Project 1 – Visualisation of 5 Statistics

In this task we were required to choose five statistics from Harpers index or another agreed source and present them in a animated or interactive piece.  The purpose of this task was to discover ways that statistics could be displayed in a more interesting manner that people would enjoy watching.  We were arranged into groups of 3 students.  I was in a group with David and Brendan.  We decided to do facts about the human body.   We found our 5 facts from this website http://facts.330.ca/body/ .

Process

Initially we had a look through the list of statistics that we were given and discussed what we would like to do.  We decided that we wanted to do something non-serious as we wouldn't need to worry about “political correctness” or offending people.  We wanted to do a neutral topic that people can relate to.  We came up with doing facts about the human body, such as the length of hair on a head or something.  We found the website: http://facts.330.ca/body/ which listed around 50 to 70 facts. 

We selected around 15 – 20 facts that we liked.  The are here [rtf].

We were told that it would be easier and more effective to use facts with a numerical punchline so we selected around 10 facts that we would narrow down.  Those facts are available here.   Note that the original ideas were quick brainstorms and were not used. The next couple of weeks were spent individually going through the list and brainstorming possible ideas.  In this time any imperial measurements were converted to metric and I rephrased the facts so that the numerical result was at the end like a punchline.  The updated list with brainstorms is available here.  In these lists we have five main ideas that we were happy with, as well as three ideas that we could fall back on if the others couldn't work for some reason.

After the facts were chosen (and we settled on the main five) we each went away and came up with a different way of displaying facts.  We settled on David's idea of animating the text and fading images in and out.  We would use photos from stock.xchng website that we were shown in class as they were of a good quality.  I liked this idea because I knew it would be feasible and we could create it in the time required, since we aren't very good drawers.  From Ian's (our tutor) lecture on After Effects we knew that we could easily animate text and images also.  For our purposes the animations didn't have to be too complex, as long as the style got the point across. In the tutorial David and I brainstormed [.jpg] the facts and we developed a list of possible photos and animation styles. The photos we were going to use were photos of people or things that are representational of the fact itself.  We also designated roles to each other.  David did the “The equivalent number of times a person will walk around the equator in an average lifetime.... 5” and “Humans shed about 600,000 particles of skin every hour.  The amount of skin the average person will have lost by age 70 ... 50KG”.  Brendan did “A sneeze can exceed the speed of ... 160 km/h.” and the title and credits.  I did “The speed that nerve impulses travel to and from the brain ... 274 km/h.” and “The percentage of the human body that is comprised of water ... 80%”.

Team Process

Over the next few weeks we were mainly working on our own sections of the project.  We had decided not to worry about music until we had all five facts (and title and credits) put together.  We gave ourselves two facts each and Brendan one fact and the title and credits because they would roughly evenly distributed.  We mainly worked on each section by ourselves, although we did e-mail smaller sized versions of our drafts to each other for some comments.  We agreed each to end the fact in a similar style with the punchline by itself on the screen.  As we were all following a similar style with fading photos and moving text, we were able to put everything together in After Effects easily.  Even though one of our group members didn't turn up for several of the meetings, he came through in the end and made his sections.  I found the music from some royalty free music which we had access to that sounded quite good, and Brendan made it loop in Garage Band.

Individual Contribution

As mentioned, the two facts I worked on were “water %” (as we called it in discussions) and “nerve speed” (as we called it, again an abbreviation).  I found all my images from http://www.sxc.hu and all the animation was done in After Effects (or AE for short).  To make distribution easier outside of uni, I decided not to use any photos where the photographer required permission, and I added any authors to my favourite authors list the site, if they required notification when using their photo in public work.  This way I could just email them all saying I'm using it.

I found animating the photos and text was relatively easy and trouble free.  It was however a time-consuming task as I had to keep checking key frames and transforms.  Though AE had several features to make this task much easier.  Like the ability to copy and paste key frames and change their order with out breaking the animation.

When we had almost everything ready I started putting them all together in one big After Effects composition.  Again AE had some nice features to help with this.  I could simply copy David's AE file and assets to the folder I was using and import it into the same file, as a different composition.  Although Brendan was using Flash to create his titles and sneeze fact, this didn't really pose any problems in AE except that we need him to edit it.  Though of course we could still put in fades and any other transitions in AE.

Reflections

During our final presentation we were given some overall comments about the work, and the chance to fix them up before the actual hand in.  These were minor issues like some timing, typography, and visual effects.  Following are some of my main changes.  For the nerve speed it was suggested I make the white flashes brightness increases instead of just white solids.  When I did I agreed that it is much better looking and more interesting.  I adjusted some timings for the water % and made the final number stay on the screen longer.

You can view the version we presented initially here, and the version with the corrections here.

I learnt not to render from After Effects over the network! The problem is that it has to download the images off the network drive the extra time adds up.  It also means that you can't render if the network goes down.  I liked being able to learn AE and discover the nice photos on stock.xchng (sxc.hu).

I'm quite satisfied with the way the project turned out. Comparing the version we presented initially, with the version we submitted, I believe that the corrected one is much more interesting to watch and gets the point across much more effectively.