Images

Today me and Hannah have worked on creating some images that we will use in the final animation such as sprites and backgrounds. We first sketched them out by hand then outlined them with a thicker, darker pen so that the scanner could pick them up easier. We then scanned them into the computer and edited and coloured them to fit our scheme and ideas.

We did this progress for multiple parts including Hazel's tree, Barnaby's Hutch and Barnaby's water bottle amongst others. The next step with these parts is to get them into the animation stage.
I also started crating a test animation for our second character 'Hazel', starting by dissembling her original picture into workable body parts.  Flash is definitely the tool I want to use as it has everything we want to achieve under a seemingly simple system, unfortunately parts of the programme are proving to be frustratingly difficult but I am managing to work around or figure out all of the problems so far.

Initial Sequence Ideas

As our design process for the graphics is nearly finished we started looking at how we would implement these into our OTS sequence and how it would play. We created some quick initial ideas and roughly assembled them. The next step will be choosing our final idea, recreating it as a final draft before turning it into the animation.

Barnaby and Hazel - idea 1 from Hannah C on Vimeo.

Barnaby and Hazel - idea 2 from Hannah on Vimeo.

Title Logo

Me and Hannah analysed the design and typography of some existing Title Logos. The original scan can be found on her blog here. We found a few common and successful features in the existing logos, for example the incorporation of parts of the characters into the logo to make them more recognisable. From this we created our first logo: 

I used Adobe Illustrator to make this, using the anchor points made creating the two tails easier, which I imported from my previous Illustrator files of the character parts. The ampersand is a light blue color, we did this to try and find a midway point between the two character and word colours that would fit in with the scheme.

Market Research

Our target audience, being so young are harder to access and extract information from, although not impossible. Another way to reach our audience is through their parents or guardians; not only to they regulate what their children watch but they can also see their reactions to different shows. Me and Hannah sent out a questionnaire to a group of parents of our target audience. The questionnaire can be found here and the results are on her blog here. From the results, we can deduce some things. Firstly that we have used very popular influences for our programme (Peppa pig and style of Charlie and Lola). Also that the channel 'Cbeebies' is a strong choice of channel to exhibit on as this was the favourite channel (also it is on freeview, as well as more expensive television packages) and to attempt to screen our show in morning and afternoon. Also, from verbal feedback gained from parents of the children, the child is most drawn to a magazine if it has toy(s) attached to the front as is largely a picture based front cover. 

First Animation Test Review

I recently created my first animation test using Adobe Flash as our final peice will be animated and we are yet to decide from the many methods of animation which we are going to use. Flash proved to be a worthy comptetitor and although it had a harsh learning curve and took me a while to get used to the controls and getting to programme to produce the outcome that I was picturing in my head. The outcome was of a very good quality and has flexible settings to control the specifications of the final product such as; dimensions, which gives me an easy way to test animations without exporting them to full size, but also maxamise the quality for the final product, as with framerate and quality settings, file type customisablity also ensures that I can export to any platform and distribute it easyily. The short animation I produced was very short and was not to my best ability as I was only recently aquainted with the programme, yet, it was still of high quality therefor I know that with more time and mroe knowledge put into it, this method could have an exellent outcome. So overall Flash is definatley a strong option to consider and I'll be doing further tests with this programme to familiarise myself with it.

First Animation Test

Analysis of existing products and influences

When deciding the main structure of our OTS we looked at many different opening sequences and the different styles that were out there and that were successful. 'Bagpuss' is a personal favourite of mine from my child hood and we especially liked the voiceover style in it; the introduction of the characters, the setting and the situation. This is one of our style models and one of our influences for our piece.

Our music style we want to be very simple, similar to that of 'Bagpuss', we want to combine it with the more modern style of the music heard in the background of this 'Peppa Pig' intro. We want to find a tempo between the two and a simple but modern melodic tune to have behind our voice over. More detail on the music on Hannah's blog here.

After previously looking at all the different kinds of animation used in children's TV programmes we decided to go for a more simplistic look, with simple block colours similar to in this 'Humf' intro. We also decided to use lighter, more diluted colours in our piece rather than the bright colours in these trailers. We posted more detail about our animating style on Hannah's blog here.