Project Background
In the late-Spring of 2008, I was approached by Dallas Baptist University asking to adapt the design of an interactive Christmas card I was developing for their Undergraduate Admissions Department to be used by the Alumni Relations Program. The idea was based on the receipt of an animated Christmas card sent by Ashland University in the Christmas 2007 season.
I completed the storyboarding process in the early-Summer of 2008 and began the animation process in mid-Summer of 2008. Rights to the music selected in the animation were acquired in late-Summer of 2008 during production. The Alumni Relations card was identical to the Undergraduate Admissions card with the exception of the final screen. As opposed to listing the Admissions staff, I listed the Alumni Relations staff.
One of the more challenging aspects of this project was the background image that I had to work with. The original was shot on a hot summer day that was mostly sunny. We needed the stage to be set in the winter with overcast skies. Unfortunately, no such image existed. To complicated matters, the storyboard called for some of the pictures to have the fountains turned off. Unfortunately, there were not images of the building with the fountains turned off either.
As you can see in this image, the building is very well lit on the day the image was taken and the fountains are in full spray.
The first order of business was to build an image that had overcast skies. This was done using the clone-stamp of Photoshop on the existing clouds that were already in the sky. The entire image was also subjected to a series of passes with various filters to bring down the intensity of the light and to give a more “winter feel” to the image.
The clouds were cloned from the clouds in the top-left and center-right sides of the image. The intent was to prevent too much of a repeating pattern being distinguishable. If you look close enough, you can see the clone pattern repeating, especially in the right-half of the image.
The next order of business was to “turn off the fountains”. Unfortunately, there is a large door on the front of the building behind the center fountain. As such, I had to make the decision to leave that sprayer in place. The other sprayers were covered brush at a time using the clone-stamp of Photoshop to paste from other parts of the building.
For example, the windows on the ground-floor closest to the center sprayer are actually copies of the second-floor windows directly above them.
The effect was a single sprayer on with the rest of the fountain turned off.
During the animation, night falls on the campus. To accomplish the effect of night falling on the campus, a series of heavy filters was applied to the image to wash out most all of the colors.
The idea was that the visitor would then be able to turn on the street lights (vector images) and the Christmas lights on the building.
At this point in the story, the visitor has turned on the fountain, which is why it it back in the image. The movement of the fountain was accomplished by using white and gray dots that moved in the sprayers along motion paths.
This particular image is only visible for a few seconds because it is preceded by a caption of “Night Falls on Campus – Click to Start a ‘Texas Snowstorm’”. The visitor is then given the option to turn on the street lamps.
The street lamps are not actually visible in this image since they were vector graphics created in Illustrator and imported in the final Flash document. Their “light” was added in the final Photoshop image, but the street lamps themselves only existed in the Flash document.
All-in-all, the client was very happy with the final product. Many of their vendors heard about it and were pleased to see it. The card was distributed via e-mail blast to all students who expressed interest of any-level of attending Dallas Baptist University during the 2008 calendar year.
