Final scene

This is the scene I made to use in my part of this circus flash project. I went with a simple circus ring and added more colour to it to make it more visually appealing but at the same time I took out some of the detail so it didn't detract from the animals. Here it is:

The animals are going to be slightly animated when idle. When you hover the mouse over them, they will animate a bit more. I think I may include a spotlight. Also when you hover over them, text will appear describing the animal and what it does in the circus.

Flash Project: Animals

Today I finished rendering the final animal designs for my portion of the flash project. I think they look a lot better than my previous animal designs because these one are more pleasant to look at, being bright and vivid and appealing to children. Here are screen shots of the work:

Flash Project: Title Page

I have been working on the title page in today's lesson. I started with the base image and the type, here is a screenshot of me working on it in Photoshop:

 

I went with this particular typeface because it is so typically circus-like and so fits perfectly with this titlepage. But I don't like it in black and white so I added a bit of colour and removed the white background because it clashes with the circus curtains. Here are the improvements I made:

 

This is a much better improvement. I now only really need and 'enter' sign or something where when clicked on, will take the user to the next page and show the content of the flash project. This will be a button. I will be making the buttons for this flash project also. I have already come up with a homescreen button and I now need to make more navigation buttons which I will show in later entries on this blog.

Initial Designs

After having a look at various art styles used in circus, I started some designs of the animals in Photoshop. I plan to have a few animated animals across the screen that animate more as you hover over them, revealing text about them. The animals I have chosen to show in the project are lions, elephants and giraffes, probably one of each mentioned to avoid over saturating the screen. Here are some initial screenshots of my first designs:

I have tried to go with a cartoon style. Mostly because we are trying to aim the project at children who tend to enjoy cartoon styles as opposed to more intricate styles. Also because a lot of the art I looked at in this area tended to be more cartoon-based. I went with a thick black line to add the cartoon element to this one.













This giraffes looks okay but I am not sure about the black outline because it is quite jagged in places and looks a bit overpowering; it detracts from the overall style of the design.













This is one that I like the least because it is too small, least fits the cartoon style and is a bit pixelated. This has led me to the decision that I will not use these three designs in the finished project. I am going to start on three more designs for the animals.

In terms of animation, whilst they are idol (not interacted with mouse) the animals will just slightly move; blinking, swaying etc. Once hovered over, the animal will animate more, like moving of the neck or something characteristic of that animal. I may have the elephant run and hide when the mouse goes near (that is the computer mouse) because I think this will give it a clever twist.

Circus animals

My job in team bee is to research the different animals that are used in the circus. I noticed that there is a lot of controversy surrounding animal use in circuses; people say that it is cruel to force animals to perform. The main animals used in the circus are typically elephants, lions, tigers, giraffes and horses.

Once I understood the background of circus animals, I then started looking into the art styles used to promote circuses to see how I want my part of the project to look. It needs to look like a traditional circus theme whilst apealing to our decided aucience: children.

These are some of the art styles I found would fit the project well:

Project Layouts

Today in our groups we had a look at how we want the project to eventually look. We also continued to decide on which aspects of the circus we want to base the project on and how we want to target it towards children. We decided on three main subsections and we plan to lay it out like this:

Circus research

In this weeks lesson I got in my group and we discussed more about he circus idea. Our ideas were as follows:

• Have a storyboard showing the past, present and furture of circus.
• Have severall screens showing different elements of a circus e.g. the different acts, types of circus and animals involved etc.
• Different contries and how each circus varies.

We eventually settled on how the idea will be structured and decided that the best idea was to focus on the individual aspects of the circus (the different performances, animals and shows). We also thought that showing the difference between circuses in different contries was a good idea.

Some Websites Are Amazing!

In this weeks session, we had to review several well designed websites to explore different techniques in multimedia. We also had to find a good website ourselves and I came across this one which I found to be very entertaining and engaging and just put a smile on my face. I believe it is experimenting with HTML5 which is also impressive, here it is:

[link: http://flashtml5.com/labs/lolwut/ or click image]