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: