Evalutaion

Evaluation

module evaluation of major project
for my major project I wanted to do something that would be visual, usable, and informative and above all fun, my original idea for the final project was to design and make a table football game i.e. like Subbuteo and develop it for the iPhone as an application.
After already mocking the preliminary sketches of the application itself as researching Subbuteo on the iPhone and the research is all still nothing so I thought great, I'll go ahead and continue producing the work, until somebody on the course had found a game called tabletop football and it was exactly like Subbuteo, and we were told at the start of the final project if you're idea already existed then you could carry on and produce the project as long as you make it better, this was hard to do as we application for the iPhone tabletop football world was made by development company and was way beyond my skill capabilities.
So I went away and came up with a new idea I just recently bought the Beatles rock band on Xbox 360 and really fell in love with the visual aspect of the game, and for it would be a good idea to make something based around the Beatles, after researching online for websites the only website for the Beatles was the main website, due to copyright law the only other websites were a fan made and particularly good, the main website was not exactly what I thought it was going to be, it was a very visual, there was no way he could listen to the music, and thanks so much information it was hard finding your way around, so I started making a basic website HTML using CSS and some PHP PHP was can be used for audio and the images on the site I was can have a section where you could listen to music while browsing through many photographs of the Beatles, to be fair I hadn't really put much effort into this and when it came to presenting our work the tutors were not happy with the amount of effort I put in, and proposed that I re-evaluate my proposed final project, so on that night I sketched down on paper a rough idea of the new site that would produce, this new site would be highly visual using photo shop as that is what I'm good at, and put together in Flash CS4 for this I would have to learn action script three, granted I could have used action script 2, which we learnt in the first and second year, but the brief did state that the student needed to push themselves and try new things.
Originally the website was going to be set in Apple Studios recording room looking down on the Beatles and objects inside the room could be clickable which would reveal hidden information or play little animations, there was to be a audio section where you can listen to the music that was situated at the top of the stairs behind a door, a games section which again you have click a door to get to, but as I started developing this in Flash it didn't really stand out to me as being very Beatle-esque, so I reset the project and set it in 1968 which was the release of yellow submarine the animation which Disney produced and the Beatles star in, and using the high visual content from that film I could make a better website.

The main screen I would have had the Beatles standing in a high Street which was necessarily in Liverpool or anywhere for that matter, it was a fictional street which would have inside it iconic locations, memorable images and characters which any Beatles fan would recognise, in a fictional high Street I placed Apple Studios which is the famous building when the Beatles recorded and also did the gig on the roof, Abbey Road with the zebra crossing, which itself is a very iconic image related with the Beatles anybody who thinks that the Beatles often thinks of Abbey Road, you would have the Beatles themselves in the high Street, I didn't want make the high Street to cluttered because I do my draw attention away from the characters themselves, the way I designed the street was to be as if you were there yourself standing on the other side of the street looking across at the Beatles, as I have never done anything like this in Flash before it was ever going to pay off or I was going to feel really badly.

1. problem-solving and methods of working

the first problem I encountered was finding the right code for action script 3 to apply to the stage the ability to have a first person perspective view I found a tutorial which loosely helped with the situation, I learnt about X and Y axis, the X axis was left to right and the Y axis was up and down, to begin with I applied both these axis to the main stage area in Flash and after playing around with the code it didn't seem right having the ability to lock up and down, it looks nice but wasn't practical because the images shift, and I couldn't find any reason why they were doing that, so I kept the stage moving on the X axis, and applied different variables in speed to each image giving the illusion of perspective, and to my astonishment it paid off quite well.
For pepper land which words a section on the site I used the same code for the high Street but had to play around with it as there were more images in pepper land i.e. hills, trees, clouds, and characters etc and again in the changing variables in speed so that it looked real, from a perspective view .
Audio in the site was a problem as the code that I knew for action script 2 was now obsolete in action script three so a lot of searching on the Internet was involved to find the answer, in a way it worked, I found a way to stop audio from playing when he came out of sections of the site, but in doing so also stops audio from playing when you return to the main area. This was one problem that really never got fixed, no matter how hard I tried I couldn't seem to find the code to fix it, but the audio still works in the other sections of the site.

