Final Video

I can't seem to upload my final video to my blog.  And when I exported the video from flash the timing of my soundtrack and the visuals changed and were out of time.  It wasn't like this on my swf file.

Music

Rostik - One day,Things Will All Be Different (MR.NiceGuy Remix)

I got the music for my video from the above link.  I chose this music because I wanted a fast pace track that would attract to the target market of teenagers to young adults.  But I also wanted it to relate to the topic of global warming.  If we carry on the way we're going with our energy consumption and don't change our ways "One day, things will all be different" but not in a good way.  I thought this the words in the song related well to the message I am trying to get across in my video.

Developed sequence

Here is where I explain the problem: Global Warming

To show that everybody is helping to contribute to Global Warming, I flick between a few everyday household things that use a lot of energy.

I want to convince users to use my application, so here I'm showing them how simple it is to record their usage...

...and then upload their data to EcoWorld by just plugging their usb into their computer.

I didn't want to make the video too long so I want to just include the three main features of my application.  The first is displaying information of their energy usage.

Introducing the second feature where users can compete against their neighbours in some "friendly competition".

To show the "friendly competition" I captured two neighbours shaking hands after they've viewed the results.

The third feature is the rewards, showing someone buying a solar powered phone.  I chose to show this phone as it is energy efficient, keeping with the "eco" approach.

What benefit does all this have:  It saves users money and helps save the planet. Users aren't going to want to use my application unless they benefit from it, therefore explaining the benefits is an important part of this video.

To finish it off I will show the application logo, to hopefully leave viewers at least remembering the name.

Influences for video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nks25eQfxWI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mnvvVi4HaI&feature=related

I don't want to have a voice over through my video, but instead text.  So I looked at some interesting ways of displaying text and I came across some of the above videos.  I really like how the text is animated and how the hierarchy, colour and movement relates to the word.  It makes the text a lot more interesting to read.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LamtBiGLzI8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btfbIVGES1I

I also looked at some ads promoting the iphone and ipad as these are really successful products.  I liked how they had reasonably fast pace, happy music in the background, quickly flicked through the main features and showed them on a white background with nothing else to distract you.

Video storyboard

What I want it to include:
The problem: Global warming, pointing out that my target market: teenagers to young adults, are also contributing to this by just using household items we take for granted.
The solution: EcoWorld, going through my application, showing the main parts of it and how you go about using it.
The results: Explaining what users get out of it and how it's helping to stop global warming.

Sound

After my application was finished I decided to add some sound to make it more interesting.  I added a "clicking" sound on the buttons and made the buttons get smaller when pressed so that users actually felt like they were pressing the buttons.  I added some background sound that includes nature and car sounds.  I thought this was kind of ironic and related to the purpose of my application well.  These days it's becoming less frequent that we only hear nature sounds with no cars in the background.

Data display

Originally I was going to have 4 pages which display data.  The first which shows you your percentage of water, electricity and gas usage, the second where you can build your house and see where you're using the most power,  the third showing a graph of how your usage has changed over time and the fourth, comparing you to your neighborhood.

Before creating the 4 pages I asked some users what they thought about these four pages.  The majority of responses I got were that:
- They liked how it showed you your energy usage in different categories, but that there should be more catergories than just water, gas and electricity.  They would be interested in seeing how cooking, water heating and space heating compared.
-  They thought that having the three completely different ways of displaying information wasn't consistent and was a bit too much information.
-  They liked the fact that you could drag and drop puzzle pieces to build your own house.  This added an element of interaction.
-  They liked how you could compare yourself to your neighbours to see how you were doing.

I took this into account and decided to keep the first page where you could see how your household energy usage was split up into categories.  I used the categories of water heating, space heating, cooking, refrigeration, electricity and other.  I decided to make it clearer that all these added up to show your whole households usage by making the pieces build up to make the shape of a house.  I really liked the look of this information therefore I decided to take out the "build your house" and other graph pages.

Having one page with the above information wasn't enough though.  I wanted to show the households monthly usage, weekly usage and daily usage.  Therefore I decided to make lots of layers.  You can click on the house to go deeper into the layers.  It will start with showing you your monthly usage and will break down into daily usage with each click.

With the "compare" page I kept the same idea but wanted to put the puzzle pieces of the neighbourhood inside a circle to represent the earth, as if it's comparing you to the world.