About The Project:

Dramatic chipmunk is a game based on a popular 5 seconds video and is targeting the 35 million people who has viewed the video. We started this project with a main focus; to develop a single mechanic game and publish it on one platform (iPad) and as the game is being developed for other platforms (iPhone, Facebook) we will research and develop the game mechanics and add more features to engage the players even more. So far we have the game for iPad and iphone. We are in process of development of the Facebook version on a local server.

My Role:

My primary role on the team is project management. My main purpose is to achieve team-driven, collaborative success. I am responsible to develop the schedule to keep the project in scope and team members on task. A major part of my job is cultivating team culture and facilitating communication between the art team and tech team and our game designer. Since we have two part time team members who will collaborate with the team from a different location on some days, I am using PM tools such as Jira to facilitate communications and keeping everyone in the same page.  In order to keep the projects vision, I would need to be able to anticipate and mitigate problems before they happen. Therefore analysing the directions that our project could take and anticipating the complications and solutions for each is also part of my work process.

Follow our development process in our blog

Project length: 14 Weeks

Team DramaFast: Wei-Hua (Lucas) Huang, Glory Gong, Matthew Xu, Pallavi Maruvada, Laurent Giannnesini, Jamins Jia, Naz Madani

Imagery is my passion. I have always been drawn to photography and started professional photography about three years ago with taking courses in Langara College while studying visual art in Simon Fraser University. Now I’m casually taking courses towards a degree in photography. I enjoy photographing people, Painting with light and long exposure photography, Nature specially macro, Events and Underwater photography. I have officially photographed a few public events such as a golf event for Children’s wish foundation, BMO Marathon 2011 and a few private events and ceremonies. What I enjoy most about photographing people, whether its a street shot or a model shoot, is interacting with people and engaging them in the shoot or capture their reactions to the camera. Currently I’m working on a fine art street photography project that I have been working on for about a year now. I’m also working as a freelance commercial product photographer for a Vancouver based start-up E-commerce Company.

Ocean fascinates me with all that’s beneath it, with all the different kinds of interesting aquatic life. The first time I breathed underwater and freely enjoyed the weightlessness and floated through the amazing colorful mysteries world below, was 8 years ago. I knew that I will go back again and again and I did. I got my first scuba diving degree from PADI the Professional Association of Diving Instructors. Then I continued learning more and more about scuba diving and finally decided to go all the way and became a PADI instructor and started to teach as I was in collage. After two years I started my own scuba diving company and the first scuba diving school for women in Iran. From that experience I have gained business management skills, people relations and effective communication, Risk Management, calmness under pressure, and efficient decision making. One of the main abilities I have developed through this experience is to move on to solving the problem or rectifying the situation when things did not go according to plan instead of stressing out about the problem.

The most enjoyable part of my experience as a dive instructor was to help people who had difficulties due to fear or phobias from sharks or deep water, be able to scuba dive and in fact enjoy the experience. Back when I used to work for a resort my manager used to say that all my customers where happy after their experience. I also implemented a few marketing strategies that helped increased our customers and I came up with an idea for underwater photography service that made it very popular and increased the revenue of the company from underwater photo service with a noticeable amount.  That in fact was one of the reasons I could build a reputation and finally started my own dive resort while maintaining a great relationship with my previous employer.

About The Project:

Kawa Monsters is a collaborative game development project with Skybox Labs. In our team we are working to develop an iPad game for kids. The game focuses on combat between two players issuing commands to creatures in a turn-based structure. Drawing inspiration from traditional trading card games, the team is striving to improve on these staples to create a simple and interesting gameplay experience in a multi touch environment.

My Role:

As a Project Manager I am in charge of keeping the team on task by creating a schedule and following through as the project develops. Part of my tasks is developing a scope vs. capacity analysis to decide if we are able to finish what we are planning in time or we have to reconsider and scope down based on the design pillars and what matters most for the game. Being the pm of the team I am responsible for facilitation of the communication in the team if need be and all the communication with our client Skybox Labs.

