first briefs finnished now....evaluation time!

task 3 is finneshed now and it came to mostly positive feedback.
i assesed what happened in the crit and went along the lines of making the comicy cartoonish page and people seemed to like it. i think the site does well in terms of being a monster hunter fansite, the artwork, style and humour are all suitable to the style of the game and there were elements to the humour that appealed to a wider audience, peoples feedback indicates that they were entertained by the title and clickable bum in a tree. its a shme that i couldnt get a copy back to my target audience for feedback but there wasnt much time to get over the block that people thought i was advertising.
i'm a little dissapointed that i couldnt get text to go alongside the rollover for the guy in the tree (links) but there were difficulties with the scale of the image that i couldnt overcome in the time so i improvised, putting the text over the image resulted in niether being visible so i went with no text at all.
when i compare this site to the one i made in task 2 i feel that i've definatly made an improvement in terms of web design and the skills involved. the only real shame i think is that i didnt get round to actually filling some content onto the links and comic pages.
for this unit on the whole i think i've learnt so much, i came onto this course with nexto no knowledge about any softwares and now i can happily use photoshop, illustrator, quark and dreamweaver... i'm well chuffed! i think my sketchbook work could have been stronger but in this 1st term its been really difficult to keep up with the software.

crit notes part 2

i thought that this page looked a lot more pro than the 1st one but at the crit people hated it. its apparently very unproffesional to have things like my buttons being on the right instead of the left, if the page is wide than people may have to scroll to get to the buttons if they're on the right so they may not even notice them.
people also said the other idea catches the eye better because its bolder and brighter.

crit notes

like i promised in my sketch book here is the image of my dreamweaver work, as you can see its different from my concept drawing but it recieved fairly good comments in the crit i had at the beggining of the week.

animation evaluation

well...... i achieved my initial goals to animate my cats story board and learn maya in the process. i'm pretty happy with the end result, the synchronisation isnt perfect but it is my first time working with maya. it looks really simple but it took me forever to make each element and get it ready for animation, i think this is because i was learning as i went along though, if i did it again i think it wouldnt take half as long. there were a few technical errors when it came to finally animating my models, mainly with the lead singer, he was going to have a mouth that was actually a crater into his face using a blend shape but this became too complex for me when it was time to animate it so i made a disk instead and adjusted its size like a mouth.as for the project on a whole i think i could have reflected on my processes better and walked through and documented them.

in the end exporting the video was a nightmare and took nearly a whole day but thanks to fio's help i managed on time to meet the deadline. wow.

learning maya

learning maya is way scary at first .
1st thing we did was to create a piece of household furniture, mines on my flickr account so you can find it there if youre interested.

cats

final ideas now!

diffinately going with my cats idea taking inspiration mainly from ashley wood and tokyo plastic, i'm going to use maya mainly because i'm eager to learn as much as i can about it.

the cats are gonna be singing and drumming along to the sound of prodigy's smack my bitch up , i found a great bit in the middle where every thing slows down and theres no bad language so it should be cool.

advent children

blatently the finest 3d graphics in the world.
i've watched this film so many times and i aspire towards this quality... unfortunatly i've only just seen maya for the first time really so i'll be a while yet...

tokyo plastic

tokyo plastic has some of the coolest animations i've ever seen and basically my animated cats idea is nicked from the drums animationn on this site.

theres a link to tokyo plastic on the side bar of this page >

ashley wood

ashley wood is probably my biggest inspiration when i make illustrations in my spare time, i love his style, from how he gives the gist of a shape right up to his full stylized characterizations of his subjects...
... you dont have to look far from here to see were i got the idea for animating cats from...

white stripes

the image on the left is from the song 'feel in love with a girl' and the one on the right is from 'button to button' i think both videos use stop motion animation. 'button' times the animation to a beat and records and illustrates the music whilst the other one simply tells the story thas in the song using lego. both use live footage like my initial idea would have done and 'button' mixes it with animation exactly as i planned to!

nicolas nemiri

he's one of my heroes basically... he's a french artist who makes comic books in an anime style that he has adopted and changed to make his own.

animation ideas....part3

this idea is nothing like my other 2, it doesnt need syncronizing so in theory that should make it easier to create.
basically there is a grumpy little man who wants to go next door and tell his nieghbours to keep the noise down, only each time he opens the door he is blasted back by the sound coming from within until the last time when he opens the door and there is nothing...

animation ideas....part2

this idea follows in the footsteps of the previous one except instead of a fight there will be cats.

the cats will be in sequence to the music only as these will be simple characters and move in simple ways the animation will be more in my legue.

animation ideas....

first of my ideas is to just go with what i love an create a fight sequence thats choreographed to the music so events happen along side the beats....
.. thinking about it though this is a little comlicated to produce for me without simply filming.
i could edit footage afterwards to fit the music and make an animation out of slices of footage.

flick book

these are just a few images from my flick book.. they're a bit hard to see but basically its a man getting shot through the head and then crying about it.....
it never made it to flash

animation catch up

i just heard the other day that the animation sketchbook has to be handed in on disk not in a book so heres what i've got so far

ideas ideas....

the web page for task 3 has to be 3 pages so i figure a plan like this'll let me have loads of comics on one page.... theres only gonna be a prototype comic cos of the short time i'm gonna have but the page needs to be able to get loads in, it'll be scroll down like the suicide bunnies page.
this way i still have room for an index page and a links page(most fans wanted a forum and faq and guide as well as the comics so i'd put links in to them)

RATIONAL!! task3

For task 3 we are collaborating to produce a fan site, for a video game called monster hunter. Monster hunter is a team based fantasy adventure game. it can be played wireless over the internet or from console to console. We are going to aim it at people who are already fans of the game. We will be producing spoof comic strips that draw on the shared knowledge of the gamers for the fan site and handouts using print based media to promote this site.

The target audience would be fans of the game who have varying amounts of experience with the game, from new players to the die hard fans that don’t like the new players.

Research will be into both print, web and comics/similar projects. We will be producing questionnaires to find out what the fans want from the website. These questionnaires will be posted on online in monster hunter forums so its aimed straight at the target audience.


ANDREW: initially I will be looking into comic strips and spoof stories such as vg cats, mint sauce and various others. I will be helping with the web design but mostly I will be responsible for the print aspect of the project which is intended to promote the website.

LUKE: For starters I will be looking at the needs and wants of the existing monster hunter fans and producing questionnaire(s) that ask specifically what they would look for in a fan site. As I’m inexperienced in web design we thought it would be beneficial for me to confront this issue and deal mostly with the web design. Andrew will be assisting me and like wise I will be helping out with print.

COLLABORATING: Basically we will be pooling our collective passion for the game as well as our skills and creativity to create a wide range of amusing comic strips based on the many facets of monster hunter and providing solutions to the fans needs.

evaluation for my web page

it was really basic but it was only my first one.
i fullfilled my initial criteria and produced a simple page just like the one in my sketch so i guess i achieved my goals but there are a few things that i would like to change, for instance my page is massive and doesnt all fit on the screen- this needs correcting and there are no backlinks to the index page so you have to use the web browser tabs in the top right.
basically you can tell its my first web page but its okay because i've learned quite a lot and i'll be applying this to task 3 now. (hopefully the next page will look much better)

web design part2

i know its on a bit late but i'm strugglin a lil with all these deadlines, this was the idea for my simple web site. basically the three buttons on the side of the index page take you to a gallery, bio and contacts page...