Lecturer Lesson 4 : Three examples of Analysis

In todays lesson for interactive media, I have been studying three examples which will help me to influence my 60 second animation.  The three examples which I looked at are The Simpsons, Wallace and Gromit and Explania.  So far I have explained the first two examples of animation.  I have found this lesson really helpful because it has helped me to gain ideas for my 60 second animation. Hopefully from this analysis which I'll complete for next lesson, I'll be able to start doing my storyboard. 

Here is my essay:

I will be talking about three examples which will influence my 60 second animation. Some of the reasons why I am doing this is that I can develop my animation and make it better for my target audience.   I will carry this out as an investigation because it means I can note down the techniques and information in my research. 

The first example of my animation is a website called explania. Explania is a website about creating educational content, for a range of ages.  Explania is a small company part of a larger multi-media company called Instruxion which are specialized in creating high impact explanatory content. This is shows that this is really good animation website to use because it has to explain highly complicated topics in a simple format for a general age target audience. The five main topics of this website are health, technology, work, software and sports. I can use this example to help me develop my idea for my 60 second animation. Some of the aspects from this animation which can help me to make my 60 second animation are using the simplest drawing techniques to create my object and this can help me to create my 60 second animation quicker.  Some these techniques which I can implement into my animation are the simple animations which describe the text , so that the message is shown clearly.  As you can see in the clip below simple colours and simple animations are used to help the message of the clip:

http://www.explania.com/en/animations/detail/calculate-your-body-mass-index-bmi

This is what I’m going to do and try to use these techniques  to make it easier for my target audience (14-16yrs ) to understand what the content is and that they will learn it and enjoy rather then, being boring and not taking the information on board.

The second example which I’m using is the Simpsons because my target audience enjoy this TV programme.  A few reasons why I choose to do the Simpsons is because it is a highly successful cartoon comedy programme around the world.  As you can see ‘John Campea’ says “A Simpsons episode produces over $400,000 dollars a year.  This shows that this Simpson’s series  theme is  suitable  for my 60 second animation. This is because this TV programme is very popular and this particular  target audience (14-16yrs). I won’t using incorporating any of the Simpson’s animation techniques because it will be too complicated and the detail of it would take too long for my animation. However, I may decide to incorporate the Simpsons characters because it seems like a good influence for animation which will ne helpful and hopefully succeed in targeting the right audience.

Introduction

Simpsons

Explania

Wallace and Gromit

conclusion

Simon Lesson 3 - Bouncing Ball and Timeline Effects

I learnt a lot of things in flash today. I completed a bouncing ball in Adobe Flash Action script 3.0, I achieved this by  creating a symbol in Adobe Flash. I learnt many tools such as the motion guide tool, which allowed me to create a path for my object  to travel.  I also, played around with the timeline effects which helped me to do many different effects such as blur, fading, scale , change colour and exploding image up into pieces.

Some other tips which I learnt in today's lesson was publishing the file as swf, so you could open it up and player the actually sequence of the ball jumping up and down.  We got told that only JPEG and GIF files could be imported into flash because otherwise the flash file would get too big and probably cause the Adobe Flash to debug and shut down.  A tip to prevent this was to go to image and click on break apart which changes the pixels to save space.

From this lesson I will be able to take this further by experimenting with these techniques and use them for my 60 second animation. I would use the motion path tool to follow my animation.

Problems :

Some of the problems which I encounter which could be an issue is creating a complex path for my object because when i played my animation it wouldn't work.