Website Design Documentation

First we started our website design by looking for ways to improve the website and why it needed improving, then we set out to create improvements for each asset that didn’t suit the website. This included changing the whole colour scheme and other important assets that I will discuss in more detail soon. Our website was englishriviera.co.uk, this website was chosen out of a pile of other websites at random.

The colour scheme for the original website was a light blue and white stripe with some mismatched colours scattered around like purple, dark blue and red; these colours were very strange as they were just thrown around and not very organised, to improve this we decided to use a simpler blue as the header and included a white text colour along with a picture of Torbay’s most iconic symbol the palm tree. We then continued to add a white theme and kept to the same blue for buttons etc, we felt like that would allow users to feel relaxed with the nice design and not be overwhelmed by an overly complicated colour palette.

The next improvement we worked on was the arrangement and organisation of the website as it felt like everything was packed into such a small space and the left over space was not managed well at all, to fix this we rearranged everything and decided a simple layout was best. the map of Torbay and a quick picture of the bay was added and instantly made a huge difference to how we perceived the website by making it look more homely and showed exactly where Torbay is for any visitors wanting to come to the bay.

The third issue was related to the space problem and arrangement of the articles and files, we decided that the main page was crammed with pictures and links to other websites so we made the whole thing nice and simple once again by moving all articles underneath one another in a single line with a small border of white around both the pictures and the text, this made it easier to focus on one article at a time instead of frantically searching around the page and trying to find whatever you are looking for.

These improvements impacted the whole design greatly and made the initial website look so much better, this was an important task as it made it easier to understand how websites are made and what sort of details we need to look out for when we come to making the final website properly.

My contribution: Everything above and planning the layout (Group manager.)

Paul’s contribution: Editing some assets in photoshop.

Sunny’s contribution: Creating and editing the top part of the website.

Maks’ contribution: Creating and wireframing the bottom part of the website.

Feedback Evaluation

This blog post contains views that were expressed today when I showed my trailer of Donkey Kong, I had very mixed reviews from a small group of 5 people, there were others but there results were not recorded. The initial preview was not expected to be very good however it managed to pull through when the reviews came through and I had many good feedback but also quite a few bad reviews too and ways of improving too.

Sound

One of the comments that was said about the sound in my trailer was that it worked well to immerssevely draw the audience in and get them interested in what they were watching, this comment helps me understand how my inclusion of sound was good and fitted the theme of the trailer, however not all of the reviews were good as I had a few comments on how the sound was poorly edited in the beginning, people were saying that they noticed the “go” bit at the beginning, this was made apparent after I had uploaded the video and is a completely fair comment as I know how to improve and get why it was raised as an issue.

Motion Graphics

The motion graphics had mainly positive feedback especially when it came to the quality and timing of them, one review stated that the graphics were “clever and unique” lots of people liked the 1 UP graphics when Mario hit the barrel and when the little explosion appeared too, however one review stated that the motion graphics had “no style” but when I questioned said person about what they meant they were unable to give me a reason or any sort of improvement that could be performed on the animation to make the motion graphics include some sort of “style.” That is an example of one of the many unhelpful comments I received but one that did help was about how the graphics could have been slowed down so people could see it for longer “graphics were too fast” this comment is one that quite simply describes how I can improve on it so I am happy with altering the animation for this comment due to it informing me of the issue.

Animation

The animation part of the trailer was given plenty of good and bad feedback which is good because most of it is useful and states how I can improve it, the best comment was about how the animation was smooth and fitted perfectly with the live action aspect of the trailer, the overall thoughts on the animation were mainly positive but obviously there were a few errors and some comments indicate how these errors can be fixed such as “make the barrels move at a consistent speed throughout” I completely agree with this statement and it is a great detail that was spotted by this person, this can easily be solved and has a clear reason as to why they thought this. To fix it, all I need to do is speed up the barrels’ movement towards the end of their path on the map.

Improvements

Most of the comments were very useful in the way that they showed me exactly how I should improve my trailer, the main points were focused on how the beginning featured me saying “go” so to rectify this mistake I only need to crop the beginning part of the video and make sure there is no white noise in the background, another way I could improve the animation is by editing the speed and timing of both the barrels and the movement of Donkey Kong’s arms, I can just tweak the key frames and positioning to accomplish this, I am quite happy to apply these changes if the opportunity is given, one final improvement that I could apply is I could edit the time it takes for the actor to reach the door because he currently slides towards the door so if I made it so in his few steps he made it to the door that would make it much better and give a much more professional look and feel to it.

