Night Life Blog

Ken and I (Alder) will be working in Flash to animate our scenes, with assets created in Illustrator, as we are much more experienced with using the two in the animation process, and also for what we wish to achieve Flash seems far more appropriate than After Effects. Although assets have already been created by Mitchell using Photoshop, they are all raster and therefore unsuitable for Flash animation, so I will be regenerating the graphics we need using Illustrator to take advantage of their much cleaner scalability.

Benefits of Flash:

• More intuitive, cleaner workspace/interface than After Effects
• Motion Tweening much more streamlined than the AE equivalent
• Movie clips can be used for easier looping of animated assets
• An external library can be used for me and Ken to easily share assets
• Vectorised graphics mean much cleaner, high-fidelity scaling
• Scenes can be used to break up long pieces of footage

Drawbacks:

• Far fewer file format options for exporting clips, although to get around this we can just export our scenes in SWF format, bring them into After Effects, and render them from there.

We have decided to make a slight change to the animation. We are re introducing a scene that we originally cut in place of one involving the main characters and the constellation of Orion. This has been replaced by an additional scene on Earth involving the main characters waking a rooster early which in turn causes the humans on the farm to wake up in a large commotion.

It was decided that at this point the Orion sequence was too complex and didn’t add much to the story. This new sequence makes more sense in context and is very appealing visually.

Myself and Ken spent the day in the Cork School of Music creating some of the sounds that will appear in the final piece. It was time well spent as now we’ve the beginnings of how Altair, Vega and the other stars will sound as they move through the piece. And through utterly destroying our vocal chords we’ve gathered the basis of the sounds our monster will make.

There has been a slight change to our awards system strategy. We have removed the “executive producer” credit. This leaves a more balanced three levels. 

•  1+ makes the person a Contributor.
•  3+ makes the person an Artist.
• 10+ makes the person a Producer and they receive a fully packaged version of the film on DVD.

I have recently been revising our approach to provide an incentive to the public to contribute art work to the film. We had originally intended to set up a fund it page to attempt to gain funding from the public in order to secure a major incentive like an iPad. However a change in direction and current time constraints have meant that we have had to reconsider. A fund it campaign may not work and we haven’t got time to wait it out at this point.

The new idea is to use the fund it principle of rewards to develop an in built rewards system.

It would be a four tiered system based on the amount a person contributes.

• 1 contribution the user will earn a Contributor credit on the film.
• 3+ contributions the user will earn an Artist credit on the film.
• 5+ contributions the user will earn a Executive Producer credit on the film.
• 10+ contributions the user will earn a Producer credit on the film and a fully packaged DVD version of the film.
• There will also be unlockable character bios on the site. One of these can be earned for each contribution made.

This will require the setting up of a profile system to facilitate the delivery of the rewards scheme.

With this new system we are banking on people buying into being part of something that could potentially become much bigger. We intend this project to have life far beyond this semester and we intend to enter it in festivals. We are hoping that the lure of being able to say the worked on a film especially if it garners notice in the festivals.

This new strategy is also in line with our current direction of buying fully into the user contribution aspect. The films success relies on their contribution and in turn that success becomes their reward as well as other bonuses.

Yesterday we met as a group in order to breakdown the scenes that each of us will be responsible for animating. Looking over the storyboards we found that we had 24 scenes in total, making it easy to split the scenes evenly among us.

Each member of the team shall be responsible for 6 scenes.

The breakdown was as follows;

Scene 1 - Robert

Scene 2 - Ken

Scene 2_2 - Robert

Scene 2_3 - Alder

Scene 3 - Alder

Scene 3_2 - Alder

Scene 3_3 - Alder

Scene 4 - Robert

Scene 4_2 - Alder

Scene 4_3 - Alder

Scene 4_4 - Robert

Scene 5 - Robert

Scene 5_1 - Mitchell

Scene 5_2 - Mitchell

Scene 5_3 - Mitchell

Scene 6 - Mitchell

Scene 6_1 - Mitchell

Scene 6_2 - Mitchell

Scene 6_3 - Ken

Scene 7 - Ken

Scene 7_1 - Ken

Scene 7_2 - Ken

Scene 7_3 - Ken

Scene 7_4 - Robert

Breakdown by Team Member is

Alder - Scenes 2_3, 3, 3_2, 3_3, 4_2 and 4_3

Ken - Scenes 2, 6_3, 7, 7_1, 7_2 and 7_3

Mitchell - Scenes 5_1, 5_2, 5_3, 6, 6_1 and 6_2

Robert - Scenes 1, 2_2, 4, 4_4, 5 and 7_4

Orion’s Design. We were trying to go for a hazey, outline.

The rest of the team is happy with this design, now it’s a matter of making it work with our cardboard cut out design. 

All Rigged and ready.

 

Mitchell Galavan

Mitchell

Here’s the next character! The little girl Altair plays with. She’s a sweet little thing, and she’s gonna annoy the hell out of their big brother. 

She’s all ready to be animated, but it’s gonna be fun as heck dealing with that skirt. I think, if I do end up animating her legs, it’ll be close to frame by frame animation.

Mitchell