Question:
Team Members Full Names:
Answer:
Vivek Monish;
Varun Andrew David;
Pratheepan Thevarajah;
Question:
Mentor:
Answer:
None
Question:
Title of Project:
Answer:
The Beginning
Question:
Project Overview:
Answer:
A better world is imagined by present day man in the form of a classic musical montage. Lack of teachers in rural areas is solved by live streaming from urban classrooms. The education boom starts off an innovation spree where the Personal Identification Device (PID) is invented. This is a multipurpose device distributed to every citizen. It brings Information Technology to the common man’s doorstep by interconnecting everybody over a common network. With the click of a button farmers, truck drivers, storage supervisors, distributors, vendors and others are all updated about the current status of their product thereby increasing the efficiency of the agricultural industry in fledgling countries. Customers use PIDs for all monetary transactions like a debit card. This negates corruption as all transactions are recorded and the total product value is shared among the various production departments immediately. The rise in one field has a domino effect on others and triggers off development in them too. Imagination is the first step to development. Present day man has embarked on that step.
Question:
Technology/Software Used:
Answer:
Software used are Adobe Premiere Pro for editing, Adobe After Effects for compositing, Imagineer Systems Mocha for planar tracking, Imagineer Systems Motor for rotoscoping, Autodesk Maya for domino effect, Adobe Photoshop for base plate image editing.
Question:
Inspiration: What inspired your team to enter the Microsoft Imagine Cup and why did you choose the Short Film competition?
Answer:
Microsoft Imagine Cup, with its global following, provides one of the most competitive arenas possible. Technology is, in itself, interesting. Imagine Cup Short films club technology with creativity. An attempt to excel here therefore makes for a very soul satisfying experience.
Question:
Team History: How did your team meet?
Answer:
We are friends from school through college.
Question:
Team Experience: What experience did your team have with Short Film before competing in the Imagine Cup?
Answer:
We worked on an amateur short film, "The Terror Within", in September 2008 for a contest in India. We also worked on another amateur short film, "Flicker", which won the best film award in the 6th Chennai International Film Festival, December 2008.
Question:
Highlights: What has been the best part of the Imagine Cup competition to date?
Answer:
The best part for us has been the story conception stage where we were enthralled by the realization that an imaginative contest could spark off ideas for real world implementation and solution of problems. Our project is as close to becoming reality as possible and hence our excitement over its potential, revealed through the Imagine Cup.
Question:
Inspiration: How did your team come up with your submission? Include which Millennium Development Goal inspired your solution.
Answer:
At the time of story conception, we felt every MDG(Millennium Development Goal) was as important as the other. We asked ourselves why the world is how it is and we came to the conclusion, a la Socrates, that 'knowledge is virtue'. We also realized that each MDG was related to the other through knowledge and awareness. Hence our solution encompasses nearly all the MDGs as a domino effect starting from education.
Question:
Challenges: What personal or technological challenges did your team face while developing your submission?
Answer:
There is the saying that you're not to shoot anything that you don't precisely know how to fix in post. Well, we broke that rule out of necessity. We didn't know much of visual effects to start with and had to learn and explore along the way. We also were particular about making the VFX as seamless as possible. Hence every shot that involved VFX was a potential challenge. Besides, we had differences of opinion over what the best way to shoot a particular scene was. We had to sort these out against the time constraint. But since this brought in a plethora of new ideas, the result was much better and refined. Submitting a coherently edited piece of 3 minutes was also a difficult task that we feel we eventually tackled to satisfactory levels.
Question:
Future Plans: What does your team plan on doing after the Worldwide Finals in Cairo, Egypt? Do you plan to use your project to launch a new business?
Answer:
We were already working on a project involving a part of NLP(Natural Language Processing) to help better communication between man and machine. Since we've projected easy access of information to all in our short film too, we'd try and develop viable software technologies that deliver information to people with just human language as input. Our short film, though an imagination of the future world, is definitely possible and we'd try and implement our film into reality.
Question:
Links to more information (i.e. website, blog):
Answer:
Email us for more info: monishvivek86@gmail.com; ivdavidster@gmail.com; pratheepan_1@hotmail.com