Reproduction:
Ideas for what I want to do, back when I thought I had two projects, in a brief format.
Idea's for Interactive sound:
I will make a motion sensor, that records sound.
I will get four pieces of music and have them all play at the same time to produce a unique sound.
I will make a voice controlled app.
I will make a recorder app.
Interactive moving image and sound
Make a touch slide, with animation playing, with different trigger.
Make a live wallpaper.
Make a fitness app.
Make an online comic with sound.
Make a simple fruit catching game.
Make a running game.
Make an interactive piano.
Make a questionnaire and have sound play in the background.
Make a shake your phone, or move your phone app with sound.
I will make a spaghetti man android app with sound.
I, than brainstorm some more idea's in Adobe Photoshop.
I, than, want back to the old day's before camera's were born and people used Zeotrops to give the illusion that an image is moving. It's interactive, because you have to spin it around and look through one of the slits to see the illusion made from all those illustrations moving at high speed, and than you play some music in the background.
I than started doing some random animations:
This video was made, encase I ended up doing a live wallpaper for mobile.
This video was inspired by the show 'Dragon Ball Z', since it was a big part of my childhood and I, was one, of the many, who were excited to see it come back, only to be disappointed by the animation quality.
If I go down the recording camera route. I researched all these different types of program's that I can use, that are for free.
But despite all this, I still couldn't make up my mind and time was quickly running out.
But when all hope seemed lost, I was than given the idea of making something, like a story and have links going from one animation to another, making use of my drawing skills.
I found this program, I could use that works only on mac.
I was told about an interactive storyboard, from none other than Jez, where my target audience could choose, how the story is going to end.
It was a combination of my skills for scripting, animation and the teacher were willing to help me with the technical stuff.
I immediately took to the idea and brainstormed for possible plots and here they are:
Your an in-mate at a prison and your trying to get out.
Your a person in a world were people have super power's. You can chose to be a villain or a hero.
Your broccoli and are on a quest to try and get eaten.
Your a pig, who finds out you were raised by a farmer just to be eaten, when you reach a certain weight and try to lose weight and appear unappealing.
Inspiration:
I personally love the style of animation in this video.
I also like the idea of seeing everything from a person perspective.
Growing up, I was a huge fan of Road Dahl, there was just something unique about the illustrations in the book that I personally liked, and unknowing to me until year's later, I had personally adapted the style into my own illustrations.Road Dahl:
Episode, allows you to make your own decisions and chose where the story ends up, and criminal case has that detailed background, that I love even though the interactive story would be relying heavily on the audio.
Now that I know what I doing. It was time for me to write out onto a online word doccumant so i have a good basic idea of what I was going to be drawing, the option's that will be displayed and what I'm going to be saying, in the audio, that will be playing in the background.
I spent ten minute's just staring into space before words finally kicked me over the head with a soft shoe.
The writing behind the project.
The thoughts for interactive Story
Getting file size in photoshop- file-new- Film and video-1920x1080
Story- Your a person in a world where people have super power's and you can chose to be a villain or a hero.
Background story: In the year 2033, a meteor came crashing down to earth. When it landed, scientists concluded that it was just a normal rock and thus deemed it unimportant. It wasn't until 2 years had passed, did people start developing strange abilities. Super Powers. Fast forward, twenty years in the future, superpowers are now common and the world is split between those who call themselves 'Heros' and those who call themselves 'villians'.
Images needed:
The world or some advanced looking buildings.
A Meteor crashing down to earth-fx- whoosh before a bang for it goes black
Zoom out, to some scientist analyzing the Meteor- some squiggles on the screen is moving
File on the meteor with the stamp 'unimportant' on it.
The words '2 years later'.
A slightly more advanced city.
A person showing power.
The words '20 years later'
Somebody is flying high in the sky, and the city down below is weird.
Images of hero, taking up one half of the screen, will the other half is taken by villains.
Options- 'Skip'-highlighted in yellow.
Scene 1- Bedroom
"Today, is the day, I will find out, what super power I have. I hope, it's something cool and not something lame, like the ability to grow carrots out of my ear's. What should I do, first?"
Background noise-birds are tweeting.
Options:
A. Go to shower first and get dressed.
B. Leave your home in your underwear, without doing anything.
C. Stay in bed, and be lazy for the whole day.
What if you chose:
1A. The screen would go dim and you will hear the sound of brushing, shower and a zip before finding yourself on the street.
"I should probably go to Power evolution first."
1B. The image fades out and your on the street but people are moving away from you.
"Man, I must really stink. But who cares?"
