Evaluation

Overall, I think that this project ended well, even with all of the problems I had in the middle of the project with keep up with a schedule, and getting all of the animations done on time. I completed my ebook in time for crit, and now I feel that my entire project is ready for submission after making my changes.
Getting to this point wasn't easy though, as I was struggling at the beginning to get my idea together, but after I changed my art style to a comic book style, all the pieces fit together and I got a strong visual theme out of it.
The thing I am most proud of in this project is probably the drawings for my animations. Although they were very time consuming (almost ran out of time to put it all on Ibooks Author!), I feel that the effort was well worth it, as the drawn elements make it somewhat unique.
Although I like the drawings I produces, I feel that I could have improved my animations further. As this was my first try using After Effects, it was not going to be perfect, but I feel that if I had more time, I could have enhanced my animations further if I had time, but I also needed to make changes to my ebook.
I found using ibooks daunting at start, but after using it for a few days, getting all my images and links together, it was alright after that. Even though I had many problems with my navigation, I eventually got it working and I am pleased with my result.
Regarding my time management, I did not stick to my original schedule as planned... Although I got everything done on time, I felt like it was a struggle in the last couple of weeks to get it completed. My blog and sketch were kept up to date on a weekly basis, however. It was just that my drawings for my animation that took much more time than I would have thought, so I got rushed near the end.
In conclusion, I think that if I were to do this project again I would manage my time better to get my drawings done with more time to animate and put together in iBooks. I underestimated how long it would take to make it look good in iBooks, and it showed when I got to crit and I was having navigation problems. I would also do more work during the beginning of the project so I would have less pressure near the end.

User Testing

As well as having the crit in class, I did some user testing at home after crit so I could check if everything worked well. Most of the test was done by myself as I was going along, slightly fixing things along the way. I needed to do this as I had navigation issues, but after thorough testing, I found that all of my hyperlinks now worked, and testing the ebook with sections in the table of contents all worked as well.
I also tested the ebook on my dad and sister as well, to get a range of ages testing my book.
As my dad is new to the iPad and iBooks, he had problems navigating through the book from the start. The gestures for going back to the table of contents and the intro movie were new to him, so after I explained these he knew how to go through my book and could test it. He tried all of the hyperlinks, which worked. He thought the animations worked well, and could easily get those to play. He also liked the gallery page, as it had all of the photos we had taken out for this project in there.
When I gave it to my sister, she also like the animations and how they were drawn. She noticed that there was no way back to the navigation page I made on the first chapter page, but I showed her the gesture to go back to the table of contents and she knew how to get back to the start then. If I had time, I would remake the navigation bar picture again to include a main menu button. Everything else was fine though, so I'm glad that I finally got my navigation to work properly.

Navigation Fixed!

After many problems, I've finally got all the navigation working.
I already fixed my navigation links in the main ebook, but I was still having problems with the table of contents page, and its lack of hyperlink support. The workaround was to make all pages sections so they appeared on the table of contents, but then the first page of the chapter wouldn't appear on the table of contents.
The way around this was to have a page with no actual content on the chapter page, so all of my pages would appear as text links. On that blank page, I made an extra navigation page, jsut to have something there and for extra ease of access.

Here's hoping that ibooks eventually supports hyperlinks on this page, maybe then it will be easier to design table of contents...

Finished Animations

Here are my three finished animations, which I have fixed up after crit:

Animation1final from Lucy Holman on Vimeo.

Animation2final from Lucy Holman on Vimeo.

Animation3 from Lucy Holman on Vimeo.

Improving Parts

From my crit feedback, I have made changes to my video and ebook.
The first change I made was to my navigation which I have talked about previously. Another thing I have change on my ebook is the font I used on my titles. It now fits in better with the other type fonts, rather than the drawn titles I used previously.

I have also made parts of it more interactive, such as adding a gallery to one of my pages. It also provides more information to the reader, as I have added annotations about each image.

On my videos, I fixed parts of the animation and artwork, such as adding more dotted shading to parts and changing the glass animation from the criticism that was given on my feedback.

Lastly, I added some sound effects to my animations, such as explosions, glass shattering and countryside noise to add ambience to my animation.

Masking in After Effects

One of the effects I used on some of my videos (Such as the flag on the first video and my intro movie). I used the one on the flag to make the flag take over the screen, and the one on the intro movie to give it an older, flashback look.

I started by making a circle with the mask tool, and then inverting the selection so the circle was the part that wasn't masked.

These are the settings I used form y mask. I used the feather to blur the edges of the mask.

This is how the video looks with the mask.

Fixing Navigation

After some testing, I have managed to get the navigation working on my ebook. Before, I had the hyperlinks link to the background images of each page, but I found out that the background image labels cancelled out the hyperlinks on the iPad. This is why the links only worked on one page, as that page didn't have a labelled image anywhere on the page. I then found out that labelled movies did not cancel out the links, so instead of using the background images as links, I created movie widgets, and moved them to the back of the pages as they are not visible, but are still linked. Now the buttons on each page work without any problems.

