Team 2 Blog

Ranya Aribi

At this point in the semester, I think our project is finally starting to look like an actual project. We have already gone on one ice skating trip, and the next one is coming up soon. We have some media, and have planned the rest we want to get and how. The project is also finally established. The decision for what we are doing, and how we are going to make some repeated clips of us on ice interesting and creative. Other little projects are also going to be incorporated in our big one, which is very exciting.

We have also set up our website, and are currently planning how we want it to look. It was all just ideas in the beginning, but it is finally starting to come with actual work, and come together.

I think what we need to work on the most is having an exact plan for everything, rather than just throwing the idea out. For example, we have a slight idea for what we want our website to have in it, but we haven’t done much but set it up. I am a person that stresses a lot until I can see the actual results in front of me, but I know me and my team will get it all done and put it together really well. I also think this is one of my biggest challenges in group projects, I really like to have everything done in front of me and that is difficult when more than one person is working on something.

For this week, we are working on our preliminary content submission. And this particular assignment is a lot of work, so we have split our paper into different topics, and assigned each person a certain topic, depending on what they have worked on the most throughout our project. After everyone has incorporated work, we are going to work together to mend all the information into one well written, clear paper.

We are officially at the midway point of the semester which means we are at the midpoint of our project as well. Everything feels like it is flying by honestly. My group has been doing a great job of keeping in touch throughout the process. Everyone is willing to do whatever needs to be done to make sure the finished project turns out the way we know it can.

This week in class we divided up our preliminary content paper into sections and assigned each part to a member. This way we know everyone will have their input involved. That is what my group has been trying to make sure is done ever since the beginning. We don’t want one person doing everything or a person’s voice to go unheard. We also learned about how to properly use some of the equipment we hoped to use last week but failed miserably. We still got some good content to start though. Our videos and photos will be so much better now after that extra instruction.

To wrap up, the part of the paper I was assigned was elaborating on our vision for the site, and the plans we discussed while at our first skating session. Once we got there the ideas start to flow more, so I am excited to see how everything turns out. There aren’t any worries that I have about our project currently. Especially after that extra instruction, we received this week.

Katie Squier

This week in class the interactive analysis presentations were great! I really loved the one that Macrae presented on the bikes. I think they did a really great job showing how the bike is really customizable. We touched on this in class but that was the only presentation of the day that didn’t have a sound aspect. In creating our own website I think that incorporating sound is really important and just puts the extra cherry on top of the site.

For our own project this week we went ice skating! It was a lot of fun and I can tell that my group is really fun because we got a chance to be ourselves outside of class. The first part of our trip to Breslow was spent trying to figure out how to work the Osmo. This was pretty frustrating and we never did figure out how to use it. After returning it we asked how to use it, and plan on getting this footage the next time we go skating. While we were there our ideas really started to flow. We decided that our website will kind of resemble a hockey team website. We will create logos, and create player biographies just like a real hockey team. I think this project will be really funny and I cannot wait to see the finished product. Next week I think we will have to go skating again jsut to get more video using the Osmo and gear more of our media around the idea of a hockey team rather than just taking videos and photos of each other just skating, which we found got boring a lot faster than we expected.

Ranya Aribi

For this weeks interactive project presentations, I thought they were all very good. I think the creativity and range of these websites really showed this week.

I did pick up some things I really liked and thought I could incorporate into my own project website. For example, a couple of the websites this week were animated, and I realized how much I liked the concept of animation. I think it would be super cute and creative to add some animation of each of my teammates ice skating as cartoons. I also really liked the concept of a website “map” that the viewer can click to guide them through the website as opposed to a more basic and common menu bar on the side or top of a website.

These week, in my team, we went on our first ice skating adventure. And we definitely had some challenges along the way. We decided to go after class on Tuesday, that was perfect, it worked in all our schedules, but, when we got there, we only had about an hour and fifteen to twenty minutes of public skating time, so we needed to get as much as we could done.

We spent a goof majority of the time trying to get the technology to work. We had so much trouble with the Ozmo, and the iphone mic, as well as we did not have the proper SD card size for the gopro. In the end, we decided to spend most of the time just getting media on the DSLR camera.

It was definitely not a waste of the trip though, we all got to practice our ice skating skills, and we planned exactly how the next time we go ice skating would be. We also went to the lab after skating and figured out how to work all the technology so that we are more prepared next time.

After watching the presentations this week, there were a lot of cool websites that were presented. The one that really caught my eye was the website that talked about the 30 endangered animals. It was a really cool website and it was interesting to see how it presented itself. All the moving pieces that were brought into this website really showed me how creative you can get while making a website.