2. How a product works

the product works using Flash CS4, using action script 3 and was made so that it gave the impression you were actually in the site, so when you mouse moves the screen moves as if the mouse was your eyes, to do this I use this code and applied it to the main screen.



stage.removeEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, moveStage);
}
//var
var mousePrevX=0;
var mouseCurX=0;
var mousePrevY= 0
var mouseCurY = 0
var currentApple:Number=0;
stage.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_MOVE, moveStage);
rightPost_mc.mouseChildren = false
rightPost_mc.mouseEnabled = false
leftPost_mc.mouseChildren = false
leftPost_mc.mouseEnabled = false
function moveStage(e:MouseEvent):void {
mouseCurX=mouseX;
mouseCurY=mouseY
//X
appleStudios_mc.x += ((mouseCurX - mousePrevX)/2.5)*-1;
abbeyRoad_mc.x += ((mouseCurX - mousePrevX)/5)*-1;
//postBox_mc.x += ((mouseCurX - mousePrevX)/3)*-1;
leftPost_mc.x += ((mouseCurX - mousePrevX)/.5)*-1;
rightPost_mc.x += ((mouseCurX - mousePrevX)/.5)*-1;
mousePrevX = mouseCurX;
mousePrevY = mouseCurY;

}

this code allowed me to give the illusion of perspective and was not pleasant to work with.

3.testing and feedback

the general impression I got from people once they had been on the website, was that they were very impressed with the visual aspect which is great because that's what I set out to do something that catches the eye something that impresses people and something people enjoy looking at, the majority of people tested my site, once questioned they never really said anything about lack of this or that and genuinely quite like the experience they got from visiting, even though they never really said anything about lack of content or games which was originally what I set out to do, games etc, I still felt it could have been a lot better had it had games in the website, but due to time left to work on the project to get it finished within the deadline I had to scrap the game element side of the site as the main site had taken me longer than expected and had I started on the games I wouldn't have been finished for the handing date.
I do propose to add more things to it in the future, also to have more informational content by the time we have a degree show, because that was another thing that I didn't have time to apply to the site before handing in the project.

4.evaluation and appraisal

4.1 self appraisal

I think for the best part of my project it went quite well it was only as the handing in date drew nearer it became apparent to me I wasn't going to be able to achieve all that I had hoped to achieve, even though there is that I am very pleased with what I managed to produce, what I have learned during my time on this project, learning new skills, facing new problems and overcoming which I believe will help greatly in future years, the only regret I have is not having my later idea first hand having the full allotted time given to me at the start of the project, had I had this idea first I believe that the finished article would have been a lot better.

4.2 improvements

the improvements I would like to make given more time, within the audio section of my site I would have liked one section where you play music rather than four separate buttons for four separate songs, I would have liked to play, pause, stop, forward and rewind also volume bar would have been good.
Another improvement I would have made is to have the games in pepper land section, just that little something to give it that extra kick, maybe also a guestbook where users could leave comments about this site on their favour aspects on their worst.

4.3 future scope

the future of the project is hard to say really, I would like to see it fully complete how I intended it to look, with everything working, it would've been nice to get recognition from the actual Beatles website, maybe even give them the idea of doing something similar, or even just endorsement from them and think to the Beatles main site, but that is wishful thinking.
I do plan to come back to this project even though it's finished and handed in, I plan on coming back and making the improvements as and when my skills with Flash allow me to do so, over the course of the project, I can safely say that I have become somewhat of a Beatles fan, before the project had obviously heard of the Beatles and knew they were never really asked myself as a fan of theirs, but thanks to this project I found myself listening to endless number of Beatles tracks and have even bought a poster to go on my wall at home, I believe this newfound love of the Beatles will spur me on to come back to this project at some point and complete all the improvements which are stated in my evaluation.

Appendices.

Adding little things

just adding things to the site now to give it more muscle, because so fare for the ammount of work gone into it theres not much really for a user to do, this is due to time issues, so im adding first off , moving blue meanies in pepperland section, bouncig ball in the main screen i want the ability to click on each beatle and have info come up about that selected beatle, i am adding butterflys in pepperland too and also going to try and figure out how to have the blue glove as your mouse pointer in pepperland , i have found may tutorials on the subject but many of them go 10 feet over my head. but ill do my best.

Beatles are back in the studio

after making a band image of the beatles in adobe illustrator, i imported it into flash and played with the bone tool to have the heads and hands and instruments move intime with the music of the recording studio.
the effect works really well, and the slight movements from the guitar hilts and head bobbles from ringo really make this page stand out.

cars now have sound!!!

managed to sort out the car sound problem, before the cars would pass by the screen with no sound , but now i have them hit a mark and the sound plays , took me a while but i figured it out, i created two sounds in adobe soundbooth , on of a normal car passing by and other with the radio on playing a beatles song. which works really well. there not on a random timer but the uneven times that the cars reapear give the impression of random.

