Time

Week – 1

• As I was not present for this lecture, this post is about my understanding of the class by the response I got from my peers.
• Time can be defined as the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole; but time has a different meaning and value for every person. For some it exists as a memory and for some, an experience. And for some it could mean something completely different .
• In this class, everyone listed down words of what they think time meant. Words like : clock, experience, memory, event, etc.
• This week was a class on understanding what time is what it represented to us on a personal level.

Week – 2

• In what I’ve learnt in this class is that Time is the ongoing series of events taking place. It can be something that happens over a long period of time or something that happens in milliseconds. For example, bursting of a balloon or a seed growing into a tree, both of these activities show the passage of time.
• We were assigned to make thumbnails on 3 narratives about our notion of time. I started by making a list of activities that showed the passing of time.
• I came up with 10 such activities and decided upon 3 of which I can illustrate on easily.
• Even though this activity seemed quite simple, it had me racking my brain. I had never thought about time in such a way.

Week – 3

• This week we reviewed the storyboards our peers had made. We had to review it based on 3 questions: 1) What are the various ways in which people have depicted time? 2) Do you agree with the narratives? Yes? No? Why? 3) What are your suggestions?
• By reviewing someone else’s work, I learnt quite a lot about how they look at time/their understanding of it. Their work was quite thought-provoking and interesting.
• Later on, I chose one of the three narratives I had come up with on which I would elaborate/improve.
• I chose to elaborate on the oversleeping as I knew I could put more frames into it. But the main reason I chose this was because it seemed interesting.
• Then we were asked to come up with 2 more narratives revolving around a saying/quote/phrase/idiom.
• The first quote I chose was “Time is money”. I came up with an interesting story inspired by the movie “In Time”.

Week – 4

• This class we showed ma’am our thumbnails for our narratives. My first narrative was about how I snoozed my alarm and overslept and my second narrative was about me getting stuck in the elevator and how I start getting paranoid about there being a ghost when the lights go off.
• After we were done with the thumbnails, we listed down 3 words that we associated with our narratives.
• The next step to this was for us to click photos that represented each frame of our narratives and captured its essence in an abstract manner.
• I started by assigning each frame with a word that I thought represented that frame, this would make it easier for me to find scenarios that I could take photos of.
• This class made me think harder than I ever have. It is so easy to look at something and know what it is but it makes you rack your brain when you have to think about what that something could mean in a non-literal way.

Week – 5

• This week we clicked photos that represented the frames of our narrative.
• I clicked several photos to try to capture the emotion of each frame. Some worked well but some didn’t quite hit the mark.
• All of us take photos on a daily basis but rarely do we put thought into it, we do not sit to think what that picture represents or conveys to us.
• This process of putting thought into my pictures has changed the way I look at photography and the world around me. These are a few of my photographs:

Week – 6

• Having been absent for this week’s class, this post is based on my understanding of the class through my peers.
• After getting 3 of our pictures approved, we were asked to make a video including those pictures and also adding as few videos that we were supposed to get through a link provided to us.
• We could use softwares in our laptops or make use of the various apps available for video editing on our phones.

Week – 8

• This week I saw everyone else’s videos. I found them to be quite insightful and learnt a lot from them and their mistakes. This helped me work on my own video.
• My video is titled “The loneliness within”. Making this video was quite challenging for me as I wanted to make sure that the message in my video was clear and the video had a flow.
• The song choices that I made for this video would also be crucial as they have to gel well with the video itself.
• This was a really interesting learning experience as it taught me the little details that matter while conveying a message through a video, the importance of audio, the flow of the video and the audio (the transitions) and how we should always take into consideration the audience’s point of view.

Week – 9

• Having been absent for this week’s class, this post is based on my understanding of the class through my peers.
• This week, we were shown the movie “Harishchandrachi factory”.
• After watching the movie, we started to analyze it, analysing every aspect of this movie like the story, music, direction, etc.
• We were then divided into groups and assigned a time period and movies in that era. We had to analyze these movies in the same manner with our groups and create mind maps for the same.
• My group had been given movies in the 1951-1965 era. These movies were : Apur sansar, Mughal e azam, Chalti ka naam gaadi, Howrah bridge and Naya Daur.

Week – 10

• This week, we discussed the movies we had watched as a group and listed down our points. We started with Mughal e azam. It was very interesting to learn about every person’s different perspective about the same movie. It showed me how everyone has a different notion of everything.
• We then discussed these points with ma’am and started to work on our mind maps. We decided to include some of the dialogues and lyrics into our map as we thought it was quite essential for this movie.
• This movie had impactful and heavy dialogues and lyrics which we could not just forget out of our mind maps.
• This process helped us break down the movie quite effectively.
• It helped me understand the movie better. It helped me learn the reasons as to why the people in those times did what they did, how they lived their lives, their beliefs and much more.

Week – 11

• In this week’s class we presented the mind maps we had made.
• We each discussed our learnings from each movie.
• While making these mind maps, I learned how differently everyone perceived these movies. The basic plot of the movies was understood the same by everyone but the little details observed by all were quite interesting to learn about.
• After this, we started to work on our overlapping elements.
• We recognized the elements that we think we observed in all the movies.
• I was a little surprised to see so many similarities in these movies. It helped me understand what was the situation of India in that era.

Week – 12

• This week, we started to do some secondary research on our era and movies.
• This was done to understand the situation of India in that time, which was post independence.
• It helped me understand the movies better and why some of the decisions were taken while making the movie.
• We then correlated this information with our overlapping elements i.e figured out how these elements were influenced by the political, economical or social changes.
• We were then briefed about our assignment. We are supposed to take inspiration from the overlapping elements and come up with an interactive installment.

Week – 13

• This week, we worked on our iterations for our interactive installment.
• We came up with some iterations but weren’t quite happy with it. We had good ideas but couldn’t relate it to our elements or establish a learning outcome.
• We also did a presentation in front of the class summarizing our movies, learning, mind maps, iterations, etc.
• I learnt a lot from the insights that my peers had about our presentation. It made me realize how we were still not quite there with our iterations and that we needed to further work on them.

Week – 14

• In this week’s class, we discussed our iterations further more.
• We knew we had some really good ideas but we just needed to flesh them out. We needed to put more thought into it and detail it out.
• After the discussion, we were able to finalize on the Heads up! idea and also finalize on its details.
• We came up with words for each movie that we thought summarized that movie and era and decided to have different decks for each movie.
• This way of interaction would tell the audience what the movie is about in a nutshell and also be a fun way to do so.

Week – 15

• This week was the review week.
• My group was a bit behind everyone but I was very happy and satisfied with the work we did. We were able to relate our iteration to our movies and our era and also establish a learning outcome.
• For the final presentation, we summarized our movies, overlapping elements, iterations, design context and we stitched the videos together (videos of people doing the activity).
• We got a positive response for our final video and the overall concept of the activity.
• Our learning outcome was based on two types of videos that we had included:
• With action based clues – It is said that when one of our senses is taken away, our other senses get heightened. When one person acts out a word, without using any verbal clues, our mind starts to process the information our eyes are giving it. 
• With verbal based clues – When instructions are given verbally, without saying the actual word, our mind starts to put that information together and starts to recognise patterns to arrive at a certain word. One of the overlapping elements for our movies was “exaggerated expressions” which was observed in all the movies as it was a clear indication of a shift from theatre to movies. This is why we chose “expression” as our learning outcome.
• Our decks and the final video is uploaded on the drive.