Interactive games.

this game is extremely fun ! its extremely simple being you just drag and drop outfits onto Jesus. But its so addictive and it has so many different genres  of outfits to pick from. The best  part being that the content is updated to things that are popular at the moment.   

An improvement I can say id want in this is to have ways to take screen shots  and have them unload to face book, or a save feature.

overall though i like game its interactive elements are fun and its quite addictive. 

This game i thought was quite bad and doesn't feel fun or rewarding to play. Their is little interactivity and at one point its hard to find the palce to click.  Aside form that the animations are smooth and the images used are clear and nice too look at. Over all i'm not so impressed with this 

This game is extremely interactive, their are animations on parts and  you can move things about as you please . This game has some appeal and is stupid in a sense it  draws you too it. 

Over all with this animation its good its appealing, and fun . but the images them self are pretty bad. 

Preparing a pitch for the client.

So since we have decided on an idea , we need to create a pitch for the client which will get across everything we are thinking in a clear way.
things that will really help show this and improve how much they understand where you want to go with this are.

• Clear font
• Mock up's so a client can visually see what it would be like
• What audience your aiming at
• What style of art (realistic, cartoon, photographic ect)
• examples of others work who you take inspiration from
• Not to much text that they get bored of reading

These give a clear understanding for your client and should stop them from being bored , we tried to include these in our presentation but because we all knew what we wanted form the project it was quite easy to have a minimalistic presentation but be able to engage them with us telling them what we would want.

Having just an image of a mock up we can explain what would be happening and what we would want going on.  

My Evaluation Of This Project

This was a project set by the aquarium and organised by the college, we where to create and interactive animation that would be uploaded to their website and possibly shown to people in the aquarium as well.
For this project I really wanted to aim at a broad audience and be able to capture something specific to the aquarium, and really get across personality's of fish. This entire project was taken like a job interview, we would design a pitch to sell out idea to them and if they liked it design it and aim to meet their deadline.

During this project I think it has really shown me what a working career in this area can really be like and developed my skills in many areas. I found this quite stressful some days and at some point really didn't want too look at another fish. but it has also taught  me how to adapt and look out for different and more efficient methods to achieve something this applied to Photoshop and especially flash during our work .
On flash their are millions of ways to tell an object to do the same thing and it really helped me learn to understand flash, I think I get the rough basics to how to get something to move on its own and a few other things which could really help me in the future if I ever need to do something with flash.
One thing I really liked but also despised on this project was the pressure it created by being form someone other then the college, it brought what I think is a working attitude to this project which made you work above and beyond trying to get things perfect and create something not that you'd just consider nice, but something the audience and the aquarium would find more then pleased with to put on their website.  but also created tons of stress for for me worrying if I would meet the deadline or if the idea and pitch was of a good enough quality for them.
Another thing is planning and teamwork, Although we where missing a person we still managed to split the original plan between us and kept up with it for a while , one thing I really do regret is managing to spend too long on one area which lost alot of valuable time on out flash animation its self.
I think this has really helped develop my skills in alot of areas how to improve on ideas , how to plan a pitch and sell it to the client. What research should be done so everything is fact , learn exactly what they want so listening to their criticism and things they consider areas  hat need improvement, also just run it past other groups and see what they think.

Considering mine and toms positions in this project I don't think we did that bad we managed to create a brilliant idea in my opinion which had great potential and we also managed to do most of the tasks we set out to do it was just the end and piece them together and code we had a problem with.
We made a back ground a bit over time because I spent way to much time fussing over small details on it. But we had all the fish animated or ready to become animated ready to go. The thing that i really think got us was the time , It sounds alot longer that it really was and really ended up biting us.
Also missing one person really did effect out work output and what we could do. especially seeing as he was the one person in our group who had experience with code and flash before.
I never thought missing one person could effect something so much but this created such a back log on the work load and gave even more pressure for me and tom.
I also had to take one weeks leave which put tom at a disadvantage.