 Development Process

Project length: 14 Weeks

Team Monsterholic: Jordan Groves, Joney Shang, Matthew Xu, Pallavi Maruvada, Lily Zhao, Quincy Sun, Naz Madani

About The Project: 

OOBE is exploring the next step of virtual reality by combining cutting edge technology to create a never seen augmented reality experience. By the use of augmentation, head mounted displays, motion detection and video cameras the user becomes part of a virtual environment without loosing any real world abilities. The user can explore and interact in a virtual reality environment. She sees herself in this environment through video glasses from different perspectives from different cameras. The video feed from the camera will be augmented with 3D animations based on the application in use. Our future goal is to create a console combining this technology all together using the head mounted virtual reality displays, Video camera and the computer working as the server for integrating the information. This console will be a platform for different application, which could be, used in various genres such as Games, E-‐Learning, 3D Modeling, Engineering, Sports, Medicine and many more. As sample application to show case the possibilities of the console we are developing a 3D virtual reality Music visualizer. Music visualizations give great opportunities to play around with all possibilities given by this technology. We won’t be able to deliver a finished product but we will deliver a sample application and main marketing concepts for the console.

Because of the unique combination of different technologies, it will be challenging to come up with a fast workflow. Bringing together music visualizations on one side with a smooth user experience and a consistent interface design on the other side is a process no one of us has ever gone through. It demands a highly integrated design process where common design methodologies might not be appropriate anymore. By using easy to use frameworks like Processing we will try to combine the design and programming process as much as possible without loosing the eye for the final aesthetics of the application

My Role:

As a project manager my task was mainly to keep the global vision of the team and keep everyone on the same page while scoping down to time constrains and budget limitations. Coming from diverse cultures and characteristics smoothing out the communication between the team members was an implicit task, while I largely feel responsible to meet the needs of every team member. Part of my responsibility was to make sure the deliverables are in fact delivered. Through experience I learned how to do that efficiently without coming off as either too soft or too authoritative which could be destructive or discouraging for team members. Therefore I consider that as one my major challenges and I think I’m still learning about it everyday. Figuring out a way for everyone to be involved and avoiding members disengagement from the teamwork while avoiding frustration of slowed down process for more skilled team members, was another main challenge that I faced. In order to overcome these challenges I tried different ways of communications and applied any advice or management tool that was introduced in class by BVW instructor/ guest speakers and also working with other teams I’ve learned from their management approach and adopted the techniques and tools in OOBE team. However I have to admit it is still a learning process for me and I have much more to learn and experience.

In the midst of the development of the project I became part of the design team and helped out with production of graphic animatic. Through that process while working with four other skilled teammates on the deign team each of whom had a unique approach in developing animatic, I’ve learned to work with few different software such as flash, After effect, premier, final cut, and illustrator and learned to develop the similar effect using different methods and softwares which could be much more time efficient than my original approach. Another responsibility that I had was to document the development process of the project in the team’s blog and follow up on task and meetings through emails and Facebook group page.

Website: http://iaep.de/bvw/

Team blog: http://bvw.iaep.de/blog/

Project Length : 12 Weeks

Team Members: Martin Schüller, Neeveen Bhadur, Nikki Li, Jasmine Jia, Jessie Gao, Craig Childe, Naz Madani

Trailer

The Day Before the End – Trailer

 Watch The Interactive Film Here

 About The Project:

The Day Before The End is an Interactive Short Film about the consequences of decision made by people. The story evolves around a man who is   in comma and the rest of the three characters standing around his bed in the hospital room. The hospital room is the selection scene where the viewer can choose a character by simply clicking on it and sees a flashback story of the chosen character with the man in the comma. Each character has three flashback stories and the viewer can choose to see them in any desired order. After all the stories for all three characters have been watched the viewer can choose to see the story of the man in comma of the day of accident. In each story the viewer is given a choice of two options. There are hidden points assign to the available choices that will be calculated to define the ending of the story. There are three different possible endings for this short film that will be shown to the viewer based on the choices they made.

My Role:

I was one of the Directors and the main photographer for this project. I shot the images used in this film in 7 days of edited the color themes after each shoot as it was a very fast paste project. I passed along the edited photos to our video editor in our teams that they could start editing and didn’t had to wait for the images at any point. I also directed the film along with 2 other colleagues I mainly made decision regarding the location, lighting, angle of shots also involved in the decision made about the sequence of the images and the storyline.

Project length:  3 Weeks

Team Afterlife: Benjamin Bracamonte, Pooya Malek, Sheva Shen, Corina Tsai, Marcel Zucco Tau, Pallavi Maruvada, Karen(Hsiao-Hsuan) Huang, Naz Madani