Developmental Drawings...

A few scanned pages from my sketchbook of developmental drawings so far... I'm thinking about putting Sir Francis Drake on a whale instead of in a boat, basically because drawing boats is quite boring and I quite like the look of the whale. When it comes to animating my characters, I want to create a very cardboard cut out sort of effect and add some drop shadows behind the waves that will move.

Ideas

I think I have got a good idea of what I'm going to do for my interactive project now. I'm going to make an interactive website with an animated Sir Francis Drake, he will find a treasure map which leads him to Drakes Circus shopping centre and find out about all the different shops he can go to along the way. At the end I want to link the Drakes Circus website to the last page saying something like 'For your own adventure, visit Drakes Circus, Plymouth'. I explored a few other ideas, I thought about applying a circus theme in to my work playing on 'Drakes Circus' and possibly having Sir Francis Drake himself as the ring master. I want to keep my work quite light hearted and to be enjoyable for the user, as well as promoting the shopping centre.

Ideas

Trying to choose between the themes of Transformers, Vivienne Westwood, PCAD, Drakes Circus and Porsche was quite a big decision but i was edging more towards the Plymouth themes because I've got all the inspiration I need right on my door step! I already have an idea for Drakes Circus which involves online interactive advertising for the shopping centre, using an illustrated Sir Francis Drake as the main point of interaction. At this point I'm not sure whether to build a website, online magazine/ flip book or an app but I'm edging more towards the website just because I have more of an idea how to build it from the Wednesday self promotion sessions with Andy.

Interactive Illustration Research

Home Sheep Home is another game created by Robin Davey for Aardman Digital with the help of Chris Underwood. The game involves different obstacles for three sheep to tackle and your job is to help them to safety. The appearance of the game is very sketchy and hand drawn, using a water colour style. It's a really addictive little game and I had to play it until I had completed all the levels... all in the name of research of course! Here are some screen shots...

Interactive Illustration Research

Booty Juggler is a great little flash game created by Robin Davey commissioned for Channel 4's 4mations. For some reason the game won't work on the 4mations.tv website its self so i've found it on another website. The game involves a pirate octopus and your job is to stop him from getting blown up! The choice of colours and the screen printed style is really effective and gives the game a nice vintage/ pirate sort of theme. For my own interactive project, I will be focusing on a similar sort of seaside/ Plymouth theme involving Sir Francis Drake, so i have found this game quite inspirational and it has shown me what can be done.

Interactive Illustration Research

Hunters' Moon is one of my favourite pieces of interactive illustration I have found so far. It's an app created for the iPad by Rob and Anthony Grajirena, I don't have an iPad so i haven't been able to experience it properly but the screen shots look beautiful. It has some game elements but is described as being "An interactive illustration and a drawing that shares an idea through game mechanics. It is best heard with headphones and played patiently."

Interactive Illustration Research

The next website I want to talk about is a project created by Stevan Živadinović called 'Hobo Lobo of Hamelin' - http://hobolobo.net/ - which is a comic/ story book fantasy written and illustrated by Stevan. He describes it as "A webtime story about a city, it's scruples, some rats, a lobo, his woodwind, and the stuff that goes down."

The websites consists of different pages that move in to each other as you move through the story. The images are supported by text and some pages are accompanied by sound. It's very complex but very impressive, anyone who wants to view it really needs to have a good internet connection! Here are a couple of screen shots...

Interactive Illustration Research

As I'm an illustrator, I'm trying to find examples of interactive illustration and have come across a couple of really impressive websites. The first is http://www.vobnedir.org/ which is a Turkish website (I only know this thanks to google translate). I don't know who designed the site, what it's selling or what any of it means, but its very inventive and uses hand puppetry and illustration to take you on a journey. Here are some screen shots of the site...

Interactive Illustration Research

All the festivals this year seem to be going down the same illustrative sort of route with their web design. This is the site for the Green Man Festival which has a really organic sort of feel to it. It's not as interactive as the Bestival site but has a few nice little surprises on it, like in the top bar theres a little hand drawn stage that makes a pumping kind of motion. There is also a branch next to it with links to Twitter and Facebook which pop up in red when you hover over them. I think it's a really nice little website and the navigation is easy.

Interactive Illustration Research

The Bestival website has a really lovely illustrative interactive theme to it. When on the main page to look at the line up, news, info etc, when you move the cursor around the page the animals eyes at the side of the page move to watch where your cursor goes. The initial page you come to has a planet with a background full of hand drawn starts. The planet moves up and down in quite a simple motion but looks really nice.

Interactive Design

Interactive media involves interaction between people and content, and digital interaction can be achieved through the use of text, image, graphics, animation and sound. There are many different examples of interactive media, ranging from websites, to applications, to video games, to interactive art, to interactive advertising, to social media, and interactive TV.

When researching what Interactive media is, i found it quite difficult to determine what it is exactly because it covers such a range of platforms. For example, interactive media can also be established through board games, pop up books etc, which are considered 'printed media'.

Interactive media must heavily rely on communication and allow users to participate with the content.

There are so many options to explore when thinking about how to take on this project, I am keen to learn more about applications, websites and online magazines. In terms of my design knowledge, they are areas that are quite alien to me but i think it would feel like a real achievement to be able to create my own.