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.