ISHAC BERTRAN

The second assignement for the Video Prototyping week was to design a service around ‘energy saving’ topic. After a short brainstorming, we worked in pairs to develop the concept and sketch it. Together with Eric, we designed a service for increasing people’s awareness about energy and culture of maintenance for a better efficiency and longevity of our appliances and devices. We decided to sketch the concept using a doll, shooting in the stop motion studio. This allowed us to control the light and the sound (no voice over), probably the main issues when shooting with basic equipment.

We sketched the story, built the scenario and the props…

…and we shot until late at night. It was fun!

Probably we missed a bit the focus of the service in the first version. We had another day and a half to refine the prototype and put more emphasis in explaining the concept. More footage, editing and fun.

I enjoyed this week a lot. Music, sound, photography, lighting, props, communication… video prototyping is design.

Video sketching is one of the most powerful tools for communicating a concept to the project team or a client. Vinay explained us different techniques and tips for shooting, editing and producing video prototypes. Resolution and fidelity need to be adjusted depending on the purpose of the prototype, the target audience, the timeline and the resources.

As a first exercise, we were given a small text with blanks in order to imagine a story. Working in pairs, we shot the story and then we exchanged the tape with another team, editing their material trying to imagine what was the story line. Here the resulting videos:

We used iMovie for editing – simple, intuitive and enough for the majority of the video prototypes.