Evaluation

OVERVIEW The past module has been spent creating a space for my work to exist online as well as examining  the very nature of this space and how best to use it. In my learning agreement I outlined the aims of my projects as follows and it is these I will evaluate against:

The site should function as an integrated part of the animated graphic novel experience, providing story and information in it’s design and seamless linking to the episodes.
A design, possibly flashed based, that conveys the appropriate feel and atmosphere of the novel.
Should act as an entrance to the “world” of newton – the post apocalyptic city where the novel is set.
Easy, minimal, navigation. It shouldn’t feel like a website, more a part of the experience.

As a target to reach or a level for our project to achieve, with regard to the above, I will discuss later on. But in what capacity will the project live? How does it inhabit the type of space that it exists in and consequently that of the person/s using it? This was a project based on another collaborative one and because of this we had to separate our roles, define out area’s of work but discuss together the questions I just asked. We knew it was going to be a based online but how could we make it different to the way someone usually experiences the web? Did even we want it to be different?
This was a great starting point to take get us discussing, debating and brainstorming. Thankfully, and for the sake of our creativity, we both agreed it needed to be a different experience to what constitutes normal web browsing. From this we started to define and formulate how we would use the space a website would give us. We were also able to begin to loosely outline our roles, I would concentrate on design and Chris on the Flash construction. Doing this enabled us to more clearly separate each others work within the project as a whole as it was developing. This is a collaborative outcome but the module itself is not so we wanted our work to be distinguishable at the at the end. These roles and work became more defined after a collaborative effort of finalizing the idea to take forward.

SPATIALISED This website would be representing and delivering episodes from a story taking place in a fictional word that I have created. The world is vital as it creates and motivates characters and story lines that wouldn’t exist in another fictional world. It is more backstory and detail than I have put into previous work and we felt this should be represented. It seemed like the perfect entry point for someone viewing this material and also for us to base our site around. By immersing as much as possible in something you feel and experience more. We could have just uploaded the episodes to any number of web comic/video portals such as newgrounds.com or smackjeeves.com but felt this wouldn’t do justice to the world that had been created. There is no reason why these episodes couldn’t be uploaded to such site and it’s something to look into but we wanted to create a space to facilitate them, something integral to the plot.
To do this we asked ourselves how can the thing that delivers the stories fictionally, actually deliver them physically? A traditional website laid out like Newgrounds is clear and simple but it doesn’t involve the user a great deal, inform them of the work, enhance their experience. I did not want to create a site for the user to just go through the same motions and conventions they do with every other. Looking at other flash based sites we started to think more loosely about what we could do, outside the constrains of web convention. Slowly we were drawn to another convention of information, the map. I’ve talked of the place being pivotal to the story and basing the website around a map interface seemed to offer us the structure required for episodic installments and a level of interactivity that will make you explore the fictional world. Some of the more experimental flash sites would not of given us the framework to update and the directness of use that that a returning viewer (to watch the latest episodes) would require. We were also keen to intrigue the first time user with an online space that made them interact. We felt from the way people use Google Maps and Earth that they would want to go in closer, discover more, and because of such software, instinctively know they could.

AIMS & PROJECT So we set out the aims which you can see at the top of the page and decided to make them happen via na interactive map based website. Once we had this we could fill out our individual roles with the particular tasks. I had already committed to the graphics of the design and felt that with my knowledge of After Effects I was also best suited to animate any elements of this. With Chris’s knowledge of Flash he was in a far better position to receive any work from me and build into a website. Also he would need to draw any images needed in the style of the episodes which I would not be able to do. We felt this was a fairly even split and also would make clear at the end who created which parts.
I set to work thinking about an aesthetic that would draw people in. When I first think of a map I imagine a traditional road map or OS map so wanted to stay clear of these. I also ruled out hand drawn early on as even the more adult orientated examples have a fantasy, playful feel. In the end I drew on the story again for inspiration, it’s set in the distant future but with crumbling and broken versions of todays technology. So to give that feel I looked at early electronic maps, train signaling diagrams, inventive tube maps all from the 1970’s and 80’s. These helped a great deal along with radar and sonar imaging systems. This way of representation offered a great deal because they are systems that gather so much information but relate to the viewer with very simple lines and text. The military overtones work well in conjunction with the Order that runs the city in the story too.
I went through various vector designs, eventually settling on the most simple, as it was with this that I felt the most could be achieved later on. It was initially an issue that the design was so alien from the very rough and textured art work in story and this was brought up in group crits. So I took the map away and started to build layer and texture into it, I felt though it was important to distance it from Chris’s art work in the same way that a road map to us doesn’t actually look like the world around. It made no sense to have everything meticulously hand drawn when the digital display conveys the right feel and could tell you all the information you need to know. Instead the there would be a piece of street level artwork where it is relevant to the episode. This would then act as the first shot of that episode as a way of introduction. I think it’s quite an elegant design and system that fits the aims we originally set out.
So once I had confirmed the final map designed it was sent to Chris to be worked into this his flash website construction. I received  his street level drawing and began working that into a zoomed in version of the map along with details of that area. The difficult part about this website was to be the transitions between the scaled out and zoomed in versions of the map. In the end we decided to create these transitions as animations in After Effects and the use them in between the two map states. I’m really pleased with how the transitions work, when you see them at full resolution the look incredibly smooth and clean. However when integrating them into  the Flash site we hit a few bumps as the video resolution doesn’t match up to that of the stills of the map. Because of the way we set ourselves up to work a lot more separately in this project it was difficult to find the time towards the end to collaboratively fix this. I do believe it is something we can sort out once I understand a little more about the way Flash handles video, and Chris understands a bit more about video  compression. Once this technical issue is sorted for one transition it can easily be applied to all the others. We have made this site from the ground up to be adaptable to change and it is this which I think is one of the most successful aspects of the projects. We set out to design and build a site that conveyed a sense of the story, was an entry into this would and could host an expanding number of episodes. I feel we have gone a long way to achieving these goals.