# Week 7 — Tuesday, October 6 ### Project 2 Thumbnails due · Tutorial planning critique --- ## Focus Lock the demo piece and the tutorial structure. A tutorial with a good outline mostly writes itself; one without an outline becomes a rambling screen recording. --- ## Due today — before 9:00 AM **Project 2 — Thumbnails (10 points)** 1. Technique statement — the technique, where in Project 1 you met it, what you could not do before 2. Demo piece plan — **10–15 quick explorations**, or the track equivalent 3. Chosen direction, with rationale 4. Tutorial outline — every section, in order, with the key point of each 5. **The hard part** — the step you expect to be most confusing, identified in writing 6. Format decision — written, video, or AI-assisted, with a one-line rationale 7. Production schedule through Week 11 **Weekly progress report.** --- ## Bring to class - The thumbnails and demo plan - The tutorial outline - Your Project 1 process log, for reference --- ## In class **Thumbnails critique.** Is the demo piece simple enough to show the technique clearly, and substantial enough to be worth watching? **Outline critique.** This is the main event today. We walk the outline section by section and check: - Does the order make sense to someone who does not already know the answer? - Is the prerequisite knowledge stated? - Is the *why* built in, or is it a list of steps? - Where does the hard part sit, and is it given enough room? **Format consultation.** Practical guidance for your chosen format — screen capture setup and audio for video, structure and screenshot discipline for written, prompting and verification workflow for AI-assisted. **Capture-while-you-work instruction.** How to record process material during production instead of reconstructing it afterward. This is the single biggest time-saver in this project. **Supervised production.** --- ## Before next week 1. **Build the demo piece.** Working, not polished. 2. **Capture as you go.** Screenshots at every step, screen recording if video, notes on every setting that mattered. You cannot recover this later — you will have moved on and forgotten. 3. **Draft the tutorial sections you can already write.** The introduction, the problem statement, and the prerequisites do not require a finished demo. --- ## Note — capture is the whole game The students who struggle with this project are almost never the ones who did not understand the technique. They are the ones who built the demo piece first and tried to document it afterward. By then the file is in its final state, the intermediate steps are gone, the settings you changed are indistinguishable from the settings you never touched, and you are reconstructing your own process from memory. Screenshot every step as you take it. Name the files by step number. It costs about ten seconds each time and it saves the project.