gear-shift

the previous entry will have to do in terms of Imagine Cup info and tips for now. i’ll add the ones about Cairo and maybe one about our final presentation sometime in late september. the thing is, whoever winds up here looking for Imagine Cup hints is going to go into full-throttle around next spring anyway. our blog will see a shift in focus towards our developing business and towards UpCity as an upcoming commercial product.

right now, our main focus is the pilot deployment for the Iasi cityhall. so until early september, all our time is dedicated to customizing the platform and improving it for our city. we’ll bring news as soon as it goes live. see you then!;)

Filed under: upcity , Iasi, news

ic 2009 journal, 6th entry: pre-finals

for round 1A of the finals we had to first deliver a 10min video presentation of our project. the deadline was mid-june, so after the national finals we had a full month left to improve the project. this was also the time when all of our exams were scheduled, so we obviously pushed everything until the last moment.

and by that i mean the very last moment, our first upload was one hour before the deadline, then we got  unhappy with the encoding and added a little more detail, uploading a second version half an hour before the deadline. we then realized that because of the summer daylight-savings we had a whole extra hour left! so we worked a little more on the credits, reencoded the whole thing and sent it a third time. the smaller version is still available on our team’s page here.

a few points about the film:

• we used Camtasia for screen-captures and editing, by the end of the night Andrei was a real wizard at using it. he’s also to blame for the end-of-the-world style intro
• all of the footage was taken from Home, we really need to thank its makers for releasing it under a Creative Commons license! i got to see it a few days before our deadline, so we took advantage of that (at least two other teams used the exact same footage in their submissions).
• i was kind of a zombie on the night we did this, Calin and Andrei did most of the work splicing bits and pieces together while i sort of sat in a corner doing the narration. some of those phrases still haunt me to this day…

soon after sending the video, we stopped development, this time for good. from that point on, during the last two weeks or so all of our efforts focused on presentation and branding. we had this nice tutorial with George Pristavu (a big thank you!) from Microsoft Romania, who gave us just the right skills to make a decent, role-based, emotionally balanced, subliminally-charged presentation. maybe not the last part

i don’t think we’re the ones to give tips on what your films should look like, there were tons of other films that looked better than our own. for instance, the French guys had one that looked professional. so that’s it! on a hot summer afternoon, we took a flight to Bucharest and then it was on to Cairo!

Filed under: imagine cup 2009 , our story, tips