Last night, Gage and I stayed up to finish up the team Moonbots Documentary, while Karlin went out with his parents and stood in line for 3 hours for a “Midnight Madness” fish sale. (Is there such thing that could be more important than the Moonbots deadline?!)
From the beginning of Phase 1, the robot changed tremendously throughout the season. I took pictures frequently to show the robot progression along with what each team member was doing. I interviewed Karlin every time the robot had a major change. Most of the time, he was too preoccupied to talk. But I do have footage of him discussing the design of the super Claw Robot.
I interviewed Stanley and Brian about the sensors and programming, but as we tried to pack the whole season in 5 minutes, the footage talking about the sensors (which the robot later didn’t use) were eliminated. Brain was only around for 3 weeks this summer between camp and an Asia vacation, just in time to help construct the field side panels, built some drive train prototypes and test out a couple sensors in RobotC. Stanley was bouncing back and forth between strategizing the mission path and programming in RobotC to remote control the robot.
I was designated to complete the documentary, from beginning to the end, because I am home this summer. (Six hours of summer school a day is NOT a vacation!) Due to the lack of man-power, Stanley switched from programming to help me with the documentary. Gage came back from camp toward the last part of the season and racked up hours just in time for Stanley to leave for Europe. For a short blissful time, we had three people working on the documentary while Karlin was working solo on the robot, writing all of the programs in NXT-G. Kind of unfair, but the final robot programming has to be done by one person to be more efficient. This was especially the case when Karlin had to rewrite all of the programs in LabView this week.
There were well over 200 pictures and many video segments to work from, plus many rounds of editing to decide on the script and format of the video. Microsoft Movie Maker, Adobe Premier CS5 and Premier Element were some of the softwares we considered using, but the Premier softwares were way over our heads. No amount of YouTube tutorial viewing could have helped us in such a short time. We decided on using MS Movie Maker for a plain, straight forward story-telling format, covering different topics to show our Moonbots journey. Armed with much optimism and unrealistic milestones in the beginning, we soon learned that everything took twice, three or four times longer than expected! (…and I thought only the robot does that). Finally, Gage and I compiled all of the video segments contributed by each person into one single video and edited it to meet the time requirements. Then yesterday, we added the voice-overs, transitions, and last night, the background music.
Team captain came home at midnight, looked and the video (once), and approved it for completion! Hooray!!!
Posted in