CONTACT
Execution
The top two boxes above this text give a brief summary of the iterative process we took to be able to come up with our final island design. It also shows each person's individual design style and how we managed to create sketches in order to make piecing them together easier. We also have included a few images for development of our individual styles.
This also shows textures that we played around with, trying to create a child-like atmosphere but still keep it very professional. We have also shown images that were used around the final island idea with different textures involved - something which we later scrapped due to not being aesthetically pleased by the design. In the end, we decided to only add textures on a select few of the vectors.
Above is the storyboard for the animatic which also helped to bring together the island idea. The animatic is broken down into really brief scenes which would be developed in the animation. There is also a page that shows how the audio matches up whilst the certain aspect of the animation is playing. We found this a really effective process as it helped to break down and really help us envision what we were trying to achieve. The full animatic can be seen below.
After the animatic was developed we decided it was crucial to start looking at character design and the values we want to achieve with this. We understand education is important to when growing up, and that if this animation was to be shown to children, we want it to have a positive and fair representation. This is why one of the values we wanted to promote was diversity. The audio clip itself states "no matter where you've come from" so we've taken this idea and applied it to our animation. One aspect to consider when creating the characters was the technical limitations and time related aspect attached to certain visuals. Simpler lines, block colours and self expressive features would work well, as we had a short amount of time to produce the animation and character animations could take up a large aount of time if they weren't properly thought out. The development of this can be seen below.
Below is the final static image and video that we managed to finish and get submitted for the RSA deadline. Unfortunately, it didn't get finished to the standard of what we would have liked and some elements had to be left out due to timing. We did include what we believed were the most important animated elements first, to ensure that if it was unfinished it would at least contain the most important pieces, and as it happened we didn't manage to animate it all before the deadline. This however, provided us with more enthusiasm to get it finished for the module to how we imagined it to be, and despite it all we believe this was a strong start to our vision.
The island itself contained over 100 elements, all of which were distributed between all 3 of us effectively and were made quickly. Not only did we have to create the static version, but we also had to create revolutions for certain vectors that were going to be animated for the final thing. This made it more interesting for those who were just used to standard graphic design because it was a learning curve to understand how objects move and how to make it look effective. Again, it was important to consider the aesthetic style of the graphics in relation to the realistic time and technical applications. We found that bold, bright and borderless was best.
The animation has been created using Adobe After Effects. Each element is a PNG image, and combined there are over five hundred layers and transitions. Although this version of the animation is in an unfinished state, it still took almost half an hour to render out. The final animation, in it's completed state, took almost four hours to render into a video clip.