1C. The image fades out and but opens to another scene, your living room and find that people are searching your house.
"What the? Hey, am I tied up?"-you
"Boss"-Minion 1
The boss stands up and the world goes black, the words 'Your dead' appears on the screen.
Audio- high pitch before going silent
Option-Do you want to try again?
Scene 2- The street
Audio-Street noise.
"Go to the hero association"
"Go to the Villain association"
"Go to the building to test your powers"
What if you chose:
2A. A guard is waiting in front of the door.
"Sorry, kid. No badge, than you can't get in"
Option-go back.
2B. A creepily looking guy is front of the door.
"Beat it kid"
2C. "Sigh, there is a line"
'1 hour later'
The scene show's your right in front of a glowing orb.
I tried to be highly realistic when it came to time. I was honest with my self.
I know I couldn't produce about 20 image's in 6 week's and little snippets of animation. I was even worried about my drawings that I would produce.
My mother even gave me, her arts and crafts box from her day's as a Art university student, in a way she made me realise I didn't have to do my drawing's digitally and can do it as a painting on a big sheet of paper and even make an illustration using real life things.
The actual option, sounded amazing until I ran into one little problem.
If I were to take an image of it from a perfect angle overhead, I would have no equipment, that would allow me to do so.
If I tried to scan it in, there was always that risk that it would crumple and not look so neat or professional, as it did hours later.
This problem was always in my way every time, I handed in my art work.
Should I google a way to preserve my painting's and wait week's, for what I need to arrive?
I've got six week's not 6 month's to produce amazing work's of art because there is always that danger with of trying to have the painting's, look as perfect as possible, spending week's on just one.
So my only option was to produce the illustration's digitally and this was the first ever digital illustration I did, taken from an image that I googled of having a large city. I found a image of NewYork.
These two, are two of many image's that I managed to produce with my evolving knowledge of Photoshop.
The meteor image was actually kind of 'Ify,' at first.
In the very beginning. I had made up my mind to produce only stock image's without any movement, just because I wasn't confident and was feeling, SUPER LAZY!!!!
But, when I realised one of my teacher's actually expected me, to actually put's more, than the minimum amount of effort into it, I started taking my time.
They actually expected to see one thing move.
I groaned, inwardly.
Well.... there was no point in complaining, I know this is the best thing for me, to do right now, since this very blog is to do with my journey to become an animator and thus I had to draw.
Lots.
I still abandoned the moving meteor though, simply because I didn't feel like animating, it all in After effects.
So here are some of the animation's, that I managed to do for my project.
This first animation was also originally supposed to be an image, un-moving, but once I imported all the parts, making up the full image in AE, it became something else entirely.
I played with the opacity of individual letter's to produce this kind of effect, once I was satisfied after playing around with one letter, it was simply a point of 'Copy and Paste', onto each later.
The last line was not actually important, like the rest, but was made in AE using the Text option and than I played around with my position's and Blur to give the illusion of fast movement.
This animation was actually animated in Photoshop using the frame time line.
The none moving background was inspired by a real life video of seeing a meteor come down to the earth from a car shield while the colour was inspired by a good animator on YouTube that did 'Die Young-The animation'
I had to use that video for reference since I had no experience with animating a rock falling out of the sky.
How I accomplished this, was I downloaded the actually from Youtube using ClipCoverter. Once I downloaded it, I inputted it into Adobe After Effect's and used the timeline to cut any part's of the video that I didn't need before I rendered the shorten clip into a Jpeg Sequence.
Now that I had a whole file worth of image's moving little by little, to represent frames, this made it a lot easier for me to use that as a reference to animate, because I could now figure out, just how many frame's I needed to fill in and if I should cut down on any frames that weren't actually moving.
The video sound was actually taken from a Youtube video of an explosion since I couldn't find a sound of a meteor crashing on Freesound.org.
Once the frame's of my animation were rendered into one video, it was time for me to put my sound and video together to produced the finished piece and that I did in Photoshop using the 'Video Timeline'.
At the very beginning, this video was meant to be an image and not an animation but despite the change, the core idea hadn't really changed from what I originally came up with.
There was still a screen showing the meteor that a 'scientist' had picked up, and there was all that mattered to me.
However when I showed it to my teacher, he told me a word I have never heard of before.
Theremin.
Here is a link to view the Theremin in action.
Apparently, it was really popular in Sci movie's for it's unique sound, and it was even used in the famous Star Trek theme song.
The sound to me was very interesting to hear and I could see where my teacher was coming from, with having this in the background for this particular animation.