Troubles with audio

having troubles with the audio at the moment, the sound from stage 1 seems to play over the other sounds in stage 2 and 3, so i added a stopall code to it and that seemed to have worked till i realised it wouldnt play at all, if the user came out of stage 2 or 3 the sound on the stage 1 would stop all together.

Audio in the studio.

Added audio today not quite what i wanted but its taken me the best part of the day to get it to work, ive added four buttons with four songs, the idea being the beatles are in the studio and have either just finished recording or about to start and you can check the songs they just made.the page gives you the feeling of being the sound man. along with the pictures of the beatles and other iconic images it really makes you feel nostalgic.

Audio section

The audio section of the site was originally to be the original main section until I had to late idea to change it think I was very wise in my decision as adding audio is not as easy as it seems, at this point I have noticed that the size of my file is getting extraordinarily large so in order to cut down on file size I have some audio files playing from an external file, for this I had to search tutorials on how to do it because it never done it before I always embedded my music into the website.

Lucy in the sky with diamonds

Today I added Lucy in the sky with diamonds it was an idea that came to me when making the background for the pepper land page because in photo shop I wrote the name Lucy in the sky and I photo shopped diamonds of different colours around the name, I decided it would be a great idea if you could hover over the diamond and have it play a section of the tune from the actual song, and choosing the intro was really great idea because it was very recognisable and everybody who has used my site to give me feedback and said that they like that bit the best it catches them off guard and they like it.

madness

The land has turned out to be harder than I expectedit's a good job I decided to get rid of the games and keep it as an interactive piece because it's becoming a nightmare to code that you learn in the second year in action script 2 you find it sometimes obsolete, granted some code still works but not everything, I've been experimenting with bone tool which is a new addition to Adobe Flash CS4 I've been using this Army images that I could ready for animating the only problem is it it doesn't like using PNG images which all my images are so it makes it very difficult, having said that I still managed to animate some characters using the bone tool and they look pretty good.

High Street and sound

Today I had fun putting the sound of ambient street noise over the main stage animation, used the word fun loosely, as it actually gave me a headache as I am using action script three which I've never used before and only ever used action script 2 and even then I wasn't that great at it, so the slightest hiccup in using action script three takes me a while to figure out, there's only so many tutorials on the Internet that actually help with your problems, the problem I have is the audio I was trying to put on it on frame one and after much blood sweat and tears still haven't managed to get it working properly, from frame one you go to frame two & three and then you come back you have to come back to frame one to get three or to get 2 so I can get the sound to stop when you go to frame three or two but when you come back it stops the sound altogether I'm still looking into this.

Cars

To give the feel of a more natural high street atmosphere I added the images of cars passing by when you're on the main screen the code that I used on the cars so that once they pass by they are a random sequence so once they disappear off the stage they take X amount of time to drive by again, the only problem I had with this was finding a way to get the audio file of car passing by as and when it passed by the middle of the screen I tried using a hit test at first but got nowhere.

Research for website

Every purchased a issue of the daily Mirror because they were giving away a free magazine with every copy it had 151 unseen and rare photos and also had some useful information inside about the Fab four.
Also picked up from Asda in Hull any special anniversary celebration edition magazine on the Beatles called hello goodbye it was five pounds and it was packed with loads of photos lots of rare information as well this I thought would be good to incorporate into the website somehow.

Jeremy (the BOOB)

Jeremy is a character in the yellow submarine he helps the Beatles find their way to pepperland and then helps fight the blue meanies he's quite a pinnacle character in the film so I thought it would be wrong of me to leave him out of the website.

Blue meanie's

What would the yellow submarine movie be without the blue meanies they are the bad guys in the movie and are probably the most recognisable second to the actual yellow submarine, at first they were going to be static images in the website but I thought that it would be better if they were animated in a way, so I sketched down some rough drawings of them so you'd have hands separate to feet and bodies separate to heads, the only thing that I can see wrong or that might cause me problems is that the images are taking very long to colour in in photo shop it's a long process first you draw them with a pencil ,draw the outline with a fine liner pen and scan them in, once scanned in you open them in Adobe Illustrator from there you vector image them and then you open it in photoshop to finish the colouring. This I can foresee taking me a while.

Trees

Because I bought the DVD it meant I had a large selection of images to choose from, I would pause the DVD at certain points in the film and sketch down characters and creatures, plants, etc.
These are some of my early sketches of trees some are my own ideas and some are taken from the movie yellow submarine, also I made my own creatures as well as taking some creatures from the movie.

