New Pen!

And I wish I'd got this one much sooner. My old pen has left my sketchbook looking like it is trying to have white pages with all the smudge marks all over them. I thought perhaps it was just the fate of a white gel pen to smudge uncontrollably, but alas the last 4 pages of my sketchbook are beautifully clean. Oh well.

Enough about pens, today I nervously took to the stage for 70 seconds and showed an entire group of visual communicators my animation. It went down really well! Except for that blasted tea tree...I bet no one knows it's a Camellia Sinensis either. I would have liked a synchronised gasp of "look at the brilliant camellia sinensis!" But it was more like "look it's a tree." What a waste of time.

Anyway, I digress. So I made some changes to the way the text appears at the tree bit, bearing in mind the amount of time I spent keeping it all in rhythm with the music. I'm worried now that it will look really disjointed, but I'm hoping the fact that the text is easier to read will keep the viewer's attention away from the unrelated background behind it. And there you have a finished Flash animation, ready to be handed in with pride tomorrow morning. It's been fun, the caffeine has been exquisite, and the company delightful. I bid you farewell.

Death by Gel Pen

This is a slow and painful death, filled with false hope and regret. I made the mistake of buying a sketchbook with black pages for this project.

"Hey this looks like fun" I thought. I already had a white gel pen which I could use to write on it with. After that ran out, I was only a fraction of phased. It's now 2 days before the hand in at 10 o'clock at night and my second pen runs out. Curse you BU shop! I felt so lucky as I picked up the last one on the shelf. I thought it would see me through to the end.

How wrong was I. I don't have much to do with my new one, but I have to buy it anyway. And quickly. For about an hour I have been watching the level of ink in my pen drop, thinking there was more than there actually was. I regret the black sketchbook and will never do it again.

Other than this minor setback, I have a finished animation which I can show in the critique tomorrow, complete with soundtrack. I've tweaked it all over the place and it's looking passable. It's come such a long way.

Convinced?

The point of this project I guess was to make a point and convince the audience of the message.

So are you convinced? I think I might just go make a cup of tea now actually.

Tea but not as you've ever know it

Here is some more animation. I got really bored towards the end...I don't think this will be staying in.

I've just realised how random this is starting to look!

Rethinking

This time round, I'm going to make my animation fit a piece of music instead of finishing the animation and finding a soundtrack to give it.

The Critique...

Well, this wasn't so bad. But seeing my animation projected on to the screen in big, I realised I didn't like it too much at all. It has no direction or purpose, and although I've made a stoyboard, I'm still pretty much making up the whole thing as I go along. Time to rethink.

Movement (I can't quite justify calling it an animation)

It went a little bit funny when I transferred it from my laptop onto the Mac at uni, but it's a (new) start.

I decided to simplify EVERYTHING. There will be a chalkboard background eventually, but for now I'm concentrating on getting the main animation done.

Improvements

So here's what I'm going to do. Simplify everything. It's not worth the hassle of making everything look chalky and pixelated when I can just use simple white vector images that only vaguely look like chalk but you get the message. I'm also thinking of loosing everything that is too complicated to animate, due to time limitations. I've spent way too much time drinking coffee and too little time making animations on it!!

I thought this would be easy...

Here is me, trying to combine digital animation with stop-frame and make the whole thing look as good as if it were either one or the other (few!)

Word of Advice. This does not work! I thought the text at the beginning was quite a nice touch, but this just won't work the whole way through. Plus it's very time consuming and time is something I'm rapidly running low on.

I am going to enjoy a coffee chain tour this weekend :]

Some more facts I can use:

• £370million is spent on coffee a year in the UK
• There are an estimated 11,000 coffee shop chains in the UK
• 40% of these are branded chains

And some of the benefits of large coffee chains:

• They are the perfect example of the "third place"- somewhere that isn't home or work
• They have led to an increase in the success of smaller, independent coffee shops as they are a good example of how to be successful, even through the recession
• They have the means to be ethical and trade fairly
• They offer a relaxed environment which is great for working, resting and socialising.

I have a pretty good idea what I want my animation to look like now, I want it to resemble coffee shops in the colours and textures I use. The actual animation will be an abstract narrative. I'm on a bit of a roll.

Scissor VS Paper

Today we made a stop frame animation in 20 minutes!! It's the tragic tale of a...thing...that has its life torn apart when it ends up in a life-threatening accident...but it saved by an even bigger thing.

Paper beats scissors...

it's a little known fact.

