I see coming with us is all of us finding the time to get to Breslow in order to get some more media of us getting on the Ice again but I feel like we will all work together to make sure that it happens again.

This week we did our paper and we all individually selected a part of the paper to write. As for me I selected the first meeting we had at the rink and how it went for us. I discussed how I felt it went and some things we can do to improve. We just needed to work on our media work, but we took care of all that in class on Tuesday to allow us to be able to use the Osmo and the GoPro. I see us doing just fine come presentation time as well.

Katie Squier

This week has proved to be the mid semester week from…heck…? All my classes seem to be picking up and my group has been phenomenal in being understanding with my group contribution this week. In class we designated different roles for the Preliminary Project Submission assignment. I took on the into portion. I think that after we got on the ice last week, our overall vision has changed a little bit so I plan to talk about the direction we are taking going forward.

I think we still have a lot of media to gather for our project. We took headshots for each other last week which will serve as a profile section for our team website. Now that we have more information about how to use the Osmo, I anticipate that we will use that and get so really great media, the next time we are on the ice. I think that we could also benefit from media outside the actual rink. Taking photos, or conducting interviews outside the Breslow arena would be beneficial. We also had a issue with out photos from the first trip as they were in a weird format and I had to change them all to .jpg so that I was able to upload the files to Box. At this point I just worry about how everything is going to come together. I feel like we have a good start and vision but when I compare what we have to some of the finished example projects, I am not so confident. I don’t know how to fix that issue or if it will fix itself as we edit and bring everything together, but I guess we will see.

Cheers to Week 9!

At the mid-term point of the semester I am very pleased with how my group has been performing so far. I believe that for the most part everyone is pulling their own weight and I am also very pleased with our communication. We all make sure that we know what we are doing and aren’t afraid to ask the group if we have any questions. The only problem that I see our team having right now and this also goes along with the biggest challenge that we are facing at the moment is making sure that we can successfully use the equipment that we have to capture our media with. But even this really is not a huge problem because after our first day of capturing content we have took the time to make sure that we understood what to do.

My contribution to the group this week was helping outline our Preliminary Content paper and also writing the research portion of our paper. With this I did not face many problems, but if there were any it was just finding credible sources to use. There is not much that I would do differently in future because I feel that what I did was fairly successful.

I am excited to see what work we all accomplish next week!