fio-mar's Weblog

The Great Life Extension Debate

fiomar — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 02:39:04 +0000

Here’s our final video. It looks into the pros and cons of extending our human lives beyond their normal capacity.

To enhance the feeling of a debate we decided to animate our parts of the script separately then link them together so that there would be a clear distinction between the arguments for (white text) and against (black text) life extension. We also agreed to leave the debate open so that the viewer is left to decide where they stand on the issue.

CREDITS
* “The Great Life Extension Debate”
* Created By: Fiona McDougall and Marnina Herrmann
* YSDN 3009 section M
* Instructor David Gelb
* York/Sheridan Joint Program in Design
* Sound Effects from A1 Free Sound Effects, Pac DV and Soundsnap
* fio-mar©2008

Design Statement

fiomar — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:25:36 +0000

“The Great Life Extension Debate” provides viewers with the chance to learn about the ramifications, both negative and positive, of investing resources into technologies that would allow us, if not to live forever, than at least to live well into our hundreds. The video illustrates both sides of the story not only to give viewers an unbiased look at the issue, but also to allow the two of us to voice or separate opinions on the subject.

A bright colour scheme was chosen to enhance the liveliness of the debate and vector illustrations combined with bold text are used to visualize the argument. We decided against using a continuous musical soundtrack because we felt that it would compete too strongly against the voices of the debate, so instead we used some sound effects to draw attention to specific points and add a certain fun appeal to our animation.

While the subject itself, is an very serious ethical debate, we have presented it in a fun way, not to make light of the subject, but rather to try and reach a wider audience.

Finalized Creative Brief

fiomar — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 16:18:42 +0000

TITLE: The Great Life Extension Debate
OVERVIEW: Life extension and the technologies and ethical debates surrounding it are things that really interest both of us, so immediately we knew it would be a great topic to do our video on. After researching it though, we realized we had conflicting views on the subject, Fiona for and Marnina against. Rather that present only one side of the story we decided to present both sides in a debate format.
GOALS AND OBJECTIVES: We wanted to inform people of both sides of the story. Let them decide on their own whether it is important for us to invest our resources into trying to make people live forever, or at least well into their hundreds.
AUDIENCE: We feel that this is a topic that is relavent to everyone. It is an issue that effects humanity as a whole. Obviously it would be challenging to have “humanity as a whole” as our target audience being that many people in this world have no internet or even a computer to access this video, plus not everyone speaks English. That being said- we decided to gear this video towards the average person who has no or little scientific knowledge. We decided not to get into biology, biotech and biomedical engineering and talked more about ethics so we could attract a wider audience.
KEY MESSAGE: We would like or audience if not to have formed an opinion about whether or not we should invest resources into life extension technology, to at least be aware of the issue and be interested in finding out more.
CONTENT PLANNING: We have done a lot of research into the topic as you can read on the blog, but we have decided for the video to stick primarily to the information dealing with the ethical side of the debate. As we are presenting our own ideas in a debate form, we narrated the video itself. Graphically the content will be typographic, vector illustrations and lots of visual puns. We also included some relevant sound effects.
SCHEDULE: week 1- research into various topics and rough storyboards and ideas. week 2-4- creation of first script and storyboards and then creation of the final script and the began to create storyboards. week 5- creation of final storyboards. week 6- creation of audio storyboards and animation. week 7- finishing animation and combining animated scenes with audio and sound effects to create final video.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: Bibliography and research notes for our presentation can be viewed here.
The Nick the Greek video we watched in class was our major visual inspiration. Our end product looks completely different, but it gave us a good starting point.

Animation Test (with audio)

fiomar — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:04:39 +0000

Here’s the same test piece synced with our audio.

I’m not sure if we’ll have to re-record the audio after we’ve animated so that we don’t have to speed the animation up as much as this. It might be a bit too fast right now, we’ll see.

Animation Test

fiomar — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 06:03:30 +0000

Here’s a quick taste of what our final video will probably look like in terms of the animation.

Final Colour Scheme

fiomar — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 14:51:44 +0000

Here is the colour scheme we have decided to use for our final video.

Video Storyboard

fiomar — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 22:15:15 +0000

Here’s our complete video storyboard. It gives you an idea of how the animations will work with the audio script in terms of pacing and sequence.

***note***

* there are a ton of different coloured screens in this video, but it’s just to see how they look, our final will have a much less extensive colour palette.

* also, in a couple of spots the animation doesn’t match up with the audio cause we’ve made some changes to our script.

Final Story Boards

fiomar — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:05:04 +0000

Here’s some visualizations of how the animation will work with the script:

click to expand

***more to follow***

Design Ideas

fiomar — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 22:41:47 +0000

We’ve started thinking about what we want our final project to look like in terms of colours and so on…

Colour Tests

The black and white type represents the contrasting opinions in the argument – white representing pro life extension, black representing the opposition.

We thought some striking background colours would enhance the liveliness of the debate.

Life Extension Debate: SCRIPT RECORDING

fiomar — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 21:56:48 +0000

Here’s a pretty-much-straightened-out recording of our audio script.