Our Portfolio of Multimedia Authoring

Essay Kevin

Vision

The initial idea was to create a simple game that allowed users to change the order of certain letters in order to create a proper word. This, however, was not the fun idea we wanted to implement yet. So we came up with a way for beginning computer users to learn ‘user-input’ via a keyboard and how the screen reacted by playing the retro-game Alien Invaders. We also tried to incorporate our last names into the project. This is shown in the starting animation, the moodboard, and the game we modified.

Delay

Unfortunately we couldn’t finish the project before the initial deadline because my mother fell ill. Cancer absolutely sucks. I’d like to leave it at that.

Creation

After knowing that our project wouldn’t be graded until June next year I thought quite a lot about why creating is so difficult when your head is full with other stuff or the pressure of a deadline is not nearly enough to get me to work on something. I’ve come to envy people that use creation as a means to vent. I’ve come to know myself as someone who mainly consumes content. As I’m writing this however, I feel happy with the fact that I’ve created and finished a project even though the situation I’m dealing with hasn’t let up.

Skills

Multimedia authoring is a subject in which each student can personally develop and hone skills. I find that especially when it comes to designing using computerprograms like Adobes’ After Effects and the open source program GIMP. Gathering these new skills I find YouTube is an excellent source. A good tutorial is a step by step guide as to what you need to do. However, The best content creators are those who show how simple skills can be used in a multitude of ways. The philosophy “Monkey see, monkey do” applies here. Especially with After Effects, a notoriously complex program to those who have never edited video, Youtube was a blessing. After Effect with Mikey proved to be a great source for how to use the program. I started with the beginner tutorials and am pleased to say that creating the animated start screen was a lot of fun. Key framing, applying effects to layers and rendering it in an efficient way are some of the skills I gathered during the project. When you want to use certain pictures in a project found with google images, the background is something that you usually don’t want to use. This means that, in order to get it to fit in well with the project, the background has to be removed. For this I used GIMP. GIMP is a open source software program that can about just as many things as the expensive photoshop software from Adobe. Learning to use the pen tool, a simple tool to trace the line between the background and the object you wish to select, was tedious. all the images displayed in the moodboard and the to images used in the animation are isolated with the pen tool. In the end the results look good. The picture that is the moodboard looks whole and specifically tailored for this project (which it is) After finalising the animation in after effects. It was time to make it suitable for the web. a 55 megabyte file wouldn’t do for an Animation that lasts a little over a second. After some troubles with trying to make an HTML5 video I finally decided on gif. The compression that follows is pretty rigorous. Going from 55MB to 6MB certainly degrades the quality of the image itself but the quickness with which it loads compensates well enough.

Game

We thought it would be nice for the game to a little more personal. to complete this we modified the sprites image. In this game, a small image file carries all the different attacking ships. For example attacking ship no.1 displays the pixels in coordinates (1, 1) to (20, 20). The second ship uses the pixels from (1, 21) to (21, 40) and so on. So we tried to modify a couple of coordinates to change a attacking ship into a dustpan. Pixel-art is incredibly difficult as you only have a few pixels to show whatever you want to show. Every pixel has to count.

Teamwork

Working together with Per Stoffer was nice. He understood the difficulties with which I dealt and agreed to delay submitting this assignment. Eventually we regrouped and since then the progress of our project was steady.

I hope you find find this project to your liking

Kevin Buis