Trial and Error

Before leaving Uni on Thursday I started work on the illustrator heavy aspect of the piece, something I wasn't looking to. As I've said before Illustrator really isn't my forte and working with it was proving difficult, I'd go to use tools and they would be in a different place or simply wouldn't exist. So I turned to the internet.

Social media has a heavy influence on this piece and I've used my own experience with it to figure out parts that should be included in the projection. Something that really stand out for me was back in the days of MSN you could assign certain GIFs to words/letters sometimes to look good but mostly to annoy your friends and the best thing about them was - they moved.

I wanted to incorporate that somehow and decided that the 'Social Media Pop-Up Scene' should have moving emojis, the downside being I would have to then make the moving emojis. So they aren't elaborate or fancy but the slight movement catches the eye and I think on a big screen will look really interesting.

Also here is the guide I used to make the base emoji and then I just animated the sequence within my own knowledge before pre-composing them in After Effects.

At this point I also made the base for the social media scene, now I really wasn't proud of this work and it was literally giving me nightmares so I knew it had to change I just wasn't sure how. What I did know was the content. I gave each of the characters on the ship a profile page including; Name, status eg King, Nobleman etc and feeling. I also included a little quote I feel represent them as characters, each quote is from the text and is either said by or to the character in question. I got this idea again from the days of MSN, being able to put a little message beside your name and from the idea of a Facebook status - hence the colour scheme. However instead of a profile picture (which let's face it with my drawing skills would have been laughable) I put the animated emoji that corresponds with the characters current feeling either; concerned, scared or worried. 

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I then saved the vectors as different images, every time loosing a character so when I put it into after effects I could do a bit of stop frame animation. Overall I'm finally becoming happy with the final product, I've still got a way to go before everything is ready but for the first time I think I might actually meet the deadline which is a crazy concept to have considering where I was this time last week. 

Here's the latest test I've made and since I've made significant changes to the animation the sound is not a bit more out of sync, a problem that will be rectified by assessment day.