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.

Art style decided And Refining of back ground.

With the help of the student teacher who came in when lee was teaching we decided to definitely keep on with the cell shade , mainly because it looked like such a big success on the background.
Something I realised is that because of this, it really brought the background to life. some of the images that where pasted together had different depth of colours and where greyed or just a bit plain.
Because of the define black lines that ran over things it really helped bring all the picture together and make it look like it was all one.

We refined the back ground by cropping a section getting rid of the frayed sections to make it look more neat and professional, I used the stamp tool to fill in gaps and merge photo's together. which i though was really successful
Before

After

Research on Puppet warped fish.

Before we started puppet warping our fish , we decided we needed to  do some research into them, so we went on you tube and brought up videos which would let us she how they moved.

We would watch the frames constantly and just choose key points in which we would add a movement to the fish, most of or fish had 3-5 movements and one had 9, adding this many movements made it fast but also made it look like alot of movement.we added 9 to one because we thought this would be one of the main features and largest of the fish tank. 

These all put in order make slight movements which when animated will create a fluid motion

By using the you tube videos this helped us achieve a more natural look and more accurate towards the fish's behaviour.

Many pictures.

We decided because of the millions of pictures me and tom had accumulated , to pick a few fish of certain types. we choose a couple that people love and a couple that weren't well known to mix things up a bit.
we also checked through each others pictures and deleted what we thought wasn't needed and kept useful ones or just ones we like in general.
we also saw the quality on the ones we checked to make sure it was possible the minipulate them in ways we wanted.
One thing we found was that  some fish where to Gray or blue or faint because of how the water distorted colours .

you can see this in the make up of the back ground.

you can see which bits are different pictures.

Reasearch

After having a lecture with someone who was a master with Photoshop, we learnt a new way of manipulating the images to create swimming fish which would save us all the troubles and time that the other way would give us.

This way we learnt was puppet warp , what would happen in this is that  a still image would be given joints and from this  we could bend and curve parts while keeping it looking real.
The process would be to

• load picture
• delete back ground (only the fish is left)
• Click puppet warm and add the joint sections to the appropriate areas.
• Move certain pins so it will look like a slight moment from the original
• Save with a different name form the original but so you know the order if their are alot.

This proved alot faster compared to the other way of cutting sections out from a film clip which took anything from 2 hours to the majority of a session

The puppet warp way did not look as smooth and natural as the other one but saved us hours. shame we discovered this a little late !

Background

This was one of the longest things I did, it shouldn't really of took so long but erasing the fish from it took a long time.
we took about 20 pictures of the bottom bit of the tank focusing around the main feature of it, the crashed plane. i took the images and slowly merged them together just seeing how the pictures would look over lapping one another this created a kinda of collage effect, it took a very long while but eventually i ended up with something that was complete and didn't look distorted and trashy.
It took an extremely long time to remove the fish in the pictures from the frames, i managed to remove them using the stamp tool.
This allowed me to keep the colours that where all ready in use and keep the picture feeling natural.

here is what our still back ground look like, after being pieced together from many different pictures

we will probably have to either fill in the sections around or add too it. also theirs the possibility of cropping a section which is of the best quality.

Lesson with Lee

after having a few lessons with lee he helped us refine our idea and help to understand code alot more . at this point we could have a circle randomly coming back and forth in an out of our fishtank. 

We had the code we needed for this 

CODE TO BE UPLOADED!

This would help a lot because it would mean we would not need to have a set path and this could all be done randomly and fast, without us having to set a constant path, this also keeps the tank looking alot more lively. 

We wanted the image to sometimes shrink and enlarge as well to add some depth , this will hopefully be done later on. 

Aquarium

TTom and I went into the aquarium many a time to get pictures of waht we needed, we choose to base the virtual aquarium on one of the tanks they where so proud about, the pacific tank, which had 3 of their sharks and was sponsored by the RAF.

The fist thing i did was take lots of picture s of the bottom plus the walls and scenery, focusing on the crashed plane in the middle. 

The pictures below are ones that me and tom took in the aquarium of fish sow e could use them as reference's. and that we could possibly use them once we discovered the puppet warp tool. also some of these have usful back grounds

The plan

This is a rough plan we have to get everything sorted out.

• gather information on animations  or art styles . 
• Get pictures and video clips of fish together.
• Piece together pictures that we need  while the video clips get refined  
• After back ground is finished start preparing code
• peice together all the peices
• Evaluation

I think that this is a fairly cramped plan but it will be possible if we keep everything on track.
i'm also very pleased with our idea although their inst a story, i believe that the children and people who see it will enjoy it if its anything like it is in my head.
also i think they will accommodate for all of our strong points

The idea

The idea we decided on was A virtual fish tank with a mix of the information one that would show simple information on the fish.
The reason behind this being that it seems the most achievable to us but also would encourage us to work on bettering our skills because it requires some coding and would be adequate to our skill level seeing as only one of us in the group has used flash regularly.

We thought that if we kept on track that we may have some time at the end that we could add some extras, like in depth information.

The methods we decided to use to get the animations and background ect required was , photography ,video clips and drawings. lee would be showing us a method to take movie clips and separate the fish so we have the animation.

we have a rough idea on the style of art we want, we want them to be fairly simple but still retain the detail and we are considering cell shading ,