Starting To Compile The Flash Together

Since we had already created the 'Intro' scene and the 'Menu' scene we decided to start putting the Flash together into one Flash file. We chose to place everyone's Flash files into Ben's Flash file since he had the 'Intro' scene on his file and it'd be easier to move everyone's scenes into his.

Since Sharon had completed one of her 'Interview' scenes we decided to put that into the final Flash scene as well since we were placing everyone elses Flash files into separate scenes as that'd be easier and would make the timeline less messy and not as long since we had quite a few video's to put into the Flash application.

Drive to Museum

After the detective is told about his wife’s passing he then gets in to his car and drives to the museum, determined to solve the case. This scene will follow the style of the introduction and feel like an interactive movie that being said this scene will lean more towards a movie rather than the interactivity side, this is because of how emotional the detective would be, and we don’t think that even he would have much control over him self at this point.


I will be using layered images in flash, then I will be manipulating them using action script and tweens to give the illusion of movement and 3d space, giving a much more involving experience for the user. This scene will also be used to display the names of the creators between each of the image fades.

Intro.

I have begun creating the intro movie for our interactive application, following the storyboards I previously created I have started bringing all our files together to create an interactive movie like introduction, hoping to not only entertain but to also capture and transfer the user into a gritty Noir themed adventure. as this is simply the introduction the user will not be able to interact with the scene and it will just be used to get the story across.





The introduction will follow the storyboard very closely, using very close shots of people (as shown below) and places to better allow an emotional connection between the user and the characters in the game.

Flash Application

So after all the picture and video editing we're finally able to start our flash, here are some screenshots of the process.

Janitor and Shopkeeper interview scenes in Photoshop and Flash

In these two scenes the detective the Janitor and the Shopkeeper (separately). In the interviews the facial expressions of the suspects change as they are responding to the questions so the expressions are animated but have a "choppy" effect. To achieve this i went into Adobe Photoshop and deleted the bluescreen background from the close-up pictures of the suspects (Edit> Clear), desaturated the images to make them black and white (Image> Adjustment> Desaturate) and changed the image size to 650 x 435 (Image> Image size) before importing them into Flash.



Once in Flash i added a Trace Bitmap effect to the facial expressions (Modify > Bitmap >Trace Bitmap) then created new movie clips for each set of expressions so that they can be animated to look like the suspect is actually speaking. The text was also made in movie clips so that they could have a "type on" kind of effect.

Flash Production

This is a mini-game in the flash application which is critical to the progression of the story as well as being highly interactive. The aim is that there is a computer with a password on it. The password is a colour code and the colours have to be pressed in the right order for the computer to grant the user access. to make this game i had to get the coding right, so to begin with, i started off with a very unorganised look to the stage in flash so that i could concentrate on the code

after i got the coding right, it was a matter of getting the stage to look presentable and have evrything working glitchlesly:

Video Editing

Here are the videos we've edited:

Video Editing

After recording the blue screen sessions, i had to edit the videos and remove the bluescreen / add effects to make the scene come to life. I used the Motion software to do the keying. here are sample screenshots of my work in progress:

Flash Developmental Designs

Viewing the world

This will be what the user sees before they enter a conversation. A user can either click on the character on screen to begin questioning them, or they can select around the background to see if there are any interactive elements, for this example we have a bin in the centre of the screen and if the user clicks it then a new event will load in which the detective searches through it for evidence.

At the bottom left of the screen we see a list of items that the user has found and collected it will be up to the user to use these to progress through the story, for example the key will open a door in which allows the story to expand, or the piece of paper holds the combination needed to view the museums security tapes and remove suspicion from a person locked inside the museum.




Conversation

After the user selects a suspect to question, the following screen will be displayed with a list of questions that the user can have the detective ask. By clicking on a question it will run the animation of the suspect responding.



Below shows a response to question one, the text of the reply will be displayed word for word and the character to the right will animate giving the illusion of actual speech



After the detective has finished questioning the suspect a mini biography will appear giving the user a small incite in to the character they have just questions allowing a better understanding of the person just questioned.



Below is another interactive scene in which the user can select the object in the world before them in order to interact. In this scene the user is outside and is on an evidence collecting mission. If the user selects the bin then they will find a blood covered shirt and start the animation of the detective finding and picking it up then expressing his emotions based on what he has found. To the left of the bins lies a gun that the killer has also dropped once again this will run the animation of the detective picking the object up and expressing his emotions. After the user is happy and thinks that they have collected all the evidence available they can click on the green door to progress to the next scene, with or without all of the evidence.

Production Progress #2

We booked another session in the blue screen room to take more of the scenes that will be included into the project.
We managed to get 2 extras to help us with the project, and they were Sarah's cousin, Josephine Lee, who again helped us take some photos and Shakel's brother.
This week we've managed to get alot of work done, from editing photos and videos and getting more video scenes and photos taken.

Editing in Photoshop

I have taken the images we have taken using Photoshop using the Noir style as the main theme, firstly to create this style I applied a grey scale to the image then I applied a level layer to alter the definition of the blacks, whites and greys in the image altering them independently based on the image taken.

I had repeated this style but made small changes based on what the image required to keep it consistent with the next.