• Goals:
  • To practice rapid storyboarding animation for communicating high level use case scenarios to clients.
    • Using informal animation to illustrate an idea or a concept is a powerful technique that is especially useful in the early prototyping phases of application development. While a commercial tool, such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft PowerPoint, may enable its users to create relatively sophisticated animations, their animation interface can be quite cumbersome for a designer who wishes to quickly sketch out an initial prototype version of an animation.
  • To reflect on storyboarding methods and what their relative strengths are.
    • This assignment is meant to inspire your creativity, flex your design muscles, and give you a chance share your own designs in class. The assignments are meant to be lightweight and fun.
• Assignment
  • K-Sketch, an open source animation program created by Richard Davis enables novices to easily create informal
    animations from sketches.
    • For background you can read the K-Sketch CHI paper available here: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1357122
  • Watch the 6 demonstration videos available here to see how to use it: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=1128A3D949137993
  • Install a version of K Sketch
    • You will need a Windows PC to use K-Sketch. A tablet PC is ideal.
  • Prototype the storyboard for your project using K-Sketch
    • You animation should be between 1 and 4 minutes
    • It should have minimal text
    • It should be understandable by anyone in our class who knows what your project is.
    • Do not worry too much about polishing the “look” of your sketches, especially if you feel you are not a good “artist”. Instead focus on conveying the concept through the animation.
    • Export your animation file as a flash file
• Lead a discussion of your idea
  • Present your animation
    • It should be a .flv file from K-Sketch
  • Digital documents can be carried in on a flash drive.
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  • Each person in the audience will fill out an anonymous questionnaire like this:
    • How prepared was this group? 1 2 3 4 5
    • The animation effectively conveyed the concept of the intervention (not a question about artistic ability)? 1 2 3 4 5
• Grading
  • 75 points effectiveness of flash animation
  • 25 points presentation
  • 15 bonus points if you create a second story board using a different technology and compare and contrast the two at the end of your presentation.

 

Thanks for James Landay for the idea for this assignment.