April 1st- Week 8 of SRP

Hello everyone!

So my illustrations are getting darker each week as my character plunges deeper and deeper into the storm… As far as art goes this week, I was doing a lot of iterations of the main character in different shots:

There’s not too much to say as far the art goes for now. I’m still just marching through all of the illustrations.

In the animation department however, things are doing much better than they were a few weeks ago. This week actually several of the animations came together quite nicely, and I’m so excited to be able to present them. One major obstacle that my mentor and I had to deal with though was lag time. When you’re dealing with as many layers and animations in a single file as we are, sometimes it can be too much for the program to process, so between buffering times, the occasional crash, and me still getting the hang of everything, it was a highly time consuming ordeal! What I have planned for the animations is to have the majority of them completed pretty soon, and then move on to animating the text. This may or may not happen depending on the amount of time I have left, but basically the text is all going to appear in panels like this one:

The picture is pretty self-explanatory as to what I’m planning on doing with them. But the hard part, (which I hadn’t anticipated) is that these kinds of animations are not able to be replicated like others. For instance, the falling rain I posted a few weeks ago is very easy to recreate, but since the text is unfortunately going to be different for each panel, the same kind of principle won’t apply like I thought it would.

So my project is now entering the stage of where I’m beginning to integrate all of the various elements into one multi-sensory reading experience. This is going to involve several steps, chiefly including website design, page layout, page animations, and score composition and rendering.

For the design of the website, I’m going to be meeting with two professionals next week, who are being kind enough to point me in the right direction as far as what this site is going to need, both aesthetically and functionally. Website design is after all something I know next to nothing about, so this is yet another way in which I am being exposed to a completely new field during this project.

Another area in which I have no experience is in music composition and music editing/rendering/recording… in fact I’m not even sure if that’s the right terminology. I’ve been doing some research in between everything else I have going on, and I believe I’m going to be working in programs called DAWs. I’ll let you guys know more about my findings next week though, there’s nothing too substantial with the score yet.

Talk to you next week!

~Keanan~