Bsc Digital Arts and Technology

We had the presentation of our idea today, to run through the design of our applicatio and show Katina and others more about our application.

 You can see details of the presentation and the work so far at http://claudnoir.wordpress.com

I’ve been given the job of editing and filming the video that will be used for the application as well as doing the sound or parts of it. 

 Unfourtantly when I went to edit the footage we took orginally on Claudia’s phone I was unable to do so as Samsung (the make of her phone) adds an encoder to any of their recordings and I haven’t yet found something I can use to convert it.

 I am still looking though.

After doing some research we found out that most sites to teach people how to do a magic trick like most books just run through a list of instructions.
 And although this is informative it doesn’t nescessarily mean it’s the best way to teach someone a card trick or something similar.

 The user doesn’t know if they’re doing the trick right, cannot see someone run through the trick to check if their doing it right, and also won’t be able to tell which step they can’t do until the end when it goes wrong.

 Which is why we propose to make an application which will make it easier for someone to run through each stage at their own pace and have someone else run through the trick with them.

 We’re hoping to have an animation of the card trick being played showing what they need to do next, a little character to talk them through the trick. With the added option of watching a video with a professional doing the trick at the end of each stage so the user can check they’ve done it right.

 They’ll also be able to navigate quite easily between the two stages to check that they have followed it properly, or if they go on and realise they haven’t quite got the previous stage they can back track.

 We’re also hoping to make the application usable for those with sight and hearing problems.

After having a group meeting, we’ve decided that for our assignment we’ll do an application that will teach the user how to do a magic trick more specifically a card trick.

 We’ll make the application in flash using animations, audio and video as we feel this will be one of the best ways to teach someone a trick.

 We haven’t yet decided how we’ll make it and what our roles are but at least we have a general idea of what we want to do. Before we begin though we need to hand in a proposal of what we want to do.

We had an exercise we needed to do before this practical, we had to split into pairs and one person had to teach the other person something new.

 We could teach them anything and teach them anyway we want to, because there were odd numbers there’s three of us in this group – Me, Claudia and Aqeel.

 Claudia would teach me and Aqeel a card trick, not sure what the card trick was called though…she taught us by showing us the trick to begin with then went through the card trick stage by stage.

 In the meantime we were filming the whole thing on Claudia’s phone (as mine ran out of battery) to show the others during the practical.
 She did the trick on me, and then I had to show Aqeel and to check to see if both me and him got the trick he then had to practise it on Claudia.

 I think it went quite well, we both were able to run through the card trick smoothly on others with no prompting and in the case of Aqeel changing the hand movements slightly which then made it harder to see what he was doing.

 This was succesful as both me and Claudia thought he had done it wrong until he pointed out by doing it the way he did it it adds to the confusion so even if the person watching the trick thought they figured it out they miss it and it confuses them.

 We showed the video and the trick to Katina and the others during the practical, Katina liked it and also liked how we taught each other the trick.

 Us three will be doing the assignment together…just need to find out what we’ll be doing our application with.