Voiceover

For my story I had the performing arts teacher read out my story. I asked him if it would be possible to put on appropriate voices for different characters. We had to make sure we were in a quiet room, the more soft furnishings the better, so the sound has less to bounce off and make it a better recording. We used a microphone that self recorded, and was able via usb to directly download the music onto the macs reading for manipulation.

I would later, cut this up into the correct chunks so that these would then work with each illustration. Perhaps slight sound editing would be needed, to sharpen it. The programmes that I will use to edit and enhance the recording are Audacity and the Levelator.

My Story and Characters

My chosen story is called Bertie and the Beast. In this story I have three characters, two of which have already been created, they are Bertie the Pirate and Pecky the Parrot, these are the two main characters. There is however the Beast, he is a very mysterious creature, in the beginning of the story and actually through out his identity never really revealed. All that is described to us is his yellow, glowing eyes peeping through the bushes and the white tip of his tail. He does reveal himself to the characters in the story but he is not decibed to us. This has given me scope to develop my own character, with the only stipulations being he is beast like, has yellow eyes and a white tip to his tail.

Once I had read my story through several times, I split it up into sections, scenes, overall I have about 18 different scenes, as my story is quite long. I had to split it up into this many chunks as I did not want to much text on each illustration, otherwise to much would be going on.

M next task was to start creating my new character. I had so many thoughts of what I wanted it to be, from a monkey to a lizard. Some sketches of various ideas are in my sketch book. In the end I decided upon a dinosaur, as they are very much beast like, but can be quite cute in a wired way. In the story it ends with them being friends so he cant be to fierce looking! In the end I tried to create a cute dinosaur that is all scary looks but a big softy deep down. Below I introduce you to Dino! (not completely taken by the name yet, so lets call him the Beast).

I did many versions of him, to begin with I just had him all with the two tones of green, but I later thought that this was a bit bland so I added purple to jazz him up. I did many eyes for him also which are all in my sketch book, but I settled with these ones, thought they gave him expression, he did not look too cute but neither did he too scary, just right.

With the other characters there was not a great deal for me to develop. I needed to create some more expressions for Bertie and Pecky, I needed Pecky flying, so there for needing to create some wings. Back views of the Beast, Bertie already had one. So it was just arranging them all into different positions depending on what they are doing in the scene at the time.

Treasure Island Toys

For this assignment we will be working on a live brief, producing content for an online toy store called Treasure Island Toys. Our target audience for this assignment is for the ages between 5 and 7 year olds.

Already a series of characters have been created by the owners, and nine short stories have been written. There is however 12 in our class so three more stories needed to be created so each one of us has a story. From this we are then going to produce illustrations with animated flourishes, weather that be a blink of the eye of a flutter of a feather.

The illustrations will be drawn up in either Illustrator or flash or both, flash will be used to produce the animated flourishes. A voice over is necessary as our age group will not be fully competent in reading the content. Also the sie of the stage that we will create our illustrations in will have to be 845 x 475 pixels. Buttons are essential, as navigation forward backward and back to start, so these will have to also be created in Flash.

To bigin with I did some research on the internet, I firstly looked at the clients website, as this has the style that we need to aim towards, so our work ties in with already existing illustrations. Also CBBC website was another very useful site in which to get inspiration from, they had lots of animated buttons and similar story structures as well.

My final thoughts on my design

I think that if it had all gone smoothly I most certainly would have not learnt nor understood the workings of HTML and CSS as much as now do, the process that you go through when trying to figure out how to correct an element is an essential skill to have when working in this area, I feel that I have learnt a great deal and hopefully when I come to make another website I will have the basics under my belt and will be able to further my skills, and start to explore more advanced techniques.

If I could change my website I would certainly try to include some illustrations, and make more pages so I could explain composition in more detail. I do like what I have created, I would perhaps change the positioning of the text, but I was limited to what I knew. Overall I am pleased that I managed to create a working website, at one point I really didn't think it was going to happen.