For week 10’s blog, it was supposed to be over the interactive analysis presentations that were presented in class this week. But then, coronavirus happened. I never would’ve thought how big of an impact this virus would have on every day life. Everything is changing, some good but mostly bad. Schools and Universities have shut down across the country and I truly don’t know how this is going to affect everything. At UNL, everything is cancelled and it kinda feels like we’re on summer break just taking a bunch of summer classes. In my opinion, it will be harder to remain focus on the school work needed to be done because you aren’t in the same mindset as you would be if you were going to class everyday. I often find myself not looking on canvas enough and missing important notifications that are key to the rest of the semester. I have a feeling that there will be some downfalls in classes where students are sort of helpless.

For our group project though, we have no issues. We are working on a website to upload our content currently and are still meeting together to film. Since we only have 5 people in our group, we don’t exceed the 10 person max gathering that the CDC is recommending. As long as everyone remains focused and healthy, I believe that we will be able to get this project done with ease. It will feel much different though.

This week for the interactive website presentations I thought my classmates found some great websites to present but my group is pretty focused on our concept which we have already started to produce. This week I was able to speak with my professor before class to assist me in narrowing down on what this interactive piece can be. I then brought this idea to my group in class that we should focus on quality of our media vs quantity. With this idea in mind we decided to re focus on 5 meals to make and produce them at an even higher level of production than our first attempt.

This week was also extremely eventful because of the rapid development of COVID-19. At the time of this escalation, I was in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the NCAA track & field national championship. Because of this I had to communicate with my team that we may need to reschedule when we can meet because of these developments. I still believe my team will easily be able to get this project finished. With this extra time before we meet to capture media, we will plan out more comprehensive ways to capture media .

This week for the interactive analysis presentations, two of our own members went so it was interesting to hear what they had to say. Jonathan did a good job on his finding a website that would most likely relate to the format and layout of our own. The website had very similar ideas and layouts that we had previously thought of, so it will be interesting how we have that example now but also how we should make differences. Their website had a lot of visuals, and due now to the lack of exchange our group will probably have to deal with, the visuals will be tougher to come by with all of us together.

For this week, I researched different tools and website formats that would best fit our project design. We were looking mostly at Wix for our website creation, but now we might be delving deeper into some deeper options. We got some filming and content figured out this past weekend but I will be working on relaying that over onto a website eventually. The biggest challenge has definitely been all of the classes being moved online now, and some people leaving Lincoln and doing this remotely will be hard.

I presented my Interactive analysis of a website this week and I believe that it went well but I should’ve done a few things before I started presenting. I learned that seven minutes doesn’t seem like a long time before you start presenting but after you start, you are just trying to make up time by saying little things. Before my presentation, I wish I would’ve researched more about the website and found more interesting topics on the website that I could’ve talked about. I feel like the videos I showed were interesting and my audience actually watched them I just wish I could’ve showed more than those videos. If I had a chance to do it again, I would try to use the same website, I would just change how I went throughout the website.

This week for our group project, we talked more about how were are going to start the website and which site we are choosing to make our website on. Now that classes got switched to all online, it will be interesting to find out what resources we have available to us. If there was one challenge for the week, it would defiantly be this and I think this would be the one main challenge for everyone. Luckily for us, a couple of our group members have most of the equipment we need to use for our project.

This week two members of our group presented and the one Jonathan did stuck with me. This is definitely the style of video we as a group would like to have on our website, of course, the camera angles would be different and a lot more interesting, we want to create a sense of a lot going on in videos. The only thing from this presentation we were missing was an algorithmic quiz that has set up responses to survey questions in order for the participant to choose their meals. We as a group have also taken into consideration that we will be adding more to the dishes we create, such as compliments, garnishes, and sides, just to make it look more visually appealing while it sits on a bland plate color. I particularly liked how the “Tasty” site had pictures, instructional videos, and actual text recipes, someone who has never cooked before could go on their website and easily create whatever they want to after they see it done in a video.

This week, Carson, Jonathan, and I filmed content at my apartment on Sunday. We set up studio lights, and two cameras, one for video and one for photos, on a tripod. I went to the store and bought ingredients to cook meals and started cooking. I ended up only cooking three for time reasons but we filmed a good amount of content with good lighting and resolution. In the future, we hope to have more of an idea on how to set up our equipment in the right spots more efficiently and be able to start filming earlier in the day so we can produce as much content as possible.

