Audio!

With special thanks to Steven Spence for recording these lovely sounds for me, they are perfect for what I needed.. tailor made.

Here they are:

Interactive book audio

Quotes pop up and buttons

To start off the work on the quotes scene I have added in the roll over aspect pof the stickers, so that the user can see a bigger version of them before deciding to add them to their scrapbook.
Here is a video of this:
I have also added buttons beside each sticker that will be used to peal off the sticker and place it in the scrapbook.

Scrapbook slide

As having a page turning animation would be a bit difficult and time consuming to impliment, along with the stickers appearing in the scrapbook (still to do!!) I have done a simple sliding animation instead.

Map Starting point

To make the map animation make a bit more sense I have added in this image and button sequence.
squint..again

Scenes slide

Completed animation of the glasses sliding across the table to show each scene (along with instructions panel)

Map merging into.. map

Finally got it to work! Ended up continuing the map spill animation until it fitted into the map image.

I have no idea what happened to this video! ...gets the point across though...?

Troubles

Major troubles trying to get the swfs to work merging the animation into the map jpeg... nightmare!

Base animation

Hmm

That video won't upload, after multiple tries. Will just have to leave it.

Animation is mostly done, some development pictures:

Step 1

The video wouldn't upload last night; here it is

...the base colour. I will add in highlights and shadow tomorrow.

Frame by frame drawn animation, 260 frames...

Just imagine it without the background, or the weird sparkly things...

Wow

It has taken hours to simply get the video I am using onto the timeline in Flash, what a ridiculous thing it is! I hate Flash!!

It involved about 20 different conversions and ended up with Flash 'unexpectedly quitting' about 50 times, but I now have the video in the timeline... now to animate, frame by frame... I can't wait!

Spill footage

..

 

The Map

I filmed the spill for making the map a couple of weeks ago, now I just need to look at it frame by frame and draw in the animation that will eventually turn into the whisky spill!

Here is some of the raw footage and how I did it. (drew out map, traced, waterproofed, glued outline, added white tac to outline, filmed)

Footnotes scene. fully finished!

Here it is in action:

Introducing..

New home button:
I have gone for a compass type symbol for the home button; I felt that it worked with the map theme a lot better.

New instructions button:
An arrow tab, that when the mouse is over brings
out a panel with instructions. The tab looks like this...

Enough for tonight...

Flash has started doing things for no reason, that make no sense. I am taking this as a clear sign to stop for the night. I have however got a much better home button in operation, all will be revealed; when I can stand to open Flash again...

Footnotes that I Gone and Done

Completed Footnotes scene, with background. Just need to add in some instructions and a new home button (that looks less revolting).

currently experimenting with the positioning of the text layer.
Think I'm going to end up putting it under the bottle as it doesn't look right like this.

Text

So, the text try-out below was no good, it didn't work and the animation I was trying out wasn't working either.
So tonight I'm working through turning all of the text sequences into PNG files and animating them. The animation involves yet more masking. But I think it works a bit better. Im making it in its own movie file so that I can easily add it into the footnotes scene and it will all work straight away (!).
So far it looks a bit like this (this has no pauses by the way, as the code to do so is in the footnotes scene already)

Textual Development

Phase one... testing out what works.

Footnotes? What footnotes? ..I can't even read them?

I know, I know.

As the bottle is fairly small I have lost all of that hard work I did into typing up the footnotes and making the labels work. I am now going to surround the bottle in the words from the footnote in a dictionary esque way (thanks for the suggestion Lyall). Now, to get on with this. But first, some research into animations of descriptive text.. or something along those lines.

Wow, that pretty garish.

simple..

Ahh, more or less decided.. a bit of kinetic typography would work nicely :)

I would be doing anything that complicated, but its nicely done.

Bringing some life to the bottle

So, the bottle functions but it doesn't really look as if it's really rotating, so tonight I spent (A VERY LONG) time bringing the bottle to life.


From looking at some real glass rotating I realised that all I really needed to do was make it appear that the light was shifting slightly as the bottle turns.

A bit like the glass here? But not really, a better representation would be to simply rotate the glass that is probably beside you right now...

Basically, I started with taking the bottle PNG image I already had, the largest section of glass area from the image and reducing the transparency, I then imported this to the Flash file and put it under the mask, so that it would not appear in the area surrounding the bottle. Following this I added in a few keyframes so that the layer moved slightly and tweened this.

This made the label fit in better but the bottle is still lacking.

 To tackle this I cut sections from the glass bottle, one of the main light area and one from the surroundings of this, altered the transparency and imported them to the Flash file. I added them into
the masked area, but behind the label layer, so that it was just the bottle being altered. I added some movement to the central light area to give the impression of the light moving across the glass a bit more.

The final step was to bring a little bit of light to the bottle top... Basically followed the same technique of a transparenlt layer of the area moving slightly...

The final product, at a more suitable speed (the HTML version, rather than slow in Flash version)

Buttons make the bottle go 'round

Today I staged an interrogation into how to make the bottle rotate at the click of a button.. Well, basically to play the animation and stop at a certain point (when the next label is lined up) and then play again to the next alignment when the button is clicked again.

Basically had to apply actions to stop the animation each time a label lined up by applying a stop function to certian frames; then added a go to and play fuction to the buttons and told them to play the next frame.

The result: