More on the I-dent

This week has pretty much been spent working on the I-dent project; my idea for it has completely changed from the one I had this time last week and I now have something which I think is a bit more feasible. The mood boards where a really useful way of getting my ideas down and I think had a big influence on the direction that I took this project in as well as some input from Ben who has been really good to bounce ideas off of. I’ve just got to find a style that I like for it now, my plan was to spend today doing that but I have been having a day where I have lost the ability to draw and this afternoon it was a case of taking one step forwards and two back, so I think I need to go off and do something else for a bit and come back to it fresh tomorrow.

Kathy did suggest that I animate the I-dent first and then choose the style but as far as I know I can not do this easily in Flash, which is the programme I want to use. That said I am beginning to wonder if it would be better if I animated everything on paper or acetate as I think I could get a bit more fluidity but I also like the jerky puppet effect that you can get in flash and think I could use that to the I-dents advantage. Having the extra week to work on it is a big help as I can now afford to spend a bit of time experimenting with these ideas.

The Live@5 project on Monday was good fun, I do not think that news graphics is something that I want to do in future but it was a good experience and I did get a nice smug feeling seeing my sports tables in the gallery. Unlike my previous experience doing the weather graphics, this week went fairly smoothly, mainly thanks to the various request sheets that Pete produced for the broadcasting students to put what they wanted on which caused fewer misunderstandings and false assumptions being made. I think I also went into it expecting the day to be a constant barrage of impossible requests from news people, so it was all generally a pleasant surprise.

However, despite this my weather maps where still able to rear their ugly heads and wreak havoc, firstly we discovered that instead of the maps being onscreen with the presenter and off to the left, they where in fact on there own and needed to be centred, which in the time I had left was not possible to do, leaving a big nasty space where the presenter should have been. Then for some reason the graphics would not render out of Flash, after my umpteenth attempt at doing this it finally worked (I still don’t know what was wrong). We then discovered that what ever programme the broadcasting students put all the weather in didn’t like the QuickTime files the maps where in and where painfully slow and jumpy to watch. My little rant aside, it was a good day and I think that Justin did a good job at keeping us all in check, and dealing with my argument with the computer.