While we have not started filming our project yet, we have added our questionnaire to pick which kinds of food each member of the group will have to make for our project and that is one of the biggest parts of our project that puts everything that we have to do in to motion. I think our biggest thing is that we need to start filming our project and with different schedules, it is hard to get everyone to film on the same day, but we are confident now that we have a day where we can all film and get a lot of the video portion of our project done.

In retrospect, we probably should have scheduled the filming portion of our project sooner, but now that we have it nailed down, we have no worries that we can start to get it going on our first day of filming that we do. I helped with food contributions that we can add as options to our questionnaire because that is what a lot of us are working on at this point in our process since we have not started the main part of the project yet which of course is the filming of the cooking.

This week I was not able to attend class due to illness. This stopped me from learning about new interactive websites. However, this gave me the opportunity to plan out more of my groups project. The first thing I did was organize the information we had on our shared google doc and used this info to create a timetable of bench marks for the progression of this project. To help this process I also began to assign roles to the members of the group based on their strengths as well as their availability to different meetings. This added level of organization will help our project tremendously because we will have a great reference page of what we need, from who, when. This weekend we plan to capture a large bulk of our media which will also let us begin our workflow.

Expanding on what I saw last week from the group presentations, I believe our teams interactivity will come from the tailoring of our food dishes to the user after they complete a questionnaire to determine their best day of dishes.

Although we didn’t have any interactive presentations this week, I still have continued my research on options for when I present a website and I thought back to some of my personal favorites from last week who presented. I tried researching a few that interested me but also a few that could give me some pointers on how we can organize our project better. One of the main takeaways that we can implement into our own project is the format of a questionnaire on our website. Since we are dealing with food options and different recipes, etc., we decided a questionnaire would be most helpful for our readers. We’d have options that included vegetarian or not, or calorie-based, or even culturally different food options.

My contributions this week were mostly revolved around creating a questionnaire. We got a lot of new ideas that will really help our project be better in the end. We came up with some questions that will help guide our website so the viewers can navigate to what they want. But what I thought was that we won’t be able to create videos for a bunch of different meals, due to money, time, etc., so we will include recipes throughout the website to fill it out more.

Although we did not do actual presentations this week have been thinking of the ones I have so far witnessed. My group has decided we will do a questionnaire similar to the perfect shoe presentation. It will consist of a list of questions the user answers in order to find out what type of meal they’re in the mood for. For instance, it would start out with do you want breakfast lunch or dinner and whichever they choose it’ll be between bigger or smaller meals with what type of meat they want or even a vegetarian option. This will save everyone time and the user can personally find exactly what they are looking for. Since it would be far too much content to make a video for every single meal we cook, it would be more the complicated ones we show us cooking and the easier ones we post the recipe with pictures of what it should look like when they’re done. I think it is reasonable that we don’t make a video for every possible meal because of the time it would take and the money we as a group would spend to produce that type of content.

This week, Carter, Brennan, and I discussed what aspect to start out the project with, we have decided to start out with the graphic of our media group called Spicy BoysTM. Next I offered ideas on what meals should go with which questions and finally decided we as a group would cook vegetarian options for breakfast lunch and dinner. I also added more ideas to the preliminary content google doc we share as a group.

The interactive analysis presentations that have been discussed and shared so far throughout the class have all been great examples of what an interactive website should be like. When it is my turn to present, next Tuesday, I hope to find a website that is both interactive as well as appealing to the crowd. I hope I can find a website that is easy to discuss on and easy to show how interactive it is. I don’t want to just baby step through the whole website and then finish with an end solution. A couple of the presentations so far have been a little long and feeling like they were never going to end so I hope I can prevent this too.

For this week in our group project we had a lot of group communication on what the next steps needed to be in our journey. Our preliminary content is due today so we’ve been finishing up our five to seven page document with all the content we have so far. For work that I did myself this week, I worked on the questionnaire that we will ask our website users on what food they are craving that day. We won’t be able to make a lot of meals but our plan is around six so hopefully our website users will be able to find one they can enjoy. We have included vegetarian meals, lower calorie meals and gluten free meals.