Project 2— Making the Abstract Concrete, CD Studio

Documentation for Project 2, Making the Abstract Concrete, in Communication Design Studio with Stacie Rohrbach, 2020 Fall, CMU School of Design

Week 5

This week we presented our interventions, reflected on Project 1, and was introduced Project 2, making the abstract concrete. In this project, we will explore various forms to communicate abstract information, and aid audiences’ understanding through a video explaining an assigned topic.

Electoral College

The topic I got is electoral college. I’ve never heard of this term (but know a little bit about the concept) before. I think it is a great chance for me to learn more about the political concept, and I believe my lack of knowledge for this topic will help me frame the story from the perspectives of the audiences without background knowledge, so I decided not to trade my topic.

Stacie provided each of us a document on our topics. The document for me explains electoral college from the following three parts:

• What is it?
• How does it work?
• Why is it important/interesting?

For now, this looks like a reasonable structure. After reading through the document, I think the topic itself is quite dry, and hard to have a clear understanding only by text. Therefore, I start to search for existing videos for this concept.

I also came across this video, which discusses the history of electoral college. This is also an important content to include in my video, because it helps audiences understand this concept on the dimension of timeline, and the narrative could be more interesting with historical facts.

Overall, based on the nature of the topic, I plan to frame the narrative in an informative, neutral, and slightly interesting way.

Narrative & Visual Exploration

Before this week’s class, I finished the first story draft. First, in order to see how long the narrative should be under 3 minutes, I timed myself when reading the document that provided to me. I get a rough idea of the length of the draft. After researching the topic and rearranging the content, I still found a hard time to keep draft in the limited timeframe. I didn’t even add the historical part in the draft at this point. I will continue work on the draft, and expect deleting some content based on prioritization in the topic.

Also, I roughly created a sequential storyboards/assets for groups of sentences under the similar scenes (below). The difficulty was that it was hard to identify a key player throughout the story. Each sentence brings new elements in the story. Continuous actors are rare. Rather, the story requires to use certain assets multiple times in different ways (changes in motion, color, and combination).

Week 6

Narrative Structure

This week, I started to do more research on the Electoral College. I found the topic to be a little bit more complicated than I expected because it connects to many other concepts or knowledges, such as common knowledge of US political systems, US territories, general election and history around Philadelphia convention.

In order to keep the video under 3 minutes, and have a clear focus on narration. I decided to focus on the following 4 parts when developing the script draft:

• What is Electoral College?
• How does it work? (This part will intertwine with “what is it” due to the nature of the topic.)
• Why was it established?
• Why is it controversial?

Unlike topics on biology or chemistry, the topic also contains many detailed information that does not lead to linear steps or storyline. The order of the information will be essential for the clarity of the narration. Should I talk

I also found out that Electoral College and knowledge around it are not common sense even for many US citizens. So I started to adjust my narration to audiences without any background knowledge. To test the clarity of the script, I plan to read the draft to people who don’t have any background knowledge on the Electoral College.

Storyboarding

To integrate visual elements and narrative, we created storyboards based on the structure that Stacie built on Miro. The storyboard is in the following image. We aligned our visualization sequence(visual), description of motion(Temporal) and narration(Aural).

In McCloud’s reading, he implied that if we make certain image more abstract and vague, how they actually look like matters less, and the narrative, the message we want to communicate, will matter more. This idea help me with my topic. Initially, when I tried to visualize that the electors for each state is roughly based on population proportion, I kept stuck with the idea of utilizing a US map, and show information on it. Then, one of the image I collect in moodboard inspired me. Why not make the actual boundaries of states vague and just use a circle to represent each state?

Something to continue work on:

• I am still unsure about certain frames’ visualization, especially the part of “how it works” above pink sticky notes. For example, how do I visualize the following knowledge?

When people cast their votes for candidates in early November, their individual votes do not elect the president directly, they are voting to select their state’s electors.

• I also need to think about how to make the transitions of motion and narrative more smooth, especially last half of the story.
• Accuracy of the knowledge in narrative.

It is really interesting to see how these elements come together. When developing the storyboard, I found that some information is easier to visualize than speak, and vice versa. For example, I switched the channels of communicating the number comparison of electoral voting power in Wyoming and Texas into visual, and kept its narrative more general. Therefore, audiences are able to focus on the impact of the Electoral College, instead of listening to the specific numbers that can be easily forgotten, and getting distracted from the key point here.

Inspired by the past work, I utilized multiple forms of visualization — flat animation and realistic photography. The combination not only helps audiences’ understand the Electoral College better, but also makes visualization work simpler.

Week 7

Moodboard

Iteration on Narrative and Visualization

When I presented the storyboards in class this week, I received some insightful feedbacks. The overall structure of narrative is nice. The circle representation on states is effective. However, there are still a few points need further clarification, especially for classmates with minimum background knowledge:

• How do each party in states choose the electors specifically?
• The relation of popular votes and electoral votes
• When and where electors meet to vote?
• Electors are not required to choose candidates based on states’ popular vote. What’s the impact?

