Project Name: Flying The Nest
Skills: Macromedia Director MX 2004, Photoshop, Lingo, Video Editing/Capture
Project (Video Desktop Capture):
Background: 'Flying The Nest' is an interactive magazine which was created in Macromedia Director for my Digital Video for Interactive Media module at University in the second semester of my third year.
The premise behind the piece is an interactive magazine for people leaving the parental home for the very first time and in the brief I was told too use extensive use of video in order to put this message across and deliver 'how to' guides for things such as cooking, gardening, DIY, cleaning, all things that people need to know when they move in to a house of their own.
We were told to focus on one of these areas and as I have recently been learning to cook myself I thought this would be a good opportunity to play 'Jamie Oliver' for the day, have a bit of fun in front of the camera and have cooking as a central theme. It is worth pointing out that Jamie Oliver's recipe for Chilli Con Carnie was used in this piece.
My idea was to have somebody teaching the user how to cook certain meals in every monthly issue as a sort of main running feature, with other areas like I have addressed above being taught alongside also and I didn't want it to be just a video they watched I wanted them to have little things to do whilst the video was in motion.
So I came up with a few ideas I felt would suit cooking such as a 'Pan Cam' so the user could see what the food should be looking like in their own pan at home and I felt this would add an extra dimension to the piece and a nice effect in the process; I also had a 'Replay' button so if the user became 'lost' they could go back and go through the tutorial again and finally as well as a main video feature I also wanted there to be additional 'bite-size' tutorials within the video that appeared at certain times on screen, like 'how to chop an onion' in the example video above, as I am assuming the user has absolutely no experience in the kitchen.
My main interface as you will see in the video is of a hallway, which contains some moving boxes waiting to be unpacked in the new home and this formed my 'links' to the different areas of the magazine, on mouse rollover the boxes reveal a video in relation to the area, so me counting my money on the table for 'Budgeting' for example and this took a painstaking amount of time to implement this system of rollovers but I am glad I spent so long on it as I feel this works well, the actual main video in the cooking section also took well over 30 exports from QuickTime to find a resolution and size to run smoothly (which wasn't captured too well by Camtasia's desktop video capturing software in the example video above).
Also notice that the Replay button at different times in the video takes you back to a certain point in the cooking video, this was done through a Lingo IF Statement I wrote relating to the 'Chapters' of my movie and this works in the same fashion as the 'Pan Cam', again notice that the pan changes at certain points in the video depending on where we are in the cooking process, so when I mention Onions, the pan has onions cooking and before this the pan is empty as we haven't started the cooking process and this was done through IF Statements relating to the MovieTime which I think works a lot better than having multiple links to different chapters in the video.
Also just after the ingredients are read to the user notice the tutorial appear at the bottom of the screen, this again was an IF Statement that told this sprite to appear when we reach the point in the video when I talk about onions for the first time and this links us to a 'bite-sized' tutorial I mentioned above.