I've started looking into a stop frame style for my own animation, just using images from a series of digitally made images instead of photographs? Still can't visualize it!

Death by Caffeine

Today I discovered that I would have to drink 66 cups of coffee in one day to kill myself from a caffeine overdose. It's slightly worrying that I feel inclined to rise to the challenge.

Death By Caffeine

Meanwhile....

I haven't really been keeping an eye on how much caffeine I personally intake daily. I don't think it's very important. Today I have had two coffees and I'm feeling good. That's all I need to know! I'm still struggling to think of a conclusion for my animation though. It's not really saying alot at the moment.

Website in the making

Our latest Flash lesson was all about using action script in animations. This is really good for interactive stuff like websites. This is what I was able to produce. It could go on the web--

it's a website for people who really want to know what shape will appear when they click on a number.

Action Script Test

My C

ownyourc.com

This is such a great little flash site trying to make it's place in the world. I like the idea, but more than this I like the graphics and the way the statistics are presented. It's also pretty much anonymous, meaning you really can have a C without worrying about the judgement of others around you.

Sshhhhhh...I'm not telling you my user name.

Moving On...

As I couldn't really come up with a convincing arguement for my animation, I've decided to change my theme slightly. I'm pretty non-swayed by the "tea is good for you" and the "coffee lowers the risk of cancer" debates, so I've moved my attention on to coffee shops in the UK.

I went to Centre Parcs for a day last week and saw 2 Starbucks in the actual park! I was immediately outraged--as dedicated as I am to Starbucks, I had gone to get away from the usual high street scenes.

I considered what the company would do if they actually did achieve world domination, and all of a sudden the idea didn' t seem so bad. A world filled with acoustic echoes and melt-in-the-mouth fragrances...I've decided to be pro coffee chain.

To back this, I found an article from the Independent backing why these chains are so beneficial. Because of their massive annual turn-overs, companies like Starbucks can afford to be ethical and offer a service worth the £3.70 average transaction.

It's a bit confusing at the moment (because I kept changing my mind every 10 minutes while making it...) but here is a poster I made demonstrating the kind of thing I would like to achieve:

(of there will be when I manage to save it as an uploadable file lolz...)

PS. Caffe Nero FTW

Advancing

I can now make an object move across the screen! I hope there's alot more I can do with a motion tween or this could be a very boring project...

A little reminder...ALWAYS SAVE. Originally, make pink circle exploded. I was very proud of this, but obviously lost it somehow...I'll include explosions at some point. PROMISE.

My first flash animation...shape tweening

This is the result of the first session of Flash training at Uni. It looks pretty and complicated, but this could be thrown together in a matter of seconds.

Some more Stuff I've found

The UK's most consumed non-alcoholic beverages:
1. TEA! 83%
2. Fruit Juice 81%
3. Coffee 70%

The UK's Favorite Coffee Shop Chains:
1. Starbucks 27%
2. Costa Coffee 15%
3. Caffe Nero 7%

24.1% of coffee shop chains in the UK are Starbucks, (540 stores)
Costa owns with 24.7% (555 stores)
Nero only had 282 in 2007

Things to Think About...

So...
So far for this project I've come up with basing my animation around caffeine. That's about it. I've still got to pull up some real statistics that can actually be worked around.
Over the past couple of days while I haven't been at uni I've seen my total caffeine intake go way up...I guess I'm just closer to a kettle when I'm at home! Max found a new sized can of red devil for 69p in Londis on Friday which brightened my day ^_^

Day one-Pins and Needles

All this talk of coffee...I'm in a mocha mood. The heating doesn't come on for another half an hour and I am cold.

Today has been a pretty average Tuesday, I have consumed 2 mugs of coffee, one for breakfast with pears and another one to blog to.
Hopefully while writing this blog, I will pick up on some vital STATISTICS about the caffeine intake in my life.

Blogging is giving me pins and needles.

Inspiration

My boyfriend's the one with the caffeine obsession, not me.

It looks like that's something that everyone knows about him, especially when it comes to christmas presents. We didn't have any more space in the cupboard for coffee mugs, but he got two more anyway. This one annoyed me the most. It came in a box covered in little factoids, telling me things about my personality because I like to drink coffee. The box does not know me. "I'll show you, box!" I thought at the time, and kept it to prove it wrong.

Now that I have to make a flash animation all to do with statistics for Uni, I see it's fate that I kept the box, plus it has a hole in the front that I like to put my keys in so I don't lose them. SO...using the facts on the box and my own caffeine statistics I'm on my way to creating a coffee-fuelled masterpiece.