I reframed the narrative based on the finding from my conversation with Shan who doesn’t have much background knowledge. She raised really great questions on Electoral College. When I walked her through the knowledge, I found myself often set a hypothetical example to make it easier to learn: “here is a state who gets 3 electors. To win its electoral votes, … ” Concrete and specific examples are easier to grasp than general description of the knowledge.

In general, I think this concept is difficult to understand without help of visual, especially for learners with minimum background knowledge. For some feedbacks I received on improving clarity in certain part of the story. I chose to wait to combine the actual animation with narrative to see if it is still unclear. I believe the visual part aid learning substantially.

Week 9

Digitize assets and storyboards

This week, I started to roughly build all assets and digitize storyboards with key frames. The result is in the following image. I realized that many information is difficult to convey from these keyframes without motion. It will be helpful to start initial draft of video sooner than later to reveal how motion clips will communicate information along with narration.

I made two major modification in visual choices after receiving Stacie’s advice:

Electors Before and After

• The shape in left is my original visual representation of electors. Although it is clear that they are different from the visual representation of presidents, Stacie pointed out that it is not clear what the relation between them and presidential candidates’ visual in the image below is. Audiences may misunderstand them as individual voters. As a result, I changed the representation of electors into the right form in order to convey their role of choosing presidential candidates.

Presidential Candidate

• Another major change is the color for undecided (potential) electors and presidents candidates. The one I used before is on the left in the image below. However, I got feedback multiple times that the color is misleading because the purplish color can represent the independents. As a result, I changed the color into the one on the right to indicate its role as placeholder for undecided electors/presidents.

Week 10

Video Draft

This video draft essentially matches audio channel with all the keyframes with still images. I only added a few motion. I realized that motion is very critical for the concept partly due to the way I illustrate the idea. Currently, it’s still difficult to grasp some ideas without motion.

Peer Review Feedbacks

We conducted peer review this week, and I received great feedbacks from Lulin, Shan and Catherine. Overall the narration and visual forms work well together. There are some reoccurring patterns and insights from their feedbacks:

• The photos of Hillary and Trump and the painting in the end feels out of place because they are not aligned with the overall style of the video. Catherine’s suggestion — “add additional visuals around what happened with popular vote vs winner in 2016” is a great idea. I think adding rip effect to the images may make the visual style coherent.

• The volume of background music is a little overwhelming. I might also change the music to fit the topic better.
• Work on the illustration of the comparison between Wyoming and Texas. It is still a little bit confusing right now. Since I am not include this information in audio channel, I think it would be essential to make this clear.
• Take another look at script and maybe move the content of historical facts of electoral college ahead as Cat and Lulin mentioned.
• The ending needs to be smoother. I might modify script. Maybe utilizing background music would make ending smoother instead of modifying script.
• If time allows, specify the form of presidents who wins the popular vote but won office. Cat brought up an idea: “what if you made the ties red and blue to represent parties of presidents who have lost popular vote but won office?”

My next step is to continue add motions to the rest of the video, and fix the issue listed above.

Week 11

Final Draft

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Feedbacks for the final draft:

• The map with circle states and zooming in to a state is good, maybe leveraging map in the end too. This will make the storytelling more coherent.
• Number of electors can stayed on the circle of states, and increasing with the narration.
• Need to work on pie chart coherence. Don’t know if they all represent one thing.
• Transition of the scene with Trump & Hilary was not natural.

Key Takeaways

For this project, I learnt to quickly research and understand an unfamiliar concept, articulate it through language and visuals, and communicate it effectively leveraging different channels. In particular, designers can communicate an abstract idea effectively through right level of abstract visuals. I practiced to emphasize on certain aspects of the story by making part of the information concrete and blur the rest of the information, eg. the map in the video.

For animation and motion graphics, I found it is critical to quickly generate clips and get feedbacks from other people rather than crafting the video by myself for a long time. This is because I can easily get into the details and technical issues of motion, and forget to check if the communication is effective. Also, another pair of eyes can bring fresh perspectives and identify issues which I am blind to since I stare at my work for so long.

I also learnt to put aesthetics aside to evaluate communication effectiveness. Sometimes, the beautiful visual forms of the project I checked can be overwhelming(in a good way), but create an impression/illusion that the information is conveyed effectively. As a designer, it is important to separate these two aspects when evaluating our work.

Future Application

The skills we practiced in this project is very useful for both motion graphics and static visuals. I believe we can apply what we learnt from this project in the situation of creating a conceptual video or for a product, or even designing a poster or infographics. Even in next project, we need to visualize and tell a story from the data, the skills we practiced here are very helpful when we want to convey information and emphasize on certain aspects of the story from our perspectives (rather than “comprehensive” perspectives).