Fundaments of Interactive Media

Tales

 

    Over all i think this project went quite well, i was asked to produce an interactive digital fairy tale. I decided to keep my project very traditional, sticking strictly to the story and i wanted to give it the feel of a real book. I decided  to aim it at young children to early teens. The fairy tale i choose was ‘The Ugly Duckling’, written by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, first published 11 November 1843 in New Fairy Tales. i decided to base my project on this particular fairy tale as it was the one that stood out largely in my childhood, i also liked to characters,  and wanted to show the emotions of the ugly duckling through my drawings.

    I started by designing the characters, this was mostly done on Adobe Illustrator, as i could draw in vectors which would make animating the characters possible in Adobe Flash. I had planned on making the three farm yard characters, ‘Pig, Cow, Sheep’ mouths animated whilst the titles were showing. I found this difficult and only towards the end of the project managed to make one work through making a movie clip. This is something i will have to develop when using flash in another project. I made most of my backgrounds in Adobe Photoshop, using different brushes and opacities to achieve the fields and water. Then after importing these backgrounds in to Flash’s library, i dropped them in to each individual scene, compositing the character drawing on top.

  I found action scripting quite hard from the beginning and think i have only recently become comfortable with it. I started by making the hatching scene. I did this by creating five hatched eggs, and five un-hatched eggs, on Adobe Illustrator. Then i covered them to buttons, then placed each egg over another in sequence. Then on symbol editor i made the buttons highlight able, so that when you dragged the mouse over the eggs the button below would show. For the ugly duckling i put a ‘on release, ‘go to and play’ to the next scene. For the farm yard scene i had to show a still image of the three farm yard animals with titles, then over the top have each of the amimals as buttons. When clicked on each animal, you would be directed to the allocated scene. I then had to make a button with came showed up after you had clicked on all the animals. At this point i wanted to place the game which i had adapted. i then made a button in the shape of an arrow to direct to the next scene, again this was done through action scripting ‘gotoAndPlay’ ‘next scene’.

    I introduced a audio track which i downloaded and converted to an mp3. I chose it as it had low soft tones, in a classical capacity. Here i had to search for tutorials on the internet as to how i could have a track playing through my product. But i only found out how to play on click with a button. I imported it in to Flash’s library, and dropped it in to a frame on my first scene, then on properties i looped the track and played it throughout the scene, i haven’t yet found out how to cut it off at the end.

   If i were to do this brief again, i would have liked to focus on another fairy tale, and gone for a much more games based approach. I think i need allot more attention on action Scripting which i will be doing in my spare time, looking through tutorials.