Storytelling: Video Prototyping
HCID 521 Prototyping Studio | Week 3 | In-Class Activity
The first phase of this quarter’s prototyping studio, we are introduced to lo-fi prototyping techniques. From last week’s 3-D prototyping, we added another dimension into consideration: time. We would be learning how to communicate our idea or design through video, which is also called lo-fi 4-D prototyping.
COMMUNICATION
Video is a tool for us to communicate our design or idea to general public. Instead of cinematography, score, or all the aesthetic factors, the main purpose of video prototyping is story telling and communication. Without a great story, none of these works for a video prototype. A successful video prototype relies on the effectiveness of telling a story, and the point is to fully demonstrate your design principle and expected user experience.
My takeaway from this was that I think this is pretty much the same as presenting a design. Video enlarges the surrounding of audience to one in it, and it also enables audience’s imagination to grow and experience the scenario of the design. I would say, how audience will feel connected while watching the video prototype is the main consideration of prototyping.
FROM STORYTELLING TO AESTHETICS
We saw bunches of clips from Sergej Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin and Alfred Hitchcock’s films (Psycho, Birds, and North by Northwest). By analyzing the cinematography and score of these films, we were introduced several ideas of how video can lead audience into a specific atmosphere, like, by indicating what is going to happen next in the story.
Besides the specific Hitchcock style, there are tons of other methods that can introduce a scene, scenario, character, surrounding, or plot of the story to audience, and it is almost impossible for me to cover all methods. Personally the fastest way to build up the sense of video-storytelling is to check out as various types of video (or even other forms of art, such as graphics, performing arts, music…etc.) as possible, just to have a clue of how different pieces tell stories in different ways.
VIDEO EDITING
During class, one of our instructors, Axel Roesler, had demonstrated several basic understandings and techniques of video editting. The content covered from video codec, editing software, to the basic principles (like, always using uncompressed files during editing process). He also recommended us to use Quicktime 7 Pro, Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effect, and Adobe Premiere.
In my opinion, I think video editing classes could be more effective if those were introduced as online courses instead of presented in our studio class, since there are tons of instruction videos available on streaming platforms like YouTube or Vimeo, and we did not have compatible softwares on our laptops during lecture (since operating the software by ourselves while taking lectures simultaneously is the most efficient way to master a software). Before this lecture, I was looking forward to learning more basic theories of cinematography or directing (if those exist and are useful for video prototyping) instead of software techniques.
(The photo was taken while I was working on the assignment introduced in this class.)
