Question for your graphic genii

[MLeo]

You know me, no graphical talent at all. I lack the motor skill for it.

Still, in some time in the future, I have to give a presentation about my dissertation, which is 20% of my total score.
And considering I have quite a couple of message passing in my project, I would like to show a couple of movies showing how things work because they have the ability to clarify immensly.

To come full circle with my first line after the subject, considering I have no graphical talent at all, what would you suggest for me to use to create said movies?

Basicly, it would involve pipes, factories, "actors" (abstract sense) and envelopes (and mailbags).

I, and 20% of my score, thank you in advance for your suggestions.

[Senator]

Well, I haven't understood what the subject is going to be yet.

Is it going to be an artistic presentation, in a dark room with a projector where they get everything with the visuals and stunned by the "feeling", is it going to be a pen and paper powerpoint presentation where you will stop every moment and so and it's basically there to remind people that 2 factories, + other 2 factories = 4 factories... In other words, I think we need to know the subjects of the dissertation and the message.

If you already have the movie pieces, and you are asking which program to use to assemble them into a movie, I suppose windows movie maker could do it, but I haven't played much with it and I thinks it's very limited. I think much better, while reasonably easy to figure out (assuming it's not your last day), would be, if you could "find" it (insert personification of innocence smilie) Adobe Premiere, which is basically a photoshop for videos. You can have layers, transform them, have 3 videos play inside a video, make fade in out transitions in said layers, the speed of which etc you can control and so on.

[MLeo]

Ah, right, I was hoping to avoid that, since I need to write that down anyway.
I'm asking about how best to create said pieces of movies.

My dissertation is about a flexible system for BOINC and Folding@Home data aggregation and presentation and giving the user the ability to use a natural(ish) language to define events that are tested to new data, which in turn gives you the ability to recieve notifications over said events (e-mail, rss/atom, sms, twitter(? You know, you can give me some suggestions here as well)).

Now, while I have unlimited resources at my disposal (in theory only), BOINC and Folding@Home servers are research dedicated, they shouldn't have to so I do a bit of scheduling through prediction of the next update moment.
Now while I have unlimited resources, I want to be able to understand the code and architecture, so I made it "easy". So a user (could be the system, or a real user, ie. actor) asks for a "harvest" this request (envelope) goes down a pipe and gets processed, this in turn generates other requests. In case of Folding@Home I get to grok a 20MB large file full of data, which is where I get my mail bag being stuffed down a pipe idea from.


In short, my dissertation is about a webservice for those who like to watch numbers grow and shrink. And is actually intended as a technology showcase for the company.
Futher more, I need to give a presentation on this that will be 20% of my total score (40% work, 40% thesis and 20% presentation + defense), and I want to spruce my presentation up a bit, considering I have a stammer and start uttering mostly nonsense in a presentation because my mind starts to fall apart and go into lockdown when I speak.

[Senator]

Indeed because... you just did.

I have understood that it is 20% of your total score and how that one is made, because that was very clear, as far as the other part goes, I had to re-read the thing twice and trice in order to get some idea, and this is only through filtering it through my own knowledge, happening to know some of the terminology and knowing what BOINC and Folding@Home is.

And still I am not so sure if I have gotten it right.
I am still not sure what "events that are tested to new data" is supposed to mean, other than, events that are tested to new data.

So one important question is, your audience going to be at the same level with you?

Basically, it's a program, with an intuitive interface, where someone sends a request to the BOINC/Folding@Home servers and tells them to notify him once something that matches his request and its filter's over the type of data he expects, is found. That notification comes in the e-mail, rss/atom/sms/twitter etc. Right?

For example, let's put it this way, someone phones alien command and tells "clone me every green eye kitten on earth", a flying saucer comes to earth, finds all green eye kittens, flashes them with a beam, creating a kitten copy and then once it is finished the saucer commander phones(emails/messages etc) back to the alien command and says "all kittens have been found" while also sending him a crate full of kittens right?

(Thats not a presentation idea btw, I am just trying to get the feeling of what your program does)
Could it be simply described as "a Data Search Engine for computer networks like BOINC and Folding@Home", "where you if you don't immediately get a result, you can tell it to notify you once a result appears" ???

