User Interface Design in Filmmaking - Term Paper Example

Use of C# in Filmmaking (UID) Name Institution Use of C# in Filmmaking (UID) Introduction Communication is an important component of any learning activity, and more so for children’s learning. Studies suggest a strong co-relationship between social behaviors and communication skills. Whereby children with weak communication skills tend to poses weaker social abilities, and this may ultimately have an effect on their academic performance. The making of films involving cartoons can be a useful teaching aide which can help in evoking learner’s creativity and develop their communication and social skills (Bygate, Swain & Skehan, 2013). Therefore, this application will entail a tool which enables children to develop their own cartoon films with the objective of influencing their behavior in learning. The animation of characters in the film can help to make learning more interesting and engaging hence influence the attitude of children towards learning. This will involve a functionality which permits users to record their dialogue and actions and then convert them into cartoon films. The idea of this application is a derivative of the actual 3D animation filmmaking process. Therefore, the children will have the opportunity to learn the process involved in producing an animated film while developing their communication skills at the same time. The application will utilize conversations and related gestures of the children to build their communication skills. The end product will be a 3D film, made of the recorded voices, expressions and body gestures selected by the users. Requirement specification The main users of this model are school going children aged between 9 to 12 years, who need to build their basic communication and social skills. The application will provide three 3D characters, a boy and two girls. To start off, a story will be required in order to form the foundation of the film. This model will involve two alternatives for the users to pick from in forming their story; to either pick from the provided list or customize their own. The second option is necessary in achieving the objective by including a functionality that permits children to explore their creativity and for teachers to guide them during the process. Once the users have established the content for their story, they will record the dialogue to be employed in making their film. Samples are to be offered by the program to act as a guide on how to enhance the dialogues and include more creativity in terms of using various emotions in their speech according to various situations. The application has a tool which will permit the users to listen to the sample and then perform a comparison with their own speech to achieve a quality production. The users will also be required to develop expressions to match the various conversations. They will need to determine the number of expression to match the dialogue in the film. The application contains a sample of 12 inbuilt expressions as well. After making a decision on the intended expressions, the users will perform and record each of them accordingly using a webcam/camera as illustrated in fig. 1. The process will need a background location to match the context of the story. The application will list the alternative scenes with each of them to be taken in a factual environment. Design During a real filmmaking process, there are some basics steps followed whether it is in cartoon/animation production or normal films. The design of this film will follow the basic film production process as its basis. The application is aimed at capturing and developing the learning conduct of primary school children through making cartoons films. However, unlike the normal filmmaking process which requires collaboration among different skilled individuals in order to produce the complex movies especially animations (Fallman & Moussette, 2011). In this case the process has to be simplified as much as possible for the children lacks the skills and competence to much such standard of production. Therefore, in order to achieve the pedagogy value of the application, the design concentrated on making the process as simple as possible while meeting the objective of enhancing the learning process of the user. The process will utilize the principles of user interface design to enhance the user experience and consequently achieve the objective of the application. User interface design refers to the controls and visuals of the application, while the user experience is the application’s behavior in relation to user interface and the emotion evoked in the user from using the application (Microsoft, 2015). These principles are utilized in linking the physical and cognitive capacity of the children to the system design. In satisfying the needs of the user the following basic principles of an appropriate user interface are incorporated; Size, grouping, spacing and positioning, and intuitiveness. The windows and frames are designed in a manner which doesn’t misrepresent the theme of the film. The grouping, which relates to the manner in which the controls in the application are categorized, are positioned in a manner that enhance the user experience for instance controls which lead to similar outcomes are suitably performed by Group controls. Intuitiveness forms one of the key aspects in this case that involving children, for it simplifies the user experience, by reducing the cases of explanations, because the user understands what each controls does (Microsoft, 2015). Under intuitiveness, the coding of colors forms a key component for example a red color is used on exit, delete, and shut down buttons to sound like a caution. The model utilizes pre-defined resources including, animations, sounds, and characters available in tools like Microsoft movie maker, and MediaStage. The children will utilize the pre-defined resources together with their own formed images and gestures to create a movie based on their own story. In the case of the webcam which can be utilized instead of a camera, Microsoft utilizes the principles Ergonomics which is concerned with the understanding of human interactions in relation to the elements of a given system by appreciating the knowledge we already have about users (humans), their competence, limitations and individualities (Gaines & Monk, 2013). The use of ‘’ My Webcam’’ is suitable for our target users, children, who can capture simpler language for they lack the technical skill and knowledge. The design incorporates all this factors to ensure children easily record their own voice, form and record gestures, connect each animation to the corresponding voice, and finally come up with a movie. Limitations and delimitations The application lacks the ability to offer feedback which is an important aspect of pedagogy in an effective learning process. This is because the application will act as a teaching tool to children of different intellectual and psychological abilities therefore causing lack of consistency and preciseness in interpreting the gestures and various emotions in voices. To counter this limitation, the application is designed to be used by a set of users to allow one to act a channel of feedback to the other, along with feedback from the teaches, other students or a guardians. Implementation The application utilizes a general framework of Microsoft visual C#. Released in 2000, C# is