Rene van Veenhuizen

EKT2C

Our project

Project FAT was the last and biggest project of our academic year. I really liked the project,  because it was together with a team that all had their individual skills. You can really good see that every group member could implement their skill where everybody could benefit from. Besides it was also a good learning experience, because you could learn from those skills and help each other.

We made a scavenger hunt for our project. We wanted that everyone who uses our installation learned about the historical objects of Enschede. We called it ‘Sneaky Finders’. In the scavenger hunt you will be directed across 5 locations in the city center. The old church, fire monument, Café Bolwerk, Bombardement and van Heekplein. We called it ‘Sneaky finders’, because together with our character ‘A thief’ you will enter a story that he tells where he wants to rob the safe. Our installation contains a safe with 5 dials due to the 5 locations we have. At each location you will get a short animation explanation that our character gives with a little backstory of the location. After this explanation you will get a question, after giving the correct answer you will get a number for the first dial. When you answered all the 5 questions you need to return to the safe and enter the code you received. We made an interactive installation combined with your mobile to discover Enschede in a fun and intuitive way (focused on 12+ target group).   

Myself

My tasks

My main task was to provide the team with good looking animations containing the message that we wanted to achieve. I think I can be proud of what I made, the end result is better than I hoped for. Dennis and Ruben helped me out with their illustration for the animation. In total I made 7 animations: Logo animation, Introduction video and question video 1 till 5. All the videos combined make a great coherent product.

Learning goals  (dutch)

Improving my English grammar

During the project my primary task was animating. Next to animating, writing blogpost was also my task. This, because I wanted to improve my English grammar. I think that I succeeded in accomplishing this learning goal. That is, improving my thought of how to formulate this sentence instead of translating it directly from the Dutch language.

Letting go of ideas

Listening to others and letting go of my own ideas has always been a struggle for me. With my selfish mind I always think that my idea is the best idea. At those moments I am isolated from the group and I do not completely hear what others have to say. I found that very difficult, because I did get some comments about that in the past. I need to be more open to the ideas from others.

I started to implement this during the project. For instance, we had to draw an illustration of our stand/installation. I began to draw and I quickly realized that I preferred my own drawing over the other ones. But, after a chat with my group I realized that I isolated myself and didn’t look good at the drawings of my team members. I learned a lot from that moment.

Improve my animation (storytelling)

I can make animations, but I want to make my animations with a better story. Animating a cube from left to right is easy. Improve this with effects is also doable, but I need to give animations more of a story. I knew that I could ask team members for help. Together with Ruben I made a script. The script is what you will see on screen and sentences for the voice over.

Open towards other ideas

This makes a good bridge to ‘letting go of ideas’. When I stay to long with an idea, then I am less open to other ideas. Conscious and unconscious.

Summary

I had a lot of fun working at this project and with my team. We had a bit of a slow start, because we really were stuck in the concept phase. After we had a concept everything went well. I think we were one of the first teams with an actual working machine. I learned a lot from my team members, because everyone had their own skill.

The team

I really think we are a great varied team. Everybody followed his/her tasks. In the end, I am very proud at our installation and the team, everything came together nicely.  

My team consists of:

Marco Engineer/Scrum master

Marco was our scrum master and mainly focused on our technical part of the installation.

Myself Animator

I was the animator of the team and I wrote most of the blogposts.

Dennis Illustrator

Dennis was our main illustrator and worked a lot on our concept.

Femke Promotion/writor

Femke was head of promotion and wrote together with me blogposts.

Sinan Coder

Sinan made the entire website, he is a really good coder.

Ruben Art director

Ruben worked as our art director. The looks, the coherent product and al the final decisions were made by Ruben.

We all worked on the installation, from laser cutting objects to painting the installation. We also came together at the lessons of Sarah as a team. We did get to know each other better and we could speak up if there was something wrong.

During the project we worked with ‘Trello’ for our scrum method. Every group member followed and did his/her tasks. Working with Trello worked very well and the planning went spot on.

We are approaching the end of the project. The site, animations and the safe are almost done! Before we want to publish our scavanger hunt to the public we wanted to test our geolocations.

We started at Koelink where our stand will be placed. Sinan enabled a dialogue of notifications, because then we could see how far away we were from the actual place.

Sinan fine tuned the locations after the test, and we are very confident that our scavanger hunt will work very well.

Below this text you can see some screen shots of how close we actually were from the Bolwerk point.

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Before we can use the VO we recorded, we need to cut and stitch all the sounds together. For every video Rene (due the animations) cut al the recorded material and stitched it together. Every recording has a different peak in sound level. I needed to level all the peaks for the videos to make it more coherent. There are always false takes or mistakes, I needed to sort these out and make it one good take.

I used premiere, because then I could align the animation better to the sound. Next to the stitching I check if every VO is correct and complete. I check the VO together with the online script.

Together with the team we decided to participate in a city tour in Enschede. We participated to get some more information about the city that we can use for our storyline and our questions. Through this tour we hope for information that we cannot find on the Internet, some special facts that only the city guide knew.

Dennis contacted the oldest tour guide he could find, his name was Frits Heijne, he is 83 years old. Frits was a very enthusiastic man and wanted to show us everything Enschede could offer.

We told him that we want to wanted specific information about our questions. The second world war borbardement, bolwerk, old church and the van Heeksquare.

We recorded Frits while he was speaking to ensure we have all the specific information, in case we want to use any of it. Frits told us a lot of facts we did not now, he knows a lot Talking about one subject he also quickly changed topics and went on to other facts, sometimes not useable for our project.

He even went into the Bolwerk like it is his own place, grabbing things off the wall and sitting down to show us more information.

Next to all the information we received we also received al lot of pictures from Fritz that you cant find on the web, such as images from the bombardement and the big church.

Rene a Ruben made an animation script. Included in the animation script is a visual sentence how the final animation will look and a the text that will be read by a VO. Yellow is what you see and blank is the VO. We wanted to tell the story in his perspective.

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Today we made improvements on our safe. We laser-cut our dials for the safe, cut our brand mark and started to paint our safe.

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For our animation introduction video Rene made animations based on his animation script. Ruben en Dennis designed some graphics for the animations. Rene made all the animation in After effects the main program for 2D animation. The animation video contains an introduction animation and after that a step by step explainer what to do in the scavenger hunt. All the graphics have the same style to be consistent. The site, animation and promotions have the same style.

In the two images above you can see my workflow. I work with pre-comps to make things more clear for the next person who enters my project and for myself. You can compare a pre-comp with a map that contains multiple layers. In adobe premiere it is called ‘nest’. In the first picture you see all the pre-comps color coded. If you double click inside such a pre-comp you will be directed to the image above this text.

To find all my images, sequences etc I work with a very detailed archive. VO for the voice-overs, SEQS for all the compositions. With an archive like this it is easy to search objects in the project and for others members the project is more clear.

For our safe we wanted our brandname cut and painted. We will place the brandname on top of our safe. This is to have extra decoration and make clear who we are.