As a project manager (my second role), I was always making sure each member of the team was following our timetable as well as that they weren’t stuck in any particular problem or needed some kind of help. I was aware of which stage they were, trying to work as a communicator between them.  Because of this I managed to get to know a bit about how they were organizing their tasks (Leslie with sound editing, Mazy with Director and Christiana with usability).

My other task, as a Video Editor, was very challenging, since it was my first time doing so. I have always wanted to know the concept behind it, how did it worked, the video extensions files, how to save them, how to compress them depending on their use - and I did.

As an introduction to video editing and to have a feeling about how does it work, I felt more confident learning an easy-to-use software. Christiana as a video editing assistant, gave me some clues about it.

The 32 videos for the final interactive game were all edited using iMovie, which I found very user friendly. The software worked fine for what I wanted the final videos to look like in the end. I felt confident working with videos and audio but in a second moment I wanted to try and experiment more within the program. Unfortunately, iMovie has very limited resources.

As a Video Editor I exchanged a lot of information with Leslie and Mazy. With the first one, giving her the exact sounds needed for the editing together with the time length of each movie (for the videos that had a background sound) and with the later, getting the size of the videos and compressing it for Director.

After making sure the videos were as I wanted (following the scripts we’ve had previously written and adding some effects – “black and white and “Aged” – the later to have a more real impression of a CCTV camera), I added the sounds and adjusted them to match exactly the scene (e.g.: bell ringing and person saying something about the bell – Mrs. Wese scene 2).

For the compression I used Cleaner. It’s an easy-to-use software as well, giving various options for saving audios and videos. I saved them all at the same time, since the settings were the same. They were saved into MPEG4 format with the option “ISMA Profile 1 1 Mbps download”.

I saved the final videos into a separate folder and later imported to Director for a previous test to see if they would play fine before giving them to Mazy.

For my next time working with videos and audios, I’d like to try to use new softwares such as Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Adobe Premiere, which will allow me to experiment more and even do more professional works.

Although my role was as a Video Editor, I helped some of the team members with some other issues about other softwares. I gave some assistance to Leslie creating a button in Flash and to do Fade in/Fade out. Later I tried to help Mazy solving some scripting problems in Director, which sometimes was very tricky.

Firstly the code seemed ok, although it wasn’t playing. As a last resource we copied and pasted the exact code again and suddenly it worked. This is one of the things that can make working with scripts a very tough task.

The biggest one we had during the project was after publishing the final piece – the first moment everything seemed fine and testing in different computers, the QuickTime videos wouldn’t play properly as they should. We tried various different codes, that seemed pretty obvious, but still it wasn’t playing. Latter, with Spiro’s help we made it work. Still doesn’t make any sense for me why wouldn’t the first ones work.

We originally used the Frame script:

on exitFrame

if the movieRate of sprite 2=1 then

go to the frame

else go to  'end'

end if

end

'end' - marker for the 'disconnecting' Flash animation.

This code was used to make the playhead go to 'end' after QuickTime video (sprite 2) has stopped playing.

Another one tried was this suggested by Rob:

on exitFrame me

 if the movieTime of sprite 2 < 2068 then

 go to the frame

 else if sprite(2).movieTime = 2068 then go "end"

end if

end

2068 being the length of the movie in ticks.

Spiros suggested QuickTime clips to be stretched into more than one frame, and on the 1st frame add the Frame script:

on exitFrame me

 go to the frame

 sprite(2).movieRate = 1

 if (sprite(2).movieRate = 1) then go to 16 (frame number/marker the last frame the QuickTime occupies)

end

And on the last frame, add the Frame script:

on exitFrame me

 go to the frame

 if (sprite(2).movieRate = 0) then go to frame "ani"

 end if

end

'ani' - marker for the 'disconnecting' Flash animation.