an object-oriented Microsoft programming language for web development and networking. Apart from the ability of its NET framework to support several Web technologies, C# is an improvement and more of an update to most of C and C++ elements. The improvement entails its ability to support scalability and versioning, automatically using garbage collector to manage inaccessible object memory. With these features plus a couple of other attributes that comes with C#, it can be used in various projects. The applications used in creating the 3D movies need to be efficient and speedy because they involve a lot of huge data, plus various calculations per second. Therefore, the efficiency with which C# handle its tasks is vital in order to reduce the time taken in making the film for instance the process of producing the shots (Wills et al, 2010). The 2D interface will be used to manage the pre-defined 3D characters. The other requirement needed to implement the application includes a webcam and a microphone to capture and record the speech and gestures. The process will entail 3 stages; recording of the speech, the recording of the gestures and then the actions. The action is to be guided by a timeline just like in real films to solve the complexity that may arise from the process of combining the speech, gestures and their corresponding 3D character. Every user has a turn to speak with the guidance of a timeline which depends on the duration taken in recording their speech. The users will select and add expressions/gestures on the timeline from a list they had initially produced. Each shot will be performed repeatedly to achieve a perfect expression to match the recorded speech. The users have a platform that allows them to view the progress of their recordings by simply clicking on ‘play’. The figure 1.below Show a sample of a created animation .To make the process easier for new users the application contains a tutorial to guide the users on the steps. Fig.1: Designing an angry expression Source (Author) The ultimate stage will be conversion of the 3D characters into film. This will also include assigning a title to the film and the necessary credits. The film can then be saved in the computer or reproduced in DVD-discs or posted, and shared on a school website for possible reviews and feedback from the members of the class and the teacher. Testing To achieve the best results possible, it was/is necessary to perform a usability test before launching the application especially aimed at the User interface. This involves a sample test group of primary school students and the developing team. The test helps in identifying areas for possible corrections and improvement hence reducing the chances of future complications and complains relating to the application’s user experience, usability and functionality. Discussion Effective teaching should aim at establishing a favorable environment that helps in the achievement of the goals of an education system. This sums up to the development of intelligent, whole-rounded learners who owns the necessary tactics and metacognitive methods that will make them create meaningful links with their knowledge foundation and transfer their acquired skills to the challenges encountered in life and even beyond . Communication plays a significant part not just in delivering and receiving the knowledge, but also in modeling the thinking process of individuals (Bañados, 2013). Communication especially in children can be enhanced by consistent practice. However, due to developments in the modern world including security concerns and changes in social patterns, guardians are faced with the challenge of providing the platform where they can practice and develop the communication skills of their children by talking to them. Security issues cannot permit children to freely go out and engage with their friends without a person to look after them. School, remain one of the safe environments where children can practice this skills, but they are also faced with their own challenges which hinder developing this key skills. These challenges come from the demands that are brought by other curriculum activities which consumes much of the available time. The challenges include the student/teacher ratio which may not give the teacher the appropriate time to give full attention to every child’s progress in development of skills, in this case communication (Cote & Levine, 2014). From this background, a properly controlled online platform can be a great avenue for children to socialize. However, this avenue is also faced with its own challenges which include security and the curricular burdens on the children, making it difficult for most of them to practices and develop their communication skills (Cote & Levine, 2014).).However, the school can develop a website and assign a segment for children to meet, post, and share educative resources. This websites provide a safe platform for it can be controlled by an administrator under established policies that are appropriate for users. The teacher also has the ability to review student’s works and make feedbacks as he tracks their progress. With this application schools can utilize their website to enhance learning process by enabling students to build, post, and share their creative work. Studies have suggested a great influence of cartoons on children creativity and psychological development. The cartoons can evoke imagination, advance good conducts when utilized in various parts of the school curriculum (Mayesky, 2014). This application utilizes cartoons to build children in their communication skills. The application great focus is on educating the children at the same time playing an entertainment role. Conclusion The project captures the importance of user interface design in capturing the user experience; this case involves promoting the development of children’s communication skills. The simplicity, effectiveness, excitement, and user friendliness of the application greatly affects the level of achievement gained from the intended purpose of the application. More so, these aspects are not achieved easily, because the friendlier the application becomes, the more complex the process of developing it gets. Therefore, usability test are necessary to enhance the quality of the final product. References Bañados, E. (2013). A blended-learning pedagogical model for teaching and learning EFL successfully through an online interactive multimedia environment. Calico Journal, 23(3), 533-550. Bygate, M., Swain, M., & Skehan, P. (2013). Researching pedagogic tasks: Second language learning, teaching, and testing. Routledge. Cote, J. E., & Levine, C. G. (2014). Identity, formation, agency, and culture: A social psychological synthesis. Psychology Press. Fallman, D., & Moussette, C. (2011). Sketching with stop motion animation. interactions, 18(2), 57-61. Gaines, B. R., & Monk, A. F. (2013). Cognitive Ergonomics: Understanding, Learning, and Designing Human-Computer Interaction. P. Falzon (Ed.). Academic Press. Mayesky, M. (2014). Creative Activities and Curriculum for Young Children. Cengage Learning. Microsoft (2015). User Interface Principles. Retrieved on 3rd, Nov 2015 from: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ff728831%28v=vs.85%29.aspx Wills, A. C., Jones, G. A., Seemann, J., Cook, S. J., & Kent, S. J. (2010). U.S. Patent No. 7,681,176. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Read More