Engage | Project Wrap Up
Brian Passafaro spent his Associate’s degree at MCCC studying digital film and with a transfer and a major change to IMM, it made perfect sense to combine those two passions for his thesis. During his time at TCNJ, he expanded his knowledge in HTML and CSS, while growing new knowledge in PHP, JavaScript, and C#. He focused on learning as much as he could about the things he loves like web design, game design, screenwriting, video production and editing.
Demo reels are linear, passive, and predefined. Engage is not, it’s an interactive video demo reel. It’s a collection of work Brandon and I have put together during the course of our time at TCNJ and we proudly present it as interactive experience.
The IMM Senior Showcase is held by the Interactive Multimedia department at The College of New Jersey. The Showcase is where seniors display their thesis work and demo their projects. This is a great opportunity for feedback from fellow students/the community and a space to meet prospective employers.
Brandon and I worked on Engage over the course of the last two semesters. It has gone through many iterations as we worked through its development. Originally we intended Engage to be an experiment in interactive video, but we quickly realized that we wanted to create something that was more than just an experiment. Engage was refocused to be what it ultimately became at the end of our development. We took a serious risk shifting gears, but the project benefited from it greatly. We ended up with something more practical than experimental.
Brandon and I faced serious concept challenges as we worked through our project. At first we had a wildly different project, still using interactive video as a medium, but originally we intended Engage to be something completely different than what it became. As we started to develop the content for the original vision we realized that the final product would be very limited in scope. Because of that, we decided to make Engage what we were pitching the entire time… We called it an “interactive demo reel” during pre-production so we literally made an “interactive demo reel”.
Tools used for the project:
- Adobe After Effects
- Adobe Premiere
- Adobe Photoshop
- Wordpress
- H5P
- HTML
- CSS
- Javascript
- PHP
For the next senior thesis class I recommend starting as early as possible. Don’t wait until the 2nd semester of thesis to start building out your project. Also, it would be a good idea to start thinking about your thesis before the 1st semester. Any way you can get the ball rolling early on is better than waiting until the last second.
