The topic that me and my group decided to work on is Surveillance Capitalism.
The first step of our work was to understand what surveillance capitalism is: it is an economic system in which large corporations profit from surveying private data that users put online.
After understanding the topic we did a brainstorming, starting thinking about which type of artefact could suit our topic better and at the end we all agreed that a short video was the best option; we also decided that an animation could help us making the topic more engaging and personalised.
We create a script with all of the guidelines for the video, writing down what each frame should be about and made a storyboard about the animations to have a path to follow during the creation of the animations.
I would honestly say that the hardest part was the creation of the video itself, because we decided to use PowToon, a software that we never used before. It was a challenge understanding how to use it, but after playing around for a while we started getting comfortable and the final artefact was absolutely well done. The final step was then just to add the voiceover.
At the end of the project we made a presentation about the work that we did and I can proudly say that I’m very happy with the result.
I would say that the strength of my group is that we divided the work perfectly, everyone had something to do and we all contribute to the project, as well as the fact that we were ready to try something new and to challenge ourselves. On the other hand, the obstacle that we find during our journey were related to the creation of the video: some features of PowToon were only for a premium version and we were struggling because the result of the artefact was not matching our original idea, but we found a way to fix it anyway. Also the communication sometimes was kind of hard and slow, because we decided to work remotely and probably going back I would say that doing more in person meeting could benefit us more and make the work faster.
My role in the project was mainly about the creation of the video and the animation. As I was saying, I was struggling at first, because the program is really not intuitive and it took me a while to figure out how to use all of the different options.
Another big problem was represented by the fact that there is not a proper premium version of PowToon, all of the feature that we needed for the project were premium and the final result is “ruined” by the logo applied to the video; it was also not possible to export the video properly without had to pay for it, so we had to screen-record it and add the voiceover with a different app.
For this reasons I say that I won’t probably use PowToon again, if not with a premium version. It is a very interesting tool and you can definitely create nice projects with it, but they should add a free version with more feature or at least make a discount for students.
My other contribution to the project was for the voiceover: I had to record it for four frames and I’ve used my phone and the voice-memos app to record it, and I’ve also gave a help with the presentation that we made using Canva.