the music

In my piece all the pedestrians are wearing MP3 players, and to get this point across I have found some royalty-free music from the site Incomputech, after Guy's recommendation.

I have used the track Monster Promenade in my piece

work in progress

The deadline is on Thursday and there's still plenty to be done! I have finished creating all the graphics, and people walking animations, now I just need to piece it all together and hope for the best.......

sound

To create an authentic high-street I sought after some sound effects to give added realism, and found this site, this site, this site and this site which give free sound effects. I have used some of the sounds from there, as they are suited to what I needed.

making a squiggly line

Giles showed me a technique in After Effects on how to make a line have the squiggly look. Using pre-comps and expressions you can achieve this.

First I made duplicates of each buildings and made alternate ones. Then I loaded these into After Effects and made a composition for each building. I set the length of these compositions to 18 frames, and at 9 frames I made one version of the building end and the alternate version start, giving a distorting look.

I then placed this pre-comp into my composition and enabled 'time mapping', then, by alt+clicking on the stopwatch for the time=mapping effect it enables 'expressions'. I chose the loop-out expressions which just constantly replays the pre-comp to give the drawing effect at a lot less effort!

slight change to the idea

After discussing my idea with the tutors it has been decided that instead of focusing on the driver, I will instead focus on the pedestrians walking down the grungy street. They will all be wearing youngish clothes and have MP3 players to truly stereotype to the younger generation. One of these pedestrians will have the thought bubble, the thought of walking down a nicer street with less pollution, and will witness someone re charging their car when they exit their thought, which will give them happiness.

roobarb and custard

I showed Andrew my idea, and he suggested a few things I can do to them.

One of them was to include a de-saturated sphere covering most of the visuals, except for where the action is happening. This will give it a stylish look, and will draw extra attention to the areas which need it most.

His other suggestion was to create it in the style of the Roobarb and Custard show, hand-drawn images, with squiggly animation, and uses selective colours. It's a very appealing aesthetic and cartoons are synonymous with people's childhood, which will attract the attention of people in the 'generation y' age bracket.

look n feel

I have created a mock-up of what the high-street will look like in Illustrator. I quite like the look of this, the gradients give the images that extra edge to them.