For minutes I would roll this idea in my mind, before coming to a decision.
Animation's such as these were only a half of what I end up making.
If I had to chose which illusion that I made that stood out to me as I was drawing, it would be this one hands down.
The fantastic webtoon 'Lookism', that is about how people with good look's are treated by the world compared to those who aren't so fortunate, it really made me see the world in a new light.
As you probably would have guessed, this image also had a lot more impact on my finished illustration from above. I wanted to portray this kind of emotion when an idiot, is given way to much power and you know only trouble with come of it.
And I've got to say, Spongebob Square Pants, nailed this look perfectly.
Once the prolong image's and animation's were done, what I had to now was produce the audio where I would talk, after all this is a moving image's and sound project.
Yesterday, I spent a good hour, going over my printed script that was split into fourth different paragraph's, that explained my story's backstory and made several different version's of each Paragraph so I had more variety to choose from.
I felt like a kid in a candy store putting it all together because I love editing.
However despite, having recorded all of this, there was always a possibility, that I could have another go at recording in the near future, in the sound room.
I've been editing for a decade so I'm pretty much a professional when it come's to timing and tweaking the sound of what I recorded. When I finish sorting everything out, I will render it and finally do the interactive side with Jeez.
Three week's is more than enough time to add a skip button to my video and have it on my prologue of my story, showing option's that allow the target audience to chose which path they should go on.
Update: Friday.
Today, I tried my hands at it again, using what I learnt recently to produce this, using general anime for knowledge. It proved to me that I have improved leaps and bound's from when I first entered the collage and made me raise my head a little bit higher.
First I made 5 layer's.
Layer 1 was the background.
Layer 2 was the sketch the rough sketch.
Layer 3 was the 'Define' Layer.
Layer 4 was the co-louring Layer.
And finally Layer 5 was the 'Ink' layer.
First I started with the 'Sketch' layer and in red, did a very rough sketch not know what I would end up making and squiggly line's slowly became a girl.
After that, I switched the Define layer, and using what I was thought from YouTube, tried to make my line's as smooth as possible. It more a really ling time of doing and redoing line's just for it to come out better than my usual line work.
Now looking back at it, I should have called the layer a 'Refined' version instead of the 'Ink' version, but what's done is done.
After, I finished drawing the 'Refined' version of the sketch, I deleted it and than went over the 'Refined' version in the 'Ink' layer, using a different brush. It wasn't until later did I wonder what it would be like if I switched brush size and tried doing the eyes with a different sized brush and I actually did it.
Here is the Inked version.
Now the colour layer was actually very interesting.
It started off with a block of colour's that I selected from a random Anime image, I got off the internet and I thought I can simply smudge all the different colour's into each other.
It took me, 10 minute's to realise it just wasn't working.
It didn't have the feeling I was going for at all, and I found myself scratching my head wondering how do the professional artist get such unique skin tone's.
And that's when I remembered it.
Gradient's in Photoshop, actually exist!
It took time but I eventually managed to colour everything in, while hiding behind the Colour Layer, this is what it look's like without the line work.
Than it was only a matter of time before I filled in the background and called it something. I realised my art work has imported and I really like making dot's to add some texture or a glow kind of effect.
Here is the full animation:
As luck would have it, I found a website that does the interactive side of my story on it's own, unfortunately, I have to provide link's if I want to put an image or show a video.
In the end, I want to sublime since I had no idea what to do in Adobe Animate, unfortunately GitHub seems to hate me when I tried to lunch it on the web so I have to take screen shot's of it.
Using Sublime Text editor, I created these pages and used 'snipping tool' to capture it, since I can not provide a link to it.
For this to work, I had to remind myself of how to use sublime, and it was just like Dwayne said, coding is something you have to do constantly or you can easily forget it.
Luckily, I turned to the magical golden egg that was the Google Search engine and I was amazed that word 'HTLM' hadn't been buried like everything else my mind wanted to suppress about the world of coding.
When I had finished, and displayed it to the whole class, I had no idea that this interactive story would provoke actual conversation, one of my idea's of layering sound was actually inspired by one of my classmates and I found evidence from completely different ending projects, overlapping each other.
I was told, that this could have potential when it came to really help somebody, like when you play an adventure game and want to be the Hero that save's a princess from a dragon, you use that to escape to a different life from the one you currently live.
People who are facing tough time's could experience what's it's like to live a better life, to help them cope.
Yep, I couldn't believe it either, I just did this for a grade but it seemed this project was deeper than what I could have expected.
Here is the link to video of me going through my interactive story.
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