For this brief we were given a choice of 3 companies to create a flash based animation for, that could be put onto a promotional website.
of the 3 choices I chose Pylones gift shop because I wanted to do something different and figured half the class would pick marvel! besides I'm not particularly interested in marvel.
Anyway I started this project by brainstorming a few ideas in my sketchbook and then creating a storyboard for the idea I wanted to stick with.
This was to vectorize the "gifts" using illustrator and then bringing those images into flash I planned on having them dance around the screen after bursting from a gift box, I decided to use Christmas as a theme and have the gifts coming from a present in someones living room, dancing around the room and also adding color as they went, I was going to follow this up with a slogan along the lines of pylones adding color at christmas.
To get the color element in there I used 2 backgrounds which I edited in photoshop, a black and white and a colored version of the same background and then altering the alpha faded the black and white background where necessary so that the colored background could shine through as the gifts danced around.
To get them to dance I decided to use guidelines and motion tweens, due to time constrictions I kept the items static, it would have been nice to have some of them moving individually as well but given the time and the sheer amount of hassle and frustration I went through with using flash decided it was not possible to do.
At the end of the film I planned on having another scene depicting a person arriving from the hallway, at this point the gifts were to dive back into the box, undiscovered... however due to the time limitations and technical ability I had to leave this out and instead just brought the girl into the current scene.
I would say the influence behind my work on this brief has definitely been a range of Anime movies that I have seen over the last few years or so, If I had to name one it would be paprika, or more specifically the marching scene in paprika, which encompasses a marching army of inanimate objects, I also took the music from the Intro of this film for my animation, however I could only get a small clip for free, so I had the choice of looping it or cutting it and adding more music, which is what I did, at the end of the scene a girl comes in and the music changes.
I feel I have tried my best on this brief, although am not 100% happy with the outcome, this is because I only have basic knowledge in flash, (a few introductory sessions) and found I didn't always get the help I needed when I needed it.
of course there was only one tutor available for the duration of this brief who had to tend to the whole class alone, so it's understandable that I couldn't get all the tutorage I needed.
I found alot of problems and frustration with using flash, however after these things were explained to me and I knew how to resolve them I can now say I feel fairly confident in using flash, although clearly at a basic level, I feel there is still more that I need to learn and am sure I will with further briefs.
I feel I have done well given the circumstances and have definitely got a basic understanding of flash, there are still things I want to know and am sure in time I will find out!
overall I am happy with the first half of my animation, but the 2nd part needs improvement.
(note: since writing this I have improved the second half and am alot happier with it!)
one other thing was that I was nervous about using thousands of frames, (I have learning problems with math and anything to do with numbers makes me freeze up basically) so as I'm not experienced in flash and to avoid confusion I kept them shorter thinking I could add frames and expand it later, of course I then found out that If i do this it will severely slow down the entire sequence, so I had to leave it as it was, otherwise delete it and start again! and I don't think I can do 3-4 weeks work again in a couple of days so it will have to be left as it is, which is around 825 frames, making the animation about 33 seconds long.
If I could do this brief again I would spend less time on vectorizing the images, I would have made an animatic, (and I really hope I don't lose marks for that because we were told we could do an animatic or a storyboard and it was not made clear that marks would be lost for not doing an animatic?) as this may have helped with realization, after the presentation of the storyboards I decided to just get on with my Flash as I knew what I wanted to happen, however it did not work that way! I would also plan my time alot better as you don't realize how precious it is until it's gone! Although I did dedicate almost all my time to this project for the past 2 weeks, I haven't worked on anything else because of it, I haven't even given my family the time of day because of it! so It's not an issue of not putting enough time into it, it's probably more about managing that time, which i'm sure if i had been confident in flash would have been easier!
here is the finished quicktime file, hopefully it will upload in college as I tried at home and it wouldn't upload!
(can't believe it, it's been an hour now and it STILL hasn't uploaded!)
(got it to upload at last but the quality is very very bad!!)
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