Following from last week, I wanted to work on the PDF first.

I had a lot of problems with the interactivity that I wanted to include and the PDF format because multi-state objects are only supported in SWF exports, I have found a work-around though.

I used Acrobat XI Pro to put the SWF file into a PDF document, and luckily Acrobat has an option when doing this to load SWF content on opening the page; the result is a seamless and interactive PDF (which is actually just an SWF pretending to be a PDF).

With this though I had another problem, I wanted scrollable text frames as I had quite a lot of writing for two pages. But guess what! These aren’t compatible with SWF files!

Instead of changing everything around again though (because the SWF option worked so well for everything else) I simply made the text frames into more multi-state objects; the text frames were going to be clickable to move to the next ‘block’ of text to imitate scrolling (sort of) but these stopped hyperlinks working so used the arrows I already had for images instead.

Anyway this is basically what the PDF looks like:

I feel it has a very strong and appropriate visual style (which you will see, carries on over into the video), and although there is quite a lot of information there I think I condensed it quite well using multi-state objects.

James suggested some minor improvements like decreasing text size and increasing padding, possibly add a background image to make it a bit more interesting to the younger audience. I also needed to add in footnotes for the hyperlinks, including the video button, which I discovered do not work universally, they work in Acrobat Reader but that is about it. I did respace/resize the body text as well as cutting it down where I could (it was a bit over-wordy);  I also changed the font to Derivia which I think still looks professional but was a bit curvier than the other so also looked a little more playful. I also swapped the play video text box for a nice, brightly coloured, little icon which is definitely more fun/interactive/etc. and it looks a lot nicer.

Doing these changes made my PDF look a bit more professional and clear – there’s a lot of text and because it wasn’t spaced very well it did feel a bit cluttered; and it also made it more fun but I didn’t want to go too far down the ‘fun’ route because although it is a fun product it would be mainly marketed to schools rather than the children themselves, so I feel it still needs to look clean and professional (which I think it does). Plus the video is more fun than the PDF, I think together they get a good balance.

A lot of time was spent in Photoshop (to make graphics, edit photos etc.) and InDesign on this and I’m happy with the result.

So then I started work on the video. First thing I did was do a logo animation following my initial designs last week, which involved the cube ‘building’ itself over time:

As you can see, I’ve kept to the nice ‘spinning bird kick’ colour scheme in the video and PDF and used the same font (Poetsen One); I think I’ve created quite a strong visual identity for my concept as a brand.

Then I scripted and storyboarded the rest of the video:

I used a text-to-speech program to narrate because a) there’s too much information to just write on screen, particularly if I want some little animated graphics (which I do); and b) I didn’t want to narrate it because I am a terrible narrator, I don’t have the voice for it.
It’s a bit iffy in places (as usual with TTS software) but I do think it’s better than either me doing it or having loads of text everywhere (and I do think it needs some explanation despite being a fairly simple concept).

After I had that all planned out it was simply a matter of turning my storyboards into the other 50 seconds of animation, and lining that up with the narration.

You will probably notice, I reused some graphics from the PDF and edited them (adding additionally layers mainly) so that I would be able to animate them in AE, again because I wanted the video and the PDF to be really tied together visually.

I was also going to use some real footage that I filmed to show the product “in action” (and because I wanted to use motion tracking). I planned to add in the ‘projection’ on the wall so that it looked like it was actually being used. But I didn’t because after a lot of time animating I decided live action wouldn’t really look right with all those graphics.

The video is now done. I put quite a lot of effort into this – it took 8-9 hours to finish which was maybe a little less than the PDF, ideally I would have split my time more evenly but I had a lot of complications and problems with the PDF as I said and the animation all went very smoothly overall – I’m happy with the result.

PDF: Convergence (probably won’t work in browser but you can download it and open with Adobe Reader if you like).