I decided to use Scenario2 of my 'smarter systems' section as the basis for my animation and set about drawing a storyboard. I have changed the names of the characters in the scenario.
Jack is new in town and doesn't know too many people yet. He sits at a bus stop waiting for his bus into the town center.
A stranger arrives and sits next to him.
Moments later both Jack and our strangers phones receive a message. It informs then that they support the same football team as each other.
Prior to their coincidental meeting at the bus stop, Jack and Colin has entered a few personal details into the system, including the football teams they support. The node, having detected the common interest has messaged it to them and the pair begin to talk about the season thus far.
The animation will then go on to explain how the system works in more detail.
From users entering interests and how it links up with the nodes and where nodes might be found.
Lastly the animation will reveal the title of the system and the logo. The title came to me in a flash of brilliance and the number of exclamation marks show how excited I was.
Called version1.html and located in the root directory this animation was the first version.
It took a while to find a bus stop both empty and with the bench facing the road like I needed. Once found the actors stuck to the storyboard, which was followed very well with few takes. A happy accident was that Jack checked his watch in both camera angles. This wasn't scripted, but I edited the footage so that when the scene changed it was as he was checking his watch.
Afterwards I decided it was too startling to jump straight to video footage, and that the animation needed some text at the start in order to grab and retain interest, which is why the intro text was not storyboarded.
The audio track used is called 'woman in blue', which I felt fitting for the project. I first heard it in a Levis advertisement so it's no stranger to accompanying visuals.
Feedback from testing:
For the most part the animation was well received. Negligence on my part means there was no preloader, so people with slower connections suffered from buffering. Also the credits button would jump to the last frame which had been downloaded, as opposed to the credits which appear at the end. However once people had viewed a smooth version of it there were few issues raised.
People were able to understand what my idea was, and the text didn't move too fast.
One aesthetics point which was raised by a viewer was the fact that all the text transitions were all vertical or horizontal motion, except for the location of the nodes, where the text flys in from all directions. They remarked this broke the style and made the animation look very much like a powerpoint presentation.
-Preloader added
-Changed node location list entry style
-Changed 'out of the blue' message to include the word 'free'
Feedback from testing:
Having fixed the issues highlighted in version 1, no new issues were unveiled in version 2. Some viewers requested a more accurate loading bar, but seeing as this assignment is going to be submitted on CD I decided not to waste anymore time on preloaders.
After re-reading the assignment brief I realised that I was not allowed to use sound I had not created myself. This is the only reason the music was removed, as otherwise it fitted perfectly. Unfortunately I fear this makes the animation a little less interesting and involving, and while I do not agree with the original content rule, I am not willing to accept a 5% dock on my mark opposing it. On the up side it does mean the filesize is reduced by 2megabytes or so.
