Evaluation

'Within a collaborative team you will be assigned a live client brief*. Whilst continuing to develop individual specialist skills you will be addressing the client’s requirements alongside the ethical considerations of working within a team.' We essentially as a group had to make a 360 video for our clients 'Norwich Tourist Board', showing the best and futuristic aspects of Norwich. Directed at 16-24 year olds. As a team, we mostly kept in contact with each other throughout, again it dwindled at the end. On the technical side our 360 video was impressive, considering it was a new concept to us. We tried to incorporate the 360 aspect, by having two different scene in front and behind the viewer. Every week we would come in with a treatment responding to previous suggestions in a professional manner.

Our 360 video doesn’t feature that two main characters we originally were going have, so the viewer could follow them around the scene. Even through weeks of being reminded, the group member never gave us their animation. Which was a shame for the overall effect. Our characters also could be playing with the scene more, instead of blending in.

My 2D skills need to be improved, I found it hard executing my ideas in a professional way since I don’t have the skill set. My animations weren't perfect. I also didn't like my character ideas given more time we could have put more thought into the designs, they could have been more creative. Our characters could have also have been 3D.

Final 360 Video

Week 8 -
This week is all about the finishing touches, making sure our animations are edited together (and possibly have sound). Ready for submission. We also have mid unit reviews just to make sure we’re on track.

The final outcome for our 360 video, unfortunately the two main characters that we needed to guide the viewer around were never completed. So we have our background characters the amuse the audience. The slogan was a nice at the end to tie up the entire concept of the animation, the music also helped with the experience. Music is great at influencing the audiences mood, so having a lively track should make the viewer feel good about the video. 

Drink

Just another quick aimation of a drink - for the night time side of the animation. It was my previous design.

Crit - Week 7

The main points were to do with colour and character texture, it was also suggested to us to also use
sound which at this stage isn't a massive priority. Maybe just a nice music track would suffice.
They also suggested taking advantage of the animation, making the movements more extreme.

They also wanted us to think about how the characters would appear (would they pop out of nowhere/behind something) with more harmony of colour palettes, also to get the main characters in the video so we could produce some kind of clear narrative. A link at the would help tie the whole animation together. Maybe to let the audience know it's Norwich, because it doesn't seem clear enough for them.

360_Testing

Here is an experiment made from maya planes, you can see the major clipping and distortion with these stock photos. 

Whereas on this more recent 360 test, the clipping is not an issue. the spilt between the two places is very well done. Although it shall be made less harsh, it also involves quite a few of our characters. Along with the new and improved logo. 

Final_Presentation

360 Experimenting

You can see here me adding my character to the after effects file, this side is the the day time characters. 

This is the night time side with my female character taking a selfie. 

And again the night scene, with my other dragon. These aren't going to be exactly where they end up. At this stage I working out the kind of size I wanted them to be, we need to work out the kind of rhythm our video is going to be by adding the two main characters.

Dragon, day and night

I changed the colour of my initial dragon design to match the beer festival dragon from the pint glasses this year, I understand this is relevant for this year. But the beer festival is a yearly thing, with has been going on for 39 years. 

I wanted to carry on making stand alone animations, for this animation the day time dragon will be standing about chapelfield with his bag wiggling his head and tail. 

My night time dragon has the same bag, but I've added glasses that fall from the sky. In the viral video fashion. 

Evolution of the Logo

Our logo went through quite a few iterations, we were told to keep the graffiti logo from the beginning. Being told if brought a 'young' aspect to our video this also being the audience we were meant to be adhering to. 

Our first iteration wasn't taken well, the 3 different types of fonts weren't well perceived. We were told to make them all similar. and to possibly make it look more like a stencil.  

You can see the biggest improvement in the last logo, it's looks fairly professional and cleanly done with the spray effect. the stencil is then picked up and left behind is the font which is all the same.

Hurrah Riverside Filming

Hurrah, we were able to film at riverside. Finally. We very nearly missed the rain, but we did it.

Still Animations

I wanted to produce very simple background motions for my characters, for my character below she is waiting for her friend to arrive. so she's looking at her watch and tapping her foot. As we all do when someone is late. 

Below here my night time character has decided to take the time to take a 'cheeky selfie' of herself, that's slang for take a picture of herself.

I took my daytime character and put her over the top of the daytime chapelfield scene that we have taken. She seems slightly too big, so I feel smaller for her is better. 