At any rate there are countless programs to do this. Could be Max, could be flash, problem is if you are not really good at them it might appear a bit crap so I really need to know what the, exact, message is.
If you want to use actors, then obviously you need a camera. That camera will either write the video to a cd/dvd which will make it easy for you, or you will have to take the video out of it with a cable. So chances are you will need a computer with a video in having card, capable of video capturing (some tv tuning or graphics cards have that) If the camera's video out cable (composite/s-video etc) seem not to match the video in of your card, don't worry there are adapters for all that (they are just cables, nothing expensive). There are many video capturing programs out there, chances are that whoever computer has such a card, will have one, or even windows moving maker (capture from video device option) and I can't check now, but surely premiere.

There are also places (well, except youtube) where you can find stock HQ video/segments to buy (are you allowed to do this?) eg, GettyImages. See for example an 1 minute clip of a conveyor belt shorting milk cartons and grab that to symbolize the concept of "processing", but I might be overthinking this.

I have found out that if you are really confident (thinking of all the others as the bunch of brains helps. Would you be intimidated by a floating brain?) and you use really short sentences you can make a good presentation with just white cards and symbols.

Look at Steve Jobs, he is amazing at this. Often his presentations just have a minimalist background with a big fat (nice) picture and a single sentence to the point. Then he explains that point reeeeally slowly to the idiots around him and then moves on.
Eg:

[MLeo]

I think we are getting out of sync here.


The "actors" thing is abstract, an entity, like, a smillie face holding an envelope (in the flash/avi/movie/PowerPoint animation rule) movie about the screen.

This, in the system represents a method call, but that's besides the point.

My question (for this thread) is about how to create said thing.


==========


If you are interrested, this is how the system works:
A person registers himself for the service (called iCrunchr btw) and sets up "watches" on accounts/teams in the various projects (or in case of the boinc framework even registering the account as his own).
Now, for every account/team in the system the iCrunchr system determines over time the most oppertune time to get the next harvest (why bother querying for a new result when it's the same as the old one?), and aggregates the data it gets back (from the "harvests").

In turn, the user enters event descriptions into the system, and when the system harvests data that could match the event description, it matches it, and when it matches then it gives the user a notification (be it e-mail, rss/atom, sms, twitter, btw, my "call" for suggestions is for this group, not the presentation, which is just the question above).

And the user gets to call another user: "Muhahaha! Me gotz more creditz than youz!".

The event descriptions themselves are intended to be usable for non-programmers, so they have to be "natural", of course, natural languages are still quite a mystery for computers (considering spelling/grammar checking not even remotely good) it has to have the appearance of being natural (so it has to be intuitive).

This is the current result:
Send me an e-mail when account "Senator" overtakes team "google" or when account "Senator" overtakes team "microsoft"


Now, the system has various "smart" things in place to make everything go smoothly, and it's for those things that I want to create movies to clarify things.

[Senator]

Flash comes to mind.
And the good thing is that there are plenty of tutorials like this one: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/animate_character.html
http://www.newgrounds.com/collection/flashtutorials.html

[MLeo]

Thanks, I'll have to take a better look at it in the morning.

The last time I tried flash (couple of months ago) I never managed to produce anything sensible from it.

[MLeo]

After some trying, I've determined that Flash isn't for me.

On the other hand, I've found a javascript library called "dojo" with a module called "dojox.gfx" which allows you to create SVG (and a couple of other formats) animations directly from javascript.

And considering Javascript is a programming language, it means that it's right up my street. ^_^ And I can use the result on the icrunchr website about page as well.

That is, assuming I produce anything viewable.


Thanks Senator!

[Senator]

Waitaminute.

Are you telling me that you are going to draw cartoons by programming and that is supposed to "easier"?

O.o'

[cordanilus]

I didn't know you can do that with Javascript.  Shows how long I've been away from Javascript.

[MLeo]

@Cordanilus: It's just a module of a library that outputs svg, vml or even Silverlight depending on the browser transparently.

@Senator: If I were to do this in Flash, then it would just look bad, if I do this in a browser through javascript, then it looks like programmer art. I know, fine distinction, but a distinction none the less.

I'll be uploading an example soon. ;)