The overall animation was rated somewhat highly with an average score of 7/10 there was one anomaly of 5/10 but that was 1/5 reviews so the overall majority seemed to enjoy it. Many people also considered this to be industry standard, excluding the mistakes, and the unique use of live action and animation together made the whole animation work very well, the reviews said “live action + animation were a good combination” so I am very pleased with my trailer and with the reviews it received from my peers and tutors.

 

Production of Trailer

These are screenshots of how I created my assets and how I managed to finally create the final trailer including organisation and issues I ran into.

To start off with I had to create sounds and other assets like the characters and backgrounds, in this slideshow there are some images of me editing some sound waveforms this was done so I could create the soundtrack and sounds like the barrel smashing noise in the trailer, I ran into complications as I had to learn a new software and find out how to edit all of the different sounds that I had, also I needed to organise them to find out which ones I needed.

The other pictures are from After Effects and the are mainly showing how I organised the files and how everything fitted into the final thing, the issues in this portion of the production were mainly file format issues for example, I needed to use png files so the file would contain an alpha channel which stopped it from having a background like look to it and allowed the final product to look more realistic, the Donkey Kong image and the barrels had to be converted into png through photoshop after I had finished editing them. This software was effective at making the product I needed however it was very complicated and I didn’t really understand it until I was shown some tips and tricks, soon after that I managed to create some good looking animations.

 

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Vertical and Horizontal Integration

Vertical integration is simply a more complex version of horizontal integration, first we need to understand the basics of what horizontal integration is.

It is a method of claiming the market and causing sales to grow, this is achieved by taking over a similar company, this strategy works for multiple businesses regardless of where they are situated, for example Coca Cola could take over a similar company in Africa etc.

Vertical integration however involves multiple steps that a company or entity may take to gain more power in the marketplace, this may not necessarily mean that the rival/victim company gets completely taken over it just involves some power to be moved around and market shares begin to grow in said company,mainly it includes having one lone distribution or producer working on the one product instead of spreading out the work and product.

2D Animation

This is my animation for the live action and 2D animation part of the course, I put lots of time and effort into it, even though it may not seem like it. Still I hope you enjoy!

This video is slightly edited but is arguably a better version of the other video.

Questions about companies

Treyarch are an American gaming company that created one of this decades most highly acclaimed game series Call of Duty: Black Ops, along with other smaller games such as the amazing spiderman and Tony Hawks pro skater 3. They are situated mainly in LA but also have studios in France and the UK.

Treyarch are a child company to Activision who simply publish their games, however they only have a say in how the game is marketed and funds/micro transactions in the games.

The company is horizontally integrated as all it’s produce (the games they make) come purely from their own source and own team of developers and designers.

Treyarch produce games in the Call of Duty franchise and are known for their triple AAA titles in the Black Ops series and World at war which is the old ww2 game that set their name on the market and created new standards with the introduction to the zombies mode.

The only real competitors that they may have would have to be EA and DICE as they created the Battlefield franchise which mirror the Call of Duty franchise and are currently in a big dispute about which game is better even though they both sell an equally high amount of units whenever they release a new game.

The customers of Treyarch are gamers who are fans of their games, however they have to market it cleverly to cause the gamers to ask their parents to buy the game for them as most of their fanbase seem to be around the age range of 10+ despite the 18+ age rating.

The company have many areas in which they specialize in like graphic design, level design, cinematics, character design etc. due to the fact that they have so many areas to work with, they have to separate out the workload into to lots of different offices and collectively bring the finished products together to finalise the overall project and sell the produce. This also means that they share out the publishing workload which they do with Activision, the parent company to Treyarch. This causes the final product to have Activision’s name and logo on the game and allows them to have free reign over any micro transactions of pricing of any downloadable content that gets released at a later date.

There have been new developers put in place and old developers were moved  higher up for example, Jason Blundell is the new director of the zombie game mode and has the overall influence of what goes on in zombies, David Vonderhaar is the studio design director at Treyarch and is mainly in charge of the overall finish of the final game, since these two directors were put in power the games that Treyarch are producing seem to be getting much better as time goes on.