However, I am still having problems with my table of contents. The way they are generated in iBooks Author makes them hard to customise, and and this point, I don't think that hyperlinks are compatible with the table of contents page. So I will either have to not have a table of contents page, or will have to create a new book to get a table of contents page generated by using sections.

There are also faults with the auto generated contents. Firstly, when all the sections are put into one chapter, the first chapter page does not get linked.

Crit Review

Yesterday was crit, and I got a lot of feedback that will help me improve my ebook. I got good comments about the comic book art style I chose for my book, and the animations were good, but could use some improvement. The main bombing animations could use a few more details to maintain the quality of animation from beginning to end, which I agree with since the end of it did get rushed.
As I had issues with linking my ebook today, obviously this was brought up in crit. I was having problems with iBooks author, as the links worked there but not on the iPad. Either I will have to redo my navigation, or try and find a fix for this, especially on the contents page where none of the links work and that is the most important links page.
One of my tutors also said I should change the font on my comic book title pages to an actual font, so it fits in with the rest of the typed fonts.
Over the next week I plan to improve my animations, make slight changes to the visual style of my ebook and most importantly, fix the navigation links on my ebook. I may also make slight changes to my animations, to make piece look better overall.

Making Everything for my Ebook

After finishing the videos, I've been making progress on the imagery for my actual ebook.
I created all of the images in Photoshop, and I have been mimicking the comic book style, which is the same style as my videos some I have an overall theme.

This is the first page of my ebook. I made the image the same size as the iPad screen which is 1024X768. I have then laid out where all the text boxes and where the navigation would go when placed on iBooks Author. I will use the navigation on each page, just copied over from this and put the transparent hyperlinks over the images.

Here's what the links look like in iBooks Author. Even though you can see the links, they appear transparent on the iPad. To link it to a page, You have to link it to a widget or image on another page, like so:

Animating in After Effects

Now that I've drawn my assets, I've start to animate my story.

The first animation I've done is a map scene, which sets the scene of the story. The main parts of the animation are the plane going around the map, and with various bombs being set off to show where the plane attacked.
 The main techniques that I used all involved keyframes, and I also used a camera to zoom into parts of the map.

These are the keyframes for the plane. There are a lot of keyframes for the position of the plane, the opacity and the rotation.

 This is the motion path for one of my planes.

These are the keyframes for my camera, which is mainly the position of the camera and the amount that it is zoomed in.

Again, some motion paths. This particular path is the sky panning down to the ground.

My second animation is my main animation, with my drawn images in a comic book style. Like my other animation, this one involved a lot of keyframes and positioning, so much so that it would make my timeline a mess if I didn't put all of my animations in separate compositions.
This is how my timeline looks with all of my compositions on it:

Inside each compositions, you can see the animated layers.

My last animation is very similar, it is basically a camera panning around parts of a comic book. Although it is simle, it uses more advanced camera techniques than my first animation.

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.

Thoughts After Pitch

The feedback I got from my pitch was positive overall. I got good feedback for the story, and the art style I was aiming for on my story. However, I have a few things to think about after getting some comments about where to go after this.
The first thing I have to think about is the navigation. I haven't really done too much about it, and I need to think about this a bit more. I got suggested a timeline of events idea, where you can scroll through what happened during the day.
After my map intro video, I was thinking about making the map interactive. Because I have the information about where the bomb hit on the day, I could make small info boxes about the other bomb hits, without it taking focus away from the main story. As there is no autoplay on iBooks Author, I could make it so clicking on the Newick part of the map could make the story part start playing,
Other than that, I haven't really thought much else about how to make it more interactive... I'll do some sketches and see where I can go from there.

My Animatics

I have made a couple of animatics before my pitch, just to show what some of my animation could look like from my storyboard drawings.

 

This map scene would be either at the start of the story, or could be the intro sequence. This part is a map of Sussex, showing the main points that the bomber hit, with the last point being the start of the story. The plane moves across the map to each point, and stops at Newick, where the map would then stop and zoom into the main story.

 

In this animatic, it starts showing the sky, as it happens just after the map zooms in to the village, showing a peaceful day. It then pans down to show my granddad's story, which starts with him walking along the road to do some work.

Storyboards

Before making my animatics, I have storyboarded where everything should go beforehand. So far, my storyboards are very basic, but they give me an idea of where to animate everything for my animatics at this point.

This first part is a map scene, a plane will fly over parts of Europe until the map zooms in on Sussex, where the plane will then fly to Newick.















This scene starts the main part of the story. It starts in the sky, and then panning down to the town, where my Grand dad is walking to work. A man then shouts, that there is a plane overhead.













He then gets shocked, and sprints to the nearby bomb shelter. The plane then drops them bomb, causing an explosion.

This part show the explosion happening, and the glass being blasted from the windows.

Although I have not drawn it yet, I have planned to show my Granddad getting injured, and then being sent to hospital after the incident.

What my Ebook Could Look Like?

I started to experiment with one of the WW2 posters I found of the British countryside, and I took a picture of the countryside in East Sussex to replicate the style.

This is the image I edited.

This is the art style I replicated.

This is my replica.