navigating your identity - update

It's been quite quiet on these here blog fronts recently, mainly because of Flash eating up my life.

Over the last week or so I have gone from HATING Flash, because it just wouldn't work. Why? Who knows why, but for some reason it wouldn't accept an incident as being called 'answer', it wanted it to be 'answer1'. It's mostly things like this that mean it takes about three tries to get the movie to export properly without compiler errors!!

Nonetheless, after trying and trying, it's setting in. I'm in the geeky way of things now as I can now write a command from the top of my head! And where I had problems before, for example, with getting the video to cue and play, then stop, and it just decided it would play through everything, I have now managed to beat Flash and have got it to stop. YAY!

All the sections are now complete: avatar, logo, stop motion, MINI game, Q&A test, Encrypted Code and I've been able to stray away a little from the typical "gotoAndStop" function for a few aspects of these sections, e.g. drag and drop, an input box, rotating puzzle pieces, points score.

The days left before hand in will see some scrutinous perfecting, which I am a sucker for. That's another part of my identity revealing itself outside of the box! ha

Also, I may try out adding an on/off sound button, because not everybody wants to be beaten down by the sound. Oh, and there's the dreaded preloader. I've already had a few unsuccessful attempts. Fingers crossed third time lucky! Praise be that this thing isn't going online, as I've quite a few videos embedded, and that would take forever to load.

Anyway, enough gab. Back to work... or not! lol

@

showcase development

Wowser, what a busy few days its been. I came back from Easter with not that much in terms of part two completed work, but after ploughing out through I've now got quite a bit sorted.

To start off with, I went with the detective office. I tried the starry starry night scene, but felt that I couldn't really put that much into it. There was some nice grass, a picket fence and then the dark night sky.



On the other hand, the office let me get my teeth into it, and model quite a few thing, recalling skills Andy taught us about 2 months ago!

Last time, for Super Paper Mario World, I didn't have to worry too much about lighting, as games of that style are all brightly lit. This time though, the lighting was essential for capturing the type of picture I had in my head. So after much playing about, I managed to get the desk top lamp to shine onto the desk, meanwhile, the blinds in the window cast shadows onto the wall - that shady, dim look being what I wanted.



The next issue was getting the right frame for the image. I tried a dark photo frame, an old aged piece of paper, and thought 'mmmm it's ok', then came up with the idea of a manila folder theme and the 'confidential' red stamp look. That way, I can also use tabs for the navigation - something that Internet Explorer 7 users are now really familiar with.



Of all the analysis I've done so far, I always comment that jazzy navigation schemes that for go the traditional nav bar may risk losing an older generation of viewers. So by using a home tab I can attempt to please both demographs. It could even be extended so that all the links are available in tabs, as websites do do this - possible improvement idea.

Once I started making the buttons in Flash, there were all sort of problems revolving around size and quality after compression. Plus, I had to choose the 'over' and 'down' states, as from my web analysis, being able to locate a button and also, it looking right with the overall theme, is important.




Of the two above, I decided eventually to go with the dotty one. I thought the line look made it look a bit amateurish, OK I'm not that much of a pro, but still, when you see it in the whole frame, I think they look better.

In a seperate part of the showcase, for my gadget glasses, I am including the AVIs of my favourite TV shows. The buttons here, I decided to design quite like that used by the very popular BBC iPlayer. Instead of just a contrasting coloured border, they use a illuminated gradient fill.



I do have concerns over whether this is in keeping with the overall design theme, but it is only a very minute part, and I do think that the gadget glasses are quite modern, and flashy, so why not have buttons the same?!

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I've also added motion to my logo along with audio. I got my inspiration through a combination of the new BBC one ident, with the swirling circle and then also the colours from the Wii adverts.




(11 secs in)

So here's my ae motion piece:


That's pretty much all for now, I've got the pixilation to do soon, and I meet that with a feel of fear and apprehension - it is a very long process and can get complicated. But to make what I want, it's a must, so gotta do it!

Adios,

@