I propose creating a digital fairy tale book that combines written text with still illustration and selective simple animation to tell a rich story.
We could choose from one of many existing public domain fairy tales to adapt, write our own original tale, or even create each page to be a snippet from a different fairy tale allowing for...
1 - each artist to pick their favorite scene from their favorite fairy tale.
2 - allow us to set our own pace as to when we decide to be finished. For example if we decide to cut back on 3 pages in the middle for times sake this method will allow for such cuts while still giving us a complete work that feels complete, not rushed or half finished.
Each Artist can design their own character for their page and we provide it with simple animation as a team. This will allow for each artist to make their page their own while creating a competitive environment where we each try to out do one another while pushing our capabilities to new heights.
Examples of simple animation could be...
a forest animal scurries through a forest.
a scary looking bird flies into the frame then leaves shortly later.
A princess twirls about in her fancy dress.
A dragon puffs smoke from his nose as it sleeps.
Artist who prefer to illustrate can create full illustrated backgrounds while each sections character designer shares duties on putting animation to the illustration via flash.
Artist who fancy themselves better at writing can adapt snippets of key scenes from each tale.
Depending how the scenes are selected as a group a cohesive story could still be told based on the organization. Think of the quirky nature of shows like robot chicken that use individual skits to create an overall narrative even though none of the characters or scenes are actually related.
Examples of sorts of animations we could do.
The fluid nature of being able to change the style for each page will allow us to break out of our comfort zones a little for each set yet allow each of us to show off in their own way.
I think this will allow for a much more excited / inspiring work environment than just animating someone else's work were we stand a higher chance of getting locked into a role we neither desire or appreciate.
With this proposed plan every one gets to stretch their character design muscles which is what we all want to do but it will also allow us the potential to have something different to do every day to keep things fresh.
We could easily do comedy horror romance or whatever else with such a project. we need not be limited to one genre. Fairy tales are easily recognized for their iconography while also being easily adaptable to any number of moods / genres.
Here are some links for potential stories you could pick from...
Example of a book like site with no flash used... animations and illustrations could be done with embeded video files.
In the event of time crunches we can cut back on using color and instead use graytones with filters to give a sepia or textured effect as desired.
We could do multiple illustration only pages per one animation ratios for examples 3 full illustrations per 1 animation.
This will allow us to cut animations or illustrations as time demands necessitate.
I don't mind this idea, I actually LOVE this idea. The only thing I'm skeptical about is getting those coding things so we can actually incorporate our animations into the webbook. And if we don't know how to do it, then it sounds kind of dangerous time-wise. And even if we DO figure out how to do it, its possible we may have problems with it even working or something like that, you just never know, and since time is a huge factor in this I personally feel its best if we stick to what we know how to do. I mean unless we can find someone who knows it like the back of their hand and maybe we can do a test run with something just to make sure, but other than that, I'm not sure :/
ReplyDeleteDirectly encoding flash can be avoided if we just make the individual items be basic video or gif files with links for the next pages instead of animated ones.
ReplyDeleteThere are multiple solutions to every possible issue this project could encounter.
We can put in minimum time to research the preferred encoding but should it prove to be more than we can handle we can easily adapt to a easier to handle method.
I just recently made a website to host my own work using weebly. Its easy to do and can has plenty of options we could choose from for hosting the final project. Which could be left up indefinitely for each artist to use as a linkable portfolio piece.
It can even be set up to have multiple administrators so we can each access it to work on whatever section needs it.
heres an example of what I've done with mine.
WWW.Studio-Aegis.com
http://www.weebly.com/