#individual video prototype

[clarasjournal]

After trying out a few different approaches to this Netflix gesture control assignment, I settled for this video prototype of the concept. I chose to go simple, easy and, for me at least, intuitive. As I’ve mentioned before I chose to go down this route of gestures because they bear resemblance to the gestures you go through when you’re watching something on a touch screen. I also chose them because of my experience of signals, where an up gesture means louder and a down gesture means quieter. The pointing towards the right means, in my book, forward. And the hand towards the screens is a clear stop sign to me, which I also interpret to be almost like an off/on switch, you do the same motion to toggle between the two statuses. 

Due to some issues with iTunes I have been unable to download iMovie, and had to use an online service called clipchamp, which unfortunately made for the poor quality in both sound and visuals. I hope to have iMovie installed before the next video prototype I am about to do.

The prior storyboard for this video prototype looked like this:

It shows only the gestures without much content. The content I added to the video was a person sitting/half lying down in her sofa lazily watching a tv-show without much will of actually doing something that requires her physically engaging. Such as moving out of her comfortable position to get the remote control. This gesture control enables for a person to lie/sit however they want and still, without having to get out of their position, being able to control their screen.

I find this gesture control to be very interesting, and I think a lot of people would like to have something like this in their homes. Although, I can’t speak on people’s behalf, only on mine, since I haven’t been out in field doing research on this subject. I do see an issue with this gesture control and that would be if you were more than one person watching the tv. With a remote control there’s only one that can be in charge of the control at a time, but with gesture control - everyone can be in charge all the time. Say, for example, you’re out at a sports bar watching football on a screen that enables gesture control. When there’s a goal people might raise their hands, and the screen might interpret this as a motion to raise the volume, which in turn might dissatisfy the people watching the game - because that wasn’t their intention. However, you might have a feature that comes along with this gesture control that can disable and enable gesture control with a remote control, making the person in charge able to switch between these two modes.

Using a storyboard for this project and the other video prototype has been really helpful in seeing the video in your head before you shoot it. In this assignment I did everything individually and for my own sake. The storyboard I chose to make is very simplistic, but made me realize how to go about and how to convey my message of using gesture control in the simplest most effective way. In the group video prototype assignment I was not the one doing the storyboard, Isak was, and his storyboards did a fine job of translating our collective but abstract idea of the video to a concrete “shootable” video.

[clarasjournal]

Initial video prototyping

I’ve begun filming myself watching Netflix while using gestures to control pause/play, volume and skip. It’s going so and so, I don’t have any prior skills in video making and even less in video editing. With that said it’s clear that video prototyping is completely new to me, but also very interesting.

I decided to stick with my initial idea of making the gestures as simplistic as possible, making it possible to perform them even lying down - as I'm doing in the GIF example above. I find this as intuitive as possible as well, turning UP the volume by gesturing an “up”-motion with your hand, and turning DOWN the volume by gesturing a “down”-motion with your hand. To pause I’ve decided to keep the motion as similar to the commonly known gesture for “stop”, and I decided to have the same motion for play, since it is a function that is either on or off. Example below:

So when it’s playing it will pause when this “stop” motion is gestured. When it’s paused it will play when this “stop” motion is gestured. I chose it because it have certain similarities to when you’re watching something on an interactive screen - where you tap the screen both when you want to pause and when you want to play. It is also similar to using a remote control where you push the same button when you want to pause or play. To skip I decided to gesture to the right with my hand. This is also similar to how you do it on an interactive screen and a remote control - signing you want to move forward. Example below:

From here I will try to make a coherent video displaying my thoughts on how gesture control could work for Netflix-watchers without using my voice or text. My vision is for it to be simple enough for everyone to understand as effortlessly as possible.