Characters in pepperland

These are some early images that I made for the clouds which won't populate pepperLand the one with the wires coming out of the top words of very early idea this was back when I was going with the idea of having it look as if it was from a pop-up book is for the images were cutout paper and put onto the stage.

When researching a pepper land I looked at lots of the images on Google, but I even found the images on Google were not that good there were some really good reference tools for colours apart from that there was a really a lot, some of my early designs for clouds were large images with swirly circles inside I really like these in black and white when it came to put them in colour and in really think they were suitable for my website.
I purchased the DVD the yellow submarine this was a big help as it gave me limitless supplies of images due to the fact that when they made the film no two trees or creatures were alike, that I found very useful.

pepperland

so far Ive got the main high street sorted but i am beginning to make the Pepperland section, this is a huge undertaking for me , as I'm not that proficient in flash and this part of the site will be the most flash heavy, Ive watched the movie and that's helped for the inspiration and basically its one big mind trip ,so to pull it off ill have to have a lot going on on one screen at one time, this section was going to be the games section, but given the fact the time frame I'm working in i don't foresee the possibility of putting games in, so i have there for come to the conclusion i will make it interactive with lots of little Easter eggs for Beatle fans to enjoy :)

depth

ive added the beatles so far they just stand on the street ,hopefully ill have them clickable and they do something , also added lamposts in the foreground so u get the impression of depth these really look good and im very pleased with the final outcome.

i have been playing about in flash trying to get the idea onto the screen, the problem i had was figuring out the code for the images to move so it gives the impression that it has depth, i initially started of with the images both moving on the x axis and the y axis so you had the movement of your head to look around, but it didn't feel right and the images didn't blend very well on the y axis, so they stayed on the x axis and i played about with them till it looked right.

John before and after

here is John Lennon his was fun to do, and adding the fur really made him look cool.

Paul before and after

here is Paul McCartney out of the 4 of them , i believe he was the best rendition i put the texture on his shirt which i used denim, hard to see when its quite small.

this is George Harrison the problem with George was his costume was quite bland so it wasn't much fun doing this one :( at first his hands were down but i soon changed it to them being behing because it looked better.

Ringo body before and after

here is Ringo's body before and after, i used the same colours they used in the films as i wanted it as authentic as possible, the only thing i did differently was make them look as though they could have worn those clothes in real life, the project is set in reality so it would be quite a cool twist , to achieve this i put real textures into the costumes at least 1 texture per Beatle.

here are the Beatles body's which i sketched freehand rather then using the pen tablet like i did with the heads, it was just easier this way, i took inspiration from the yellow submarine era, so Ive set the date to 1968 which is the year the motion picture was released, so the sketch's represent the time. even though the song yellow submarine was released in 1966.

here is my reference i used to get the styles right.

here are some examples of the art work I'm still drawing at the moment ,Ive made it in the style of first person perspective so to the person visiting the site, gets the feeling of standing in the street with the Beatles, the idea at the moment is just an idea. i will need to look on google for tutorials on how to apply the effect.

Gallery replaced

today i have been playing around with the initial idea, i can see from the problems I'm having with the gallery in flash that this will be a huge task.
so therefor Ive put my project on a diet and cut out what i didn't think was essential, so i cut the gallery and the idea that it was in a studio, i thought having it in studio was hard to add iconic images and places associated with the Beatles, so after lots of drawings later Ive come up with the idea of having 2 famous landmarks in the Beatles history, Apple studios, where they did the famous gig on the rooftop, and Abbey road, the iconic image of the 4 walking across the zebra crossing is probably one of the most famous images in the world and what most people think of when you mention the Beatles.

Galery Mock-up

This is the mock-up of the gallery section, which in flash with have the curtains closed. and just the blue meanie, then you click him and he pulls the curtains rope, and the curtains open to have butterflies fly around the page while you can browse the pictures, which i haven't decided to have have scroll across or have static yet, I'm looking at tutorials which help you make a dynamic gallery in flash, which pull in data like php would for html.

Coding the Intro

here is the yellow submarine, which will make its appearance, randomly around the site, also used in one of the games.

as of the moment I'm working on the intro, it has now evolved into a intro and a quick photo montage, which brings the user up to speed, as the website is set towards the end of the Beatles career, so a moving photo montage and glass orb which shows the year plays before you enter the site. but having problems with the coding, the orb flys on screen but doesn't fly off as easily.

Ringo & John

These are the Black and white and the colour images of John Lennon and Ringo Starr,All members will be wearing clothes, which they were wearing in the movie yellow submarine.