As for our project we did our first visit to the ice rink and it was quite interesting. It was the first time I have ever ice skated before and it showed very quickly. It was but 2 minutes and I was rolling around on the ice because I wasn’t much of a skater. But then I discovered they have like walkers but for the ice which was monumental in me actually looking like I knew what was going on. We did have some slight technical problems. We couldn’t figure out how to get the camera itself to remain still. But turns out all we needed was a smaller phone to make it work. SO when we go back a 2^nd time we will be more prepared. Also we brought a camera and a GoPro but turns out that the GoPro needs s special SD card so we will have to go out and get one of those if we feel like we need to use that. The camera that we used had some problems focusing and the lens wasn’t the best. But in the end we created a few ideas and it will lead us into our project paper that is due next week.

The presentations this week were very interesting and offered many techniques that I liked. The CSS site about the endangered animals was very interesting to me. I liked the geometric aspect of it and how simple, but visually appealing it was. The Mario museum site was also a fun one that fed off of nostalgia. I had never seen anything like that site before and the 3D aspect of it was pretty eye-opening with what is possible. Those were my two favorites, but all of the sites this week were good. They incorporated sound, visual appeal, and amazing techniques around their central story perfectly I though. Some of which I hope to include in our project.
This week we finally made it to the ice rink on Tuesday. We had some technical difficulties right off the bat with the Osmo mobile piece. We were able to figure out other ways to do things through with the DSLR. So one thing we need to fix for next time is if we don’t know how to exactly use some, ask. A lot of ideas started to flow out once we started skating. Our project started to make more sense and come together which was fun to see and talk about.

This week although I did not present, I was able to learn quite a bit about what to use for my website. My favorite website that was shown was the Adidas recycled shoes. What I liked most about it was how it was very informative, but also at the same time they were very concise with how they presented it. Something that I would like to incorporate into my website would be the way the videos were used in their site. I believe that doing this will allow me to present great content and give my audience the information that they need to understand what we are going for.

This week my group and I really did not do much to further our progress on our project. We did plan on our big day of capturing most of our content to be on this upcoming tuesday. I am very excited to see what we capture and think that the whole process is going to be very fun.

In the future the only thing that I would change is that we, as a group, check in with one another at least once a week. I think that by doing that we will be able to stay more organized.

Ranya Aribi

This week, I presented my interactive project analysis. I went first, so I honestly did not know what to expect. I worked really hard on my project, maybe too hard, because I noticed I was the only one who went up there with pages of notes and a slideshow. But, despite that, I felt very prepared for the presentation.

I can honestly say I learned more about the storytelling aspect of this project from the people’s presentations that came after mine just because my website was an interactive storytelling website, but it was just a story about how much time you waste at work as opposed to a story with an actual storyline to it. Mine told the story through charts, statistics, and numbers instead of emotions and visual aspects like some of the other presentations.

I did though, appreciate the different ways storytelling can be done and depicted, and also how each person found a different website to use so far. The websites that my other classmates chose were all really intriguing and I learned a lot and gained some tips on what I want to incorporate in my own website.

For this week, my group hasn’t done too much about our project but decide that we are going ice skating next week to get content. We also made the website already, and once we actually get content, we will start working on that.

This week was the first time my class started to present their interactive websites. All of the ones shown were really good I thought. One of the most apparent aspects of each site to me was that they all had a slight constant movement element. For one it was a slow zoom in ion their pictures and another had a background that moved as your scrolled. It made it look as if the main background was on top of it, giving it a 3D type of appearance. Some of the sites didn’t include all type of media which I thought could help tie the who production together. It would have been cool to hear how loud the bike was for example.

This week we just finalized when we were wanting to meet to go skating for the first time. A time that works best for all of your schedules we decided was next Tuesday after class. We will have to figure out who is going to do photo, video, sound, etc but that will all fall into place once we actually get the equipment. I will have to bring that up in our group chat soon, so it is easier when we get the stuff.

This week in class we watched multiple interactive analysis presentations. However, I felt like the tornado presentation that we watched was one of the cooler websites that were presented. It would be difficult to have that within our presentation considering we are Ice Skating. But I feel like this gave us a lot of ideas on what we could do in order to make our presentation pop out a lot more. This will be a huge part in our grade. But the biggest thing I felt that kind of lacked in all of the projects except for the Tornado website was the use of Audio. I personally feel that Audio is a huge component of any project or website. I am a huge audio guy so I feel that it is extremely important for sure.

For our team aspect of the blog this week was a little hectic for all of us and had a tad big of miscommunication when turning in the Team Schedule. But we took care of it with no damage done which was very helpful. We are still trying to fine tune a good time to get our first chance to go skating and see what we can get made up. We will all have to check our schedules to see when we will be able to make that happen. All of us are very active in our GroupMe so it should be pretty easy to find a time to get all of us together.