Storymaker, Storyteller

Click here to view our presentation at Microsoft on July 29th.

Thanks to Alexander for sending us this shot of our Microsoft presentation:

The Expo is more than a fortnight gone and we’re all back at our respective homes after a fantastic trip to Canada. Here are a few of the photos we didn’t get a chance to upload before we were chucked out of our fancy Microsoft-paid-for hotel with free wireless and had to start paying for essentials like food, shelter and the internet:

This was our booth at the demofest alongside all of the other teams presenting at the Design Expo, sandwiched between Eindhoven’s ‘Ennea’ and China’s ‘Tai Chi Master’. On the right at the top is Polly. Note our snazzy name badges (in a rather appropriate IMD-orange).

After a few hours of manning the booth we went straight to the Kodiak room for the final setup for the presentation. As we were on last we spent the next couple of hours sitting anxiously backstage. We watched the other teams deliver their presentations without a hiccup which only piled on the pressure. Just before we were scheduled to go on we were taken down to the stage door and mic’d up. At 3.15, right on schedule, we walked out onstage and gave our presentation.

In spite of our apprehension we received great feedback from the judges and the audience, and were approached many times before we could leave by people complimenting our presentation and asking how they could buy our devices!

We were all then herded into another room where we were given two demos of interesting pieces of software MS are working on, one of which is a fantastic tool for introducing children to programming. There were certificates all round and we were awarded ‘Best End-to-End Design’. From there it was straight to Lili’s house for the after party, followed by another after party followed by sitting on the floor of a hostel listening to a room full of very merry Mexicans singing loud songs. The next day we caught a bus to Vancouver to continue our holiday, but that’s getting a bit outside the scope of this blog.

All of the presentations were professionally filmed by Microsoft staff and will be available online soon, we’ll post a link here when they’re uploaded.

There’s a common tag being used for expo photos on Flickr which means you can see other people’s photos from the conference there.

Well, our presentation went amazingly. All went according to plan - nobody forgot what they were meant to be saying, the PD worked, everybody loved it. We got a really positive reaction and Microsoft’s blog, Channel 8, wanted to interview us about our project. After the presentations we had a debrief and a couple of talks/demos from some people in the Research department at Microsoft. We then headed to Lili’s house for the closing party. Talk about huge American houses!

Since the Microsoft stuff ended, the four of us have been travelling a bit. The day after the party we headed up the West Coast to Vancouver in Canada, which is where we are now. We’ve been staying in an awesome hostel right on the beach, next to the largest sailing centre in Canada. We’ve had a few nice evenings on the beach and a somewhat entertaining day learning to windsurf.

We don’t have much time to update the blog at the minute because we’re moving around so much (and we have to pay to use the internet, weep). When we get back to the UK we will update further and get all the photos up. Promise.

After almost eight months, this afternoon all our hard work will come down to eight minutes in our presentation. At the moment, DemoFest is running and people from all over the world are browsing the stalls. We’ve had some really positive reactions to our project which I think is making us all feel a little better about what is still to come.

At 3.15pm we will be presenting to an international audience in the Kodiak Room, Microsoft Conference Centre. Our presentation will be ten minutes long followed by a brief question and answer session. Hopefully PD will troop on through and not fail on us like it did in our technical set up. Wish us luck!

You can now get to the blog more easily via storymakerstoryteller.com. Tell your friends!

We arrived in Seattle around 9pm local time on Friday, got a taxi to the hotel and hit the sack to sleep off the 24 hour journey. Early the next day we made our first visit to the Microsoft Conference Center for presentation crits and technical setup. Here you can see the team from Mexico City practicing in the Kodiak room, where our final presentations will be held.

There were a lot of clever tech people on hand to get us set up in the massive Kodiak room (it’ll be the slickest presentation we’ll ever have made with professional filming, lighting etc). There are loads of helpful, friendly people here at Microsoft, and it’s a bit surreal when the company logo is on everything from the podiums to the coffee cups. Being my first visit to the US I still feel like I’ve fallen into the television or Grand Theft Auto!

Microsoft put on some generously portioned lunchboxes and we ate outside with Richard Banks from Microsoft Cambridge. Did we mention there’s a giant fridge full of free soda? Lee just couldn’t handle this much choice.

We got some feedback from the crit suggesting we get some more shots of the actual devices into the slides. Unfortunately we hadn’t had much time to shoot anything properly before we left the UK, but Andy from Microsoft kindly offered up his office as a makeshift studio for the afternoon. Jo came into her own and 250 shots later we had some great new images.

Last night we went to a local seafood restaurant here in Bellevue for a buffet on Microsoft with all of the other teams, and today we got a bus into Seattle for the first time. After a visit to the Seattle Art Museum Lee and I had kielbasa hotdogs at Pike Place Market then we all hit the Falafel King for a plateful of chickpea goodness. Lee & I then wandered aimlessly for an hour while the girls were busy in Abercrombie & Fitch (sheep) then we got the monorail out to the Experience Music Project and the Space Needle, finishing off the day with a taxi ride from a crazy cabbie. In short; we’re having too much fun to get across in a blog.

We had our photographs taken by the press office on Thursday and we’ve already appeared in quite a few places online and some newspapers back home. Look out for us in the paper, check the press links on the right or Google “Storymaker, Storyteller” for more.

It’s hard to believe (or perhaps we just don’t want to?) that there are only only two days to go until we fly out to Seattle. The devices are finished! At the moment, Natalie and Lee are putting the finishing touches to them and making sure everything is running smoothly for our presentation.

Neil and I are currently editing the final version of our concept video. This will be a short video which will feature in our presentation, it will show our audience the interaction between our two networked objects plus put them into context.

I think everyone is starting to feel the pressure, hopefully we’ll get everything finished soon and we can concentrate on feeling excited rather than stressed. We’re still having the occasional hiccup, for example this morning one of our tutors accidentially pulled all the wires out of our circuit board. Good times. Fortunately for us, we have a cracking team behind us and there is always someone on hand to help us out and provide support.

It is now Tuesday, a mere three days before our departure to Seattle. Most of today was spent assembling the final devices in the workshop. With a lot of help from Gus, all four of us were there as our idea finally came to life.

As second year students, none of our previous work has ever been developed to such a professional standard so it was really exciting moment for all of us. Both the devices are looking rather impressive, even the beige paint looks better than a few of us expected it to. The finishing line is in sight on the construction front, all we still need to do now is make a few final tweaks here and there. Natalie and Lee have been working flat out all day, making adjustments to enable both devices to perform at optimum level. 

Neil and I also finished the filming for our concept video today. The old version, which can be seen here, was alright but we wanted to update it to include footage of the finished devices. Unfortunately this means that the entire video needs to be completed within a very short timeframe, as the devices were only finished today. Hopefully we will have a successful, albeit very long and tiring, day of editing tomorrow. Within the final video we also hope to convey a better portrayal of the relationship between the two devices. 

Only three days to go…