CT4011: Animated Prototype project
The first stage when starting a new project was to think of an idea and create a moodboard for some inspiration. My prototype is called "War Factory", a game where you play as a factory worker that constructs bullets to help the war effort.
Once i had my idea sorted, i decided to jump into after effects and create a title slide for my project. I did this by creating a solid a filling it with a gradient fill to get the background and a text layer that says "War Factory". The text was simply filled with a black color and outlined with a yellow.
The next step was to create an animation for the text so it created a cool opening title scene. The image above shows the letters falling from off screen to form the words "War Factory". This was done by adding two key frames to the timeline, (see below).
All of the images above are the different scenes that will feature in my prototype. I decided to go with a simplistic art style consisting of mainly shapes like rectangles with a curved edges.
I added smoke to the chimneys in illustrator because i wanted to animate smoke coming out of them in after effects however the smoke had to be removed in illustrator and added in after effects
To create the smoke effects for the chimneys in after effects, i simply made a rectangle and positioned over one of the chimneys. I then added a wave warp effect to it and altered the height, width and direction in order to create a a wavy effect on the rectangle. This did not require any key framing as the wave warp applies until the clip ends on the timeline.
After the first two scenes were implemented i decided to move onto to a character and a the first walk animation. Above you can the character in illustrator. He is positioned like that because that will be the starting position in the walk animation.
I took the character into after effects and made a walking animation. Obviously i cant show the animation here but here are the key frames used to make the animation. The process mainly involved rotating the different body parts of the character in order to make a walking motion. Also, i had too change the anchor points of all the body parts in after effects in order to make them move more like limbs.
Once the walk animation was created, i took one of my scenes i created in illustrator and added it to the timeline. I then dragged the character into the scene and added the walking animation as well. The first step was to get the character to walk to the metal box. This was done by trimming the animation down to fit the time it took to reach the box and adding two key frames for the characters position; one at the starting position which was off-screen and one at the end position at the metal box.
Now that my character had reached the metal box i needed to make another animation. The animation would have to be him picking up a piece of metal. Again i cant show the whole animation so above are the key frames for the animation.
Above is the metal bar asset i created for the metal box.
The first image shows the metal coming out of the box. This was done by altering the metal bars position and scale transform options.
After the character has picked the metal up and walked it to the mold i had to change the color mold to show that it had been filled. I did this by simply animating a gradient fill into the timeline just as the character reached it.
The same walking animation was used to get the character to walk off screen from the bullet mold.
Now it was time for the second scene. Again, the same walking animation was used to get the character to walk on screen and walk over to the red button that is on the wall.
The next step was to create yet another animation that allowed the character to press the button on the wall. This was done by using the end positions of the walking animation and adding another set of key frames about a second after to make it look like the character is standing still and pressing the button
After the button was pressed, i had to animate a shotgun shell falling from the blue chute. This was simply done by placing the shotgun shell behind the blue chute and adding two key frames in order for the animation to work. One key frame marked the position behind the chute and the other on the conveyor belt.
The same process was used to move the shell along the conveyor as well.
Once the shell had reached the red pipe i needed to create gunpowder falling down into the shell from the chute. I used the same process as the shell coming out of the blue chute however i used circles instead and changed the bend on them to make it appear more like dust than solid circles.
After the shell was filled, it was moved off screen and i used the same walking animation i created earlier to get my character to walk off screen as well.
The final scene was relatively easy to make as it didnt require any new animations. I reused the walking animation to get my character to the button, the button press animation to get him to press the button and the shotgun shells moving along the conveyor belt. The only new animation i had to make was the box lid closing when the shells reached the box. This was done by changing the anchor point of the lid to the corner of the box and adjusting the rotation in order for it to close.
At the end of the video i used the same title animation that was at the start
The last step was to add audio and music to the clip. Above is a picture of all of the different layers i had in my video. The murky green colors are all sound effects. I used copyright free sound effects and music. I got the effects of two different websites whose links can be found below:
https://www.zapsplat.com/sound-effect-categories/
https://www.epidemicsound.com/sound-effects/?_us=adwords&_usx=11330441011_royalty%20free%20sound%20effects&utm_source=google&utm_medium=paidsearch&utm_campaign=11330441011&utm_term=royalty%20free%20sound%20effects&gclid=Cj0KCQjwp86EBhD7ARIsAFkgakhJJnjWFHcHDBq5lKUMuvLhNBptOnZJ15jr_AyMVto43Le94_ayeToaAs6mEALw_wcB
The actual final step was to create a poster to advertise the game. Above is a picture of my poster
