Interactive comic evaluation

For this project, my influences were the interactive comics 'Dead on Arrival' and 'Hotel', as well as the interactive adventure videos on Youtube. I decided upon an A-to-B journey to allow a beginning to end narrative to my story, and I decided to use photographs I took myself as my primary source material which gave me full control over the images I used as I could take the photographs to fit my storyboard. 

My own past experience gained from previous Flash animations I have done, as well as looking at the work of others, my interest in graphic novels, and the classroom demonstrations that have been part of my course have all contributed to the skills and techniques I used for this project. As well as this, I discussed the project with other students and with my lecturer to help develop my work. My own experimentation played a part in my development of this project, a good example is the method I used to simulate the character walking.

The photos allowed me to feel the ambience of the locations I chose and I could then take and edit the pictures to reflect this. I manipulated the images in Photoshop and in Flash to achieve the results I needed. I decided not to use sound in my comic as I didn't want to distract from the imagery and I also wanted to keep the feel of a more traditional, paper-based comic.

This project was hard work, but I have enjoyed it. I will be using some of the techniques I learnt and developed, for example, i found that using a storyboard allowed me to have a very clear idea of what I needed to do right from the beginning, and I'm pleased with the cinematic effects I utilised. The Flash coding I learnt, such as buttons, is something I am looking forward to utilising in future work.

Overall, I'm pleased with how my comic turned out. I like the way I coded it and I feel that the pans, fades and cuts I used are effective in both telling the story and in moving it on at an appropriate pace. The technique of vertical mirroring I used to make my protagonist appear to walk is, I feel, very effective. I could have managed my time a bit better to allow for more scenes, shots and animation, but I feel that I have produced a good piece of work.dead on arrival, photo work.

Story board

This is the story board for my interactive comic.

This story's about a man's journey to get to a job interview on time. It doesn't go as smoothly as he hoped. After he gets off his train he goes to catch a bus, and is offered a lift by a stranger. The reader has to decide whether he takes the lift or catches the bus. If the bus is chosen, it breaks down and he's late for his interview, and misses the job. If he takes the lift, the cars brakes fail and he has to run through town. He takes a shortcut down an alley and witnesses a mugging in progress. The reader has the choice of ignoring the mugging, in which case the character is mugged himself and misses his interview. However, if he goes to the victim's aid he fights off the mugger and the victim gives him a cash reward which he uses to pay for a taxi, which gets him to the interview on time.

Flash Pan and Zoom

In flash we were learning how to zoom and pan. Firstly I chose an image of a hight street from google images. I opened it in photoshop to change the size and resolution whilst avoiding pixelation. Next. I imported the image into flash I added rulers so I could see how large the stage was. I next used the time-line to create a motion tween. I put the first mark at 50 frames and had the image zoom in to that point. finally I panned the image to the left, so I dragged the photo to the right so the part of the photo I wanted fit the size of the stage.

Here are the pictures of the stages mentioned.

Next we started adding buttons using action script. First I used the rectangle tool to make a shape. Then I double-clicked it to highlight it ready for conversion into a button. I clicked the window tool bar and selected code snippets, and then stop and play. There are four states for buttons, which are up, down, over and hit.

Audio capture

Today we had an induction for a Marantz audio recorder. We were shown how to set it up to record in mp3, in mono. We were shown how to connect a uni-directional 'gun' mic, and an omni-directional mic. We were also shown how to set the recording levels and how to set up a pre-set. The health and safety issues discussed were; don't turn the headphone volume up to high, avoid getting the unit wet (electricity), and trip hazards from the trailing cables. This information is available on Moodle.

Typography experiments

I photoshop we have been playing around with text and imagery.

Here I have been using the warp text tool. First I wrote these words at random to give me something to work with. The effects I used include wave and fish-eye.

In this picture I have been trying out paths where we put text along a line. I used the pen tool to create the wavy line and I used the text tool, clicking on the line and then typing makes the type follow the line.

For this example I used the custom shape tool which gave me a choice of templates which I could fill in with my own choice of text. To do this I held the rectangle tool down, and selected custom shapes from the list. I chose a speech bubble from the selection by holding the left mouse button and dragging it down. I used the text tool and clicked inside it.

Finally for this I managed to place text inside a photo of my face. First I chose a picture of myself. I cropped it to include just my face and added a filter to make it monochromatic. I used the magic wand tool to select an area of my face and then used the text tool to add text. I used different colours for different sides of my face to enable the text to stand out. I like the effect of the grey scale and how the areas of light on my face contrast with each other, and how the text contrasts with this.

Flash Demo

To create a flash file for the iphone we opened flash and chose an iphone stage from the drop down menu. We then chose an image and placed the jpeg on layer one, frameone, with a resolution of 72dpi and a size appropriate for the iphone.

Then we created an image of a circle on layer two using the oval tool. Next i added a keyframe on the timeline by clicking on the 50th frame and pressing F6. Afterwards i selected the circle and Pressed F8 bring up a dialogue box to convert the cirlce into a movie clip.

To make the ball move i used a tween or to be more specific a classic tween. First i had to highlight an area on the timeline and add a keyframe, i highlighted the frames and chose the tween option from a drop down menu.