Over all I don't think our finished product is very good although it had the potential to be great. we had a number of set backs which hit us pretty hard but I do think we managed to coupe quite well. Even if the project its self was not very successful the things I've learnt form this like time management a fine plan, clear presentations, team work, code in flash, even more about flash, improvising , adapting to the situation, learning on the spot and seeing flaws and things that could be improved . all of these are things ive realised while doing this project. Being a project from a client was really good in my opinion , because we weren't showing it to a teacher, so it really did not make you think " i can leave it for later" but this needs to be done that 110% had to be put in other wise its your face your tarnishing not to mention your representing an art college. It also gave a great reward to work after.

Working constraints.

For this project me and tom have had very little use of flash, using it in one project before but not using any code which would effect things in a major way like in this project, something we are finding in this is that , its hard! code is possibly one of the hardiest things to get used to, it makes sense once its down but being able to do it from memory is extremely hard! but thanks too lee's help things we wanted to do on flash became achievable , while we would also learn new  commands and ways of doing things on flash.
we relied on kyle for flash allot because he has a fair amount of experience and was confident and comfortable with his skills with flash. shame he hasn't been in allot for this project.

also another we have faced is that splitting a work load originally planed for 3 was instantly effected because of kyles absence, and i believe it has had a fairly dramatic toll on our work. we could of really used his help to help slack work loads and the stress of getting used to coding with flash.

one more I can think of would be the fact college was the only place I could use flash as my pc at home is not currently no able to run flash or photo shop, it completely chokes on it.  I know I could come in on my own time on Friday but between me and tom sometimes we found it hard to meet up after we finished on Thursday afternoons.
 luckily we had college on Thursdays as well at this point which gave us a little bit of extra working time plus we had lee which was always a big help.

fish in flash

So the idea we have is that we will have a shark that moves around at random, coming it at random points and takes a random amour of time to come into the stage.
We want this to also happen with our other fish but we want them to avoid the shark as it comes near them swimming in an opposite direction swimming into the distance or something along those lines.
We would also like the smaller fish to be able to interact with the scenery and back ground, the way we have thought about getting around this is to add a layer above the back ground which when the fish swim to hide
their animation sill stop behind the raised scenery hiding the fish, and making it allot simpler for us, this could also tie into the idea we have for the fish to react with the shark  and other things.
and finally we would like to add the ability to click near fish and they would respond , but something like a shark might just swim slower and not turn around and swim away.

this is what we would like to be in our finishing flash animation but at this stage its starting to look like we might not make it because we are falling behind some what.

Methods of reasearch

Firstly we went to the aquarium spent hours their watching fish we so would be animating so we could get an idea behind their personality and how they effect or are effect by things that are in their habitat, for example the sharks and other predatory animals that where in the tank with them.
One of the things we got too see was a feeding time at one of the tanks which completely changed the atmosphere and how the fish responded to one another.
Also on our visits to the aquarium we took pictures of the fish and recordings so it was data specific to that tank.

Secondly we asked staff what their feeding habits where too see what the people who have looked after then and see them on a daily basis say about them and see if we can learn anything new that might only be able to see at certain times or experiences they only have.

Thirdly we looked at boards near the fish tank these didn't really tell you allot about the animals but would give you basic info, what they where called their Latin name, and an image . This really helped us when it came to selecting fish because we just took pictures of the board as it changed  so we knew what fish where around in the tank so what we could use.

Lastly we used the internet, you tube, other sites which have information of clips of fish swimming or pictures we could use as reference. The benefit we got form looking at clips of the fish swimming was we didn't have to the aquarium see how the swim , or react and then come back to college to change things or make something accordingly. this was a great benefit to me and tom for this project.

After finishing a puppet warp.

So we had the problem of putting all of our fish together after we finished puppet warping them , we uploaded every image to illustrator and gave them their cell shade outline, this allowed us to change the size of the image at will without the image getting distorted which was a huge benefit  to our flash animation , we could make fish appear at different depths with out having to worry about them being distorted and pixalated.

After being saved in illustrator they where put in order on  flash , so that the swimming motion would like moving from first frame to last then last to first. we tested this while one following a guide path and it seemed to work , our experimenting with stuff pay'd off, plus the extremely useful help from one of the other groups.