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 This has been replaced by an additional scene on Earth involving the main characters waking a rooster early which in turn causes the humans on the farm to wake up in a large commotion.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.

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.