OneRing: How I bootstrapped my Kickstarter video on a high-schooler’s budget.
I’m Utkarsh Tandon, and I’m building OneRing — a smart monitoring device for Parkinson’s patients. We just launched our Kickstarter campaign here: OneRing.
When it came time to making the video, I knew there was no budget for a studio-level production (we’re operating on a high school sophomore’s budget here folks). At the same time, it was clear that an iPhone quality hand-recording wouldn’t cut it. So I went the hacker route, and turned the production into a mini, low-cost project of its own using tools I could find at home! Here’s how I did it — first off though, thank you mom for letting me turn the living room into a production set for the week! To check out the final result, visit us on Kickstarter.
Step 1: Background
An infinite white background (thanks Apple) seemed to be a good idea for the talking scenes. So I set up a large white paper roll from floor to ceiling using tape in our living room.
The lighting is key, because a shadow would give away the illusion of the ultra bright effect, so I bought a set of clamp lights ($10 a pop) and attached to our living room light stand. I would stand in front of the light source to avoid a shadow showing up, and had a separate clamp light behind the camera (we’re getting to that part) to brighten me.
iMovie (woot free on my laptop!) took care of the background exposure for me, completing the infinite white background effect.
Step 2: Camera and Audio
My mom’s iPhone 6 was good enough for video quality, and I mounted it on a bunch of my textbooks along with a selfie stick (finally came in use) for stability. I would get my brother or mom to hit record.
Now, I needed a good way to capture audio directly as I spoke. The microphone from the video recording would capture too much ambient noise, so I used the in-built mic that many earphones have, and pinned it to my sweater. This was then hooked to the iPod in my pocket, where I would start the recording app just before beginning the video.
Step 3: Device showcase and in-use recording
Any good Kickstarter video shows the product in it’s full glory — a panning round shot all around the beautiful device. Coming up with this was hard — the camera needed to be steady, the shot needed to be consistent, and the motion fluid + well-timed… hmm….almost motorized. It hit me — I used my Lego Mindstorms NXT from a few years ago to rotate a servo motor with good timing. The background was the same white sheet from before.
I placed a cut white styrofoam bowl on top of the servo as a platform (got to keep up with the theme of a white background) and the OneRing device was placed on top. The shot would begin from the iPhone camera, the motor would rotate, and the device would oh-so-sweetly spin. Definitely checkout the video for the full effect.
Now, I also needed to record the device + algorithm + app in-use. So I cut a bit of white sheet, placed on my table, and used our good old selfie stick to get a overhead view. Then I recorded me putting the ring on, and used the app to monitor my tremor/movement data.
But what about those animations……..
Step 4: Animations
Animations help make a point clear, but I didn’t have the budget/time to grab some high-end animation software. Turns out, Keynote/Powerpoint have great mini-animation motions that you can screen capture.
So that’s what I did, directed some animations, placed them on a green background, imported the video as an overlay into iMovie and subtracted the green. And like magic — my animation was overlaid!
Thanks for reading, and I’d love to see your support on the Kickstarter campaign! Developing the machine learning model for the Parkinson’s tremor classification taught me a lot, and engineering the device from 3D-printing was so much fun. Making the app to interface the device to my software was a new experience and I couldn’t have done it without all of you on the internet making awesome blogs and tutorials.
I’m always on the lookout for interesting projects, and would love to do something fun over the summer (besides studying for SATs before junior year) so drop me a message: utkarsh.tandon1@gmail.com
