Drawing my Assets

Over the past week, I have been focusing on drawing all of my assets for my animations in Illustrator, and I am starting to piece together the first animation.

Some of the parts I have drawn for my map scene.

A scene for my main part of my ebook, the bombing animation.

Edited Audio + Full Length Animatics

On Wednesday, I fully edited my audio into three different parts, which will be the three chapters in my ebook. The chapters are the intro to the story, the day of the bombing and the aftermath of the bombing. Each audio clip is around 40-55 seconds in length.

As of today, I have made my full animatic for the intro, and I am almost finished with the animatic for the main part of my story. These animatics are helping me with how I am going to fully animate my ebook.

This is what my work area looks like at the moment for my animatic.

A Better Art Style

After talking about the chosen art style in class, I am going to change my style a bit. It still involves me drawing, but I will be going along the route of comic book styles, rather than WW2 posters. I feel that comics are more fitting towards my own drawing style, so this should be more fun to draw than from the poster style, and the colours used between the two styles are relatively similar.
I looked a little bit at popular pop art artist, Roy Lichtenstein, and his influences.

Russ Heath is a comic book artist whose famous works include war comics. I looked at his art mainly for his drawings of planes, which could be used to help me with my own illustrations.

Another artist I found who did some war comics is called Jerry Grandenetti

Joe Kubert is another war comic book artist, althought his style differs a lot from the other two.

The colours used on all of these comics are slightly similar to the ones used on propaganda posters - they are bold colours that stand out a lot. I really like the comic book style, so I thought I'd look at some more conventional comic book art to see how they are coloured.
One comic book artist like this is Jack Kirby.

Laying out my Ebook in iBook Author

This is all early stuff on iBook Author for me, but I thought it would help me get an idea of where everything will go on my pages once I've done some of the animating.
So far I have split up the story into three chapters, each having a section of video to go with them.

The background would be in the style of a 1940s. The map on the side would be the video, although I don't know if the video, when clicked, can be made to fill the whole page.
After that I thought of the map becoming interactive, with a few text boxes about the areas on the map.

This chapter will feature some illustration as a background maybe. I don;'t really know where to put the video with this one, though.

For this last part, I was thinking about adding photos primarily. With a bit of audio/video.

I am finding it difficult to work around the limitations on iBooks Author, but hopefully I'll come up with something when I go back to lessons tomorrow.

Assets I Have Gathered

Over the past few weeks I have gathered some imagery that will help me create me ebook. Although I am going with a mostly illustrated design, I can throw in some pictures on some of the pages between the animated segments. I can also use some of the imagery to help with my drawing.

A picture from a newspaper exert that I have edited in Photoshop to make it sharper.

The same srea from the photo above, that was restored later. Again, enhanced in Photoshop.

My Granddad (middle) working at the garage before the bombing.

Map of the local area. Can redraw this for my map animation segment.

Two photos of Newick from the 1950s. Although after the bombing, they may be useful for my illustrations of the town.