2D - not great

This is just three steps in a walk cycle (if you couldn't tell I was struggling) 2D really isn't somthing I'm strong with, so I've decided to try a differen't method on photoshop. With keeping all the body parts separate, and moving them bit by bit. And then exporting them into flash, I'm not sure how it will work but I will have a try.

My Inspired Characters

This image you clearly see the brick texture in the background, which I think looks quite good. Like they have been painted.

After Linear burning the backdrop on to the characters and editing the brightness they have come out darker than I intended, I think I am going to try and draw them again. But play with the brightness of the brick texture before I add it on to the character.

The brightness has still not been adjusted here, but I decided on the two characters I wanted to use. With very simple outfit differences, so the audience knows that it's the same person but subtly changed. I'm not completely happy with the actual ideas, I feel like If I make them lighter and easier to see I might be happier.

Texture used on the two main characters

We've decided to take on the style of one of the characters created, by using the brick pattern to create a painted on the wall graffiti look. We will take this, and use this as one of the main characters.

Filming

This is us filming at chapel field during the day, we were asked why we were there. But after explaining we found it wasn't an issue, however this wasn't the same for riverside. We we told that we weren't allowed to film there until we get confirmation from the land owners.

But from that day, we now have a 360 shot of chapel field in the day time, and in the night time. Unfortunately riverside will have to wait in the meantime, we will edit/animate on what we can.

Presentation Crit

Our presentation wasn't fantastic (pretty unorganised and awful) but suprisingly we got the best reaction to our idea so far we were told 'it was a good idea', We plan to create our half chapelfield and half riverside with lots of characters. We are going to start filming Monday. Nice 7:30 start.

Presentation Elements

This was the short animatic test to show the viewer where they will be looking (or where we want them to look) from when we're guiding them around the scene with our characters. Which we have now decided to change, we are only going to have two main characters to guide us round the scene, a male and female.

This was the short walk for the original characters, I have felt from the start that they don't seem to fit well with the 'grafitti' theme. So we plan to change them to a style that looks like the one below with texture. 

This is the style that we're looking for, the texture looks like it was ripped off paper. This will be the look for our two main characters.

Character Ideas

I really wanted our characters to have relevance to 'Norwich' and 'Chapelfield' and there are a lot of food and drink shops in chapelfield, I wanted to also give them a very simple day and night look. For example during the day a cocktail can just put on a straw and fruit for night time. 

However these ideas got shot down pretty instantly by other group member, saying that they didn't want to do food. 

On that logic I kept with the relevance of Chapelfield and Norwich to animate one of the statues that at one point of the year you find everywhere.

Practising

Here I just did a quick animation of a unknown character just showing our idea from going to day to night, here the character decided to put on some 'snazzy' glasses before heading out to to night life of Norwich. It did come out slightly jumpy with the transition between the two places, but that shouldn't be a problem coming to the final outcome. 

Week 6- It wasn't so much of a roast this time.

Our tutors didn't dislike our ideas this time aound, they liked the idea of having the two characters being the focus of the films showing you were to look, they liked the tweets appearing showing offers, but they felt like there needed to be more of a story. We took their feed back and have decided to roll with one of our previous ideas of making a day and night scene, this became a clearer thing to do since the tutors mentioned that just using a picture instead of a video for the 360 would be easier.

Treatment Take 2

Week 5 - We responded to the crit we were given to the previous treatment by making it visually satisfying by adding characters. Along with the tweets that we originally had, except this time they would interact with the characters around. ie they would encourage the characters to go into the shops with their deals. Our lead will be two main characters, as examples here we have used the 'Not Mario' and 'Not Luigi' characters. 

Graffiti Twitter/ E4

https://twitter.com/norwichgraffiti

Thinking of new ideas

Here are just a few drawn up character ideas from one of the guys in the group, they could be drawn up digitally and animated.

Week 4 - Roasting

We knew going into the VR room that we didn't have the BEST idea, but we knew what we wanted to do. But neither did our tutors, suggesting that our 'sweets' character might confuse the audience rather than entertain them. That we need to look at whether our target audience would find that funny. We
also needed to focus on the 'future' aspect of Norwich, the market for them didn't show that.

They felt like maybe combining the graffiti aspect of the second idea with the first involving social media, they made the point that having a 360 video with posters of events happening in Norwich then the video has a shelf life.

Idea 2

Idea 1/ Week 3 Post 2

Week 3 -

We split our group of 6 into two groups of 3, in those groups we created 2 separate treatments with two separate ideas. Formatted into a visual and textual feedback, to be presented to the client.

'Tweet' Examples