Rationale

Rationale

The aesthetic we have chosen for our video is paper cut outs, as we think it is visually engaging and gives us a point of difference from a majority of other websites, which tend to be digital. As this aesthetic may potentially come across as youthful, we have balanced this with content which is colloquial and more aimed at University students, as that is our intended audience.

The target audience for our animation and website is University students, as we think they are at a good age to change their plastic bag buying habits. We have targeted this age group by using humor and colloquial language, keeping it casual and easy to engage with. We have also tried to target students who may be apathetic towards this issue by creating a character who they can relate to.

We have communicated our information through the form of a conversation between two characters, while simultaneously illustrating the lifestyle of a plastic bag. We have used this style of narrative as we think it will keep the viewer engaged and interested.

The design of our website relates to the aesthetic of our animation, and we have tried to keep it simple and easy to naivigate. The user can eaily jump or scroll to sections, and jump back up. We have also used our website to provide the reader with additional information of their choosing, which we have breifly mentioned in the animation to inspire some interest. We do not want to bombard the viewer with information in the animation itself, which is what makes the website useful.  

Final Critique

What we took away from today's critique is that, in some of our scenes which are meant to have a big impact or 'shock-factor', this isn't coming across. We are working on improving placement of impact throughout our video, transitions, audio and refining details. We have realised that small details can combine to make scenes a lot more engaging and expressive. 

In this scene in particular, we needed to lengthen the amount of
screen time it had, in order to give the viewer enough time to
read and process the text. We don't want to overload of viewer
with information. 

This scene was not having the amount of impact we intended.
It is quite an important scene that is built up to, so we are
experimenting with sound effects to add to the emotional impact
and effect. We have also increased the size of the red circles and
are brainstorming other ideas about how we can approach this.

Something that we think is working well in our animation is the
text/voiceover ratio. We have kept the on-screen text to the bare
minimum, only including key words that are of particular importance. 

Another scene that we think is working well is the sequence in
which we increase the pace of cuts to build tension quickly. This
works a lot more effectively that the previous zoom that we were
using. We can think about other ways in which we can incorporate
similar ideas into the rest of our animation. 

On our website, we have come up with the idea of having our sections on scanned paper and linking these sections with tied string, in order to make all elements of our website work together more coherently. We have also typed up all the content for our website, which gives the reader more in-depth information than covered in the video and also expands on the narrative. We have also added in a render of our animation to get an idea for how this would looks once incorporated into our website.

By looking at other animatics of classmates, we have been inspired and also have a clearer idea of what works and doesn't work in animations. 

Critique of Progress so far

We have been working on combing our audio with our animatic and playing around with timing and sound effects and what they achieve. What we took away from our critique was that we needed to make our animations less static, as there was potential to seperate more layers and animate more. Also to more strategically use cutting to create suspense and tension where we wanted it. This is still a working progress, but we are enjoying playing around will different things and their effects. We have also realised having background music doesnt really fit with our animation and just having sound effects is a lot more effective.

We have also been working on our website, experimenting and working things out as we go. The feedback we got from our website in progress was that we need to make sure that all of the elements of our website relate to one another and all tie into our aesthetic. We want to make our website easy to navigate and read, but also make it visually engaging and relate to our animation. Since we are both new to HTML and CSS, we want to keep it fairly simple, which we hope will also be empathetic to the users of our website. Here is what our website looks like so far.

We have added in some textures for the background of our video and main content. There have also been some adjustments made like aligning particular elements, adding padding and margins to areas, all contributing to making the site cleaner. We still need to adjust bits a pieces like, titles and borders etc. The main thing now is adding our content.

Beginning to code our website

We have started coding the HTML and CSS of our website. 

We have set up the layout that we want, including the basic styling, font and images. We have included navigation that allows the user to jump to sections and then to jump back up to the top, in order to make our website more accessible. At the moment, are using Lorum Ipsum as place-holder text and we are working on writing our content for each of our sections. 

Recording and sourcing our audio

Today we set up a studio to record our voiceover. We hired a mic and used fabric to absorb the sound.  We printed scripts for our actors recorded the voiceover multiple times so that we can sort through and find which versions work best.

We have also been sourcing potential music and sound effects to try out.

Refining our website design and wireframe

Now that we have both watched the HTML and CSS tutorial and had a lecture on HTML and CSS, we know what we need to include in our wireframe for our website. 

We have made up these wireframes and now have a much better idea of how our website will be structured. We can now begin to create this website.

We also have created our story-real and now need to record our audio and work on perfecting our animation and making it more detailed.

First Formative Critique

We have decided on a paper cutout/ DIY aesthetic which will be simple get visually engaging. We will balance this potentially youthful aesthetic with casual Kiwi colloquial language and humor to appeal to our target audience, which is New Zealand university students. Our story is a narrative which follows two male, University aged characters, one of which is arguing that plastic bags are harmful, and another funny character who doesn't care. This second character is an embodiment of the audience which we are trying to target, and the narrative builds to a climax when he realises the impact of the plastic bag he buys. There will be two simultaneous narratives, the conversation with the two characters which will be over-layed by voiceover over the other narrative which is the life of the plastic bag.
Our feedback revealed that we need to remove the gradient as it does not fit in with the rest of our solid colours. We also think we will soften our colour palette so as to make it not so intense and vibrant as it is quite over whelming. We also realised that we needed to re-design our website as it was too complex. Instead of having links to different pages, we will now have a single scroll which will take the user through three pages (the video, the facts and how they can help). We will begin to work on the logistics of this design and begin animating our storyboard once we have made some changes and refined our ideas and consistency.

Script

We then began working on our script. We had gathered some facts and thought about the conversation we want our chracters to be having, so we took this into consideration. We have made our script humorous, by using kiwi language, we have also considered the time limit and what the most important facts are to say. We ran through the script once it was completed and realised it was over 1 minute, therefore we needed to cut it down. We took out some unnecessary words, ran over it again and it was within the time frame. 

Story Boarding

Todays lecture was on story boarding, and this continued into the tutorial where we had to sketch our story board for our animation. We already had a clear idea of what we wanted it to look like and the scenes we wanted. Both of us sketched out some of the scenes, then we combined them all to create our final story board.

Experimenting with animation ideas

We each had our own interpretation of the ideas we had discussed, so we both made some scenes up out of paper, that we thought best portrayed our small action big impact animation. We made these out of paper as we though this would be a helpful way to get started with illustration ideas, also we liked the idea of making an animation out of paper cut outs so we did this to see what it could potentially look like. We had very similar ideas and we will combine these when continuing with our aniamtion.

Website Design Ideas

We came up with the idea of cutting the main objects out of paper for our animation so we demonstrated this through the layout of our website. 

We need to think of a type face to use which will be appropriate for our designs, as this is just a place holder at the moment. We are thinking something handwritten or cut out of paper. It was suggested by our tutor that we have a background or frame behind our video, so we might scan something in. Our title needs to be catchy and grab the audiences attention. We will continue working on this design and develop our two link page layouts in relation to this one.

Initial Ideas

Our initial idea is to follow the lifecycle of a bag, aided through a conversation between two characters. After the first class we created a mood board which displayed our illustration ideas and possible techniques we could use. 

We will continue to develop our ideas, but also come back to this throughout the process.