Part 2

Initial signs were good, just over a week after the presentation I started to get messages from people who said they were eager to work.

"James Hustler 08 June at 16:10
Hi guys hope you're good. I know I've done like nothing, but I'm literally happy to do anything whatsoever, I'll basically just do any role or say anything that needs to be said at all. What have you lads done so far? cheers"

"Richard Eglinton 09 June at 17:40
Yo, how its going?

I've been looking into having an example to show at the presentation. i was thinking like you said with the developer diaries to have the links embedded into an advert. Does this sound like a good idea? If not what do you suggest? im happy to do whatever is needed.

also when do i need to have it done by?"

So I thought, this is good. I can give the others an opportunity to do some work. I decided to detail exactly what was needed, let them do whatever they could from it and then I'd finish up whatever still needed doing before the summative submission.

"Matthew Alford 09 June at 19:16
OK, so I'm starting a new thread here so Kieron can get in on this. I believe we have to have the presentation submitted by Tuesday. Here's what we need:

The main thing is an example for my point about developer diaries. There's a really text heavy slide in the presentation where I go through how branient could be used for improving developer diaries, but we could just show that. So take one of these:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UcZXMuY5kqk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZ5vmiR7a4I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCUO8yiMu3k
or any other developer diary you want, and take no more than say 40 seconds of dialogue where they introduce a character or creature, then find some concept work for that character and use branient to integrate it without interrupting the video or getting too much in the way.

and the second thing is to think about how to snazz it up visually. If I provide you guys with a summary of each of the slides, then you can look for pictures that you think would work on them. Try and find fairly funny ones, as it's a pretty informal presentation.

Slide 1 is an introduction
Slide 2 introduces what Branient does
Slide 3 says we're pitching to a video games company
Slide 4 is about marketing. It talks about innovative marketing campaigns like the bear one she showed us and also unobtrusive advertising
Slide 5 is the slide about the developer diary business, so no worries about pictures here. Don't want to clutter things.
Slide 6 is about how Branient could be used to help staff make good showreels quickly and easily
Slide 7 is just the last slide.

If I don't get anything from you guys by Monday I'll do it myself, but obviously I wanna give you guys the opportunity to get grades etc.

So in summary, a branient video (you should be able to get a URL that we can open on the day) and pictures/whatever you think would enhance the presentation. Send these things to my email which is m.alford@rave.ac.uk."

so basically there are two key tasks here, creating a brainient video to provide an example of what we're pitching, as per the formative advice, and get some pictures to replace the walls of text.

James Hustler, who I hadn't me up to this point asked for a copy of the presentation, which I duly sent to him.

I then got nothing until the day the submission was due. I got two brainient videos at about 2 in the morning. Credit to Ric and Richard for trying here, they'd obviously had a little trouble with this and that. However, neither film was quite right. Richards was a little limited, and because the text he created were links to other pages which stopped the video it contradicted what I say in the pitch. Also of his two links only the first one worked. Ric's was good in that it didn't stop the video, but it didn't give you the choice to show or hide the pictures which goes against the interactivity. The developers could just put more pictures in the actual diary if they'd wanted to. Also, it was about 3 minutes long, which meant it would take up pretty much all our presenting time, and there were only 3 pictures in the first minute and a half.

So I did a video at the last minute. Contrary to the reports I'd got from Richard and Ric it was actually pretty easy to use for the basic level of functionality I wanted it for. I'd like to see some object partnership in future versions, which would make things like what I did a little easier. So for that you'd want to be able to upload pictures, which appear as text until you click on them, as opposed to having to create the text object and the picture object and then create seperate controls to have clicking one show the other and visa versa. If that even makes any sense. Apart from that though, I had the video I wanted in about half an hour, including download, edit and BrainStudio time.

A few days before the presentation I started to get a lot more messages asking to meet up before the presentation. I was going to be in before hand anyway doing other work, so it was no problem for me. I figured that they had one last chance to redeem themselves after helping very very little.