Light Up Football Kit

This is a blog entry on my reflection after the exhibition.
I came in to set up. My poster looked bold and stood out, ad seeing it in the exhibition I feel that it was a very successful outcome. 

Only a handful of children attended the exhibition but, fortunately, my inventor turned up and I was able to explain the work and show her what I made. She was impressed by the animation, so I now feel relieved and believe that I managed to make something meaningful for my inventor, while realising her idea in a unique creative way.

I have made a quick exhibition plan of how I will set up and what equipment I will need.

I will simply need a Projector and a Wall to present the animation

In preparation for the exhibition we have to create a poser that shows of our inventors invention. Outlining what it will do and how it will look.

Below is an image of Theresa's invention

This is the first attempt at Rotoscoping over the footage and getting a feel for what may work in order to make this successful.

Reflection: The initial blocking of the pink tracks the players very well and looks quite convincing. It gives a clear sense of the kit in motion. 

Improvements: I could make the lights bolder and the illumination around the player much clearer.  A way of doing this, that was suggested to me, is to do it like in the 'Ready Brek' 70's adverts. People would be completely surrounded by a luminous outline. In addition to this, some shading would give the figures greater depth.

This entry is very brief as it was not complicated at all.

Reflecting on the idea to add graphics to footage, I decided to make a quick logo to add over the footballers playing.

I simply took the Little Inventors Logo, added a background, changed the perspective and gave it a 3rd Dimension. This will sit over the footage.

Unfortunately, after Formative, it would seem that my idea does not 'truly capture the essence' of Theresa's invention. So , as a group we came up with a list of alternatives:
- Video Record a match and animate over it
- Get a free kit model and animate it
- Find raw footage of a game and create my own graphics for the game.

Out of the options, I am going to chose to animate over some pre recorded football footage. Finding a Kit model is too expensive (£124 for a pre made model! sigh) and simply adding graphics over a match does not reflect her invention enough.

Plan: I can use an animation technique called Rotoscoping to draw over the players and replace their uniforms with Theresa's to show off how her kit works. 
Instead of Rotoscoping an entire match, I will animate over clips of passing and scoring, to show how the lights change based on each action.

I managed to finish creating the the 3D model of the shirt and added the colour and some placeholder blue lights. I also added Theresa's surname and her chosen number to the back.

As a finished experimentation, I quite pleased with this outcome as it works well as a previs idea for her invention.

I thought of a way to bring Theresa's Kit to life, using my 3D Modelling skills. 

I began experimenting using a software package called 'Sculptris'  (Images with dark background). This software allows you to manipulate and shape a 3D mesh into a model/object of your choice, much like when working with real clay.

I began to make the shirt and Trousers of the uniform, shaping it to fit the human form, however I felt that the model seemed very limited, due to the lack of a human reference. Because of this I decided to try and experiment inside of Maya as well and compare the two.

Maya is also a 3D software package, but it can also be used for animating(Blue Background). I imported a human figure and began to Quad draw and model around its physique.

Reflection: I believe that the Maya experimentation is more successful as the use of a reference allows me to create proportions much more accurately, hopefully making the final model more convincing.

Now that I have Theresa's invention, I have started to analyse and understand the essence of it and how it would theoretically need to be made. 

Upon inspection, her invention is rather complex, despite appearing to be the simple concept of a light up uniform. 
The Pink fabric will need to be in Junior size, while still having LED Lights woven into it.
These lights will have to have the function of being:
- Multi Coloured: Blue, Pink, Purple, Green

However, that is not all. She detailed that the lights change when the players number is called, but also when the ball reaches or leaves the player. From this I have identified that the kit will also need two additional features: An Audio receiver and Proximity sensor. 

Audio Receiver: This will need to be strapped/woven somewhere on the uniform, perhaps around the waist. It will also need to be powered by a battery (which could also power the LED Lights). The kit could have a Mini-Solar charger???
- This audio Receiver will need to be programmed to recognise certain patterns of speech, namely the particular player numbers that have been used in the match. This will require Pre-programming 

Proximity Sensor: The Ball will need to house a proximity sensor that will trigger a change in the lights colour when the player has received the ball and passed it on. 

Reflection: This invention requires plenty of technical work and programming. Abilities that are outside of my skill set as an animator. 
I will need to think of another way to bring this invention to life in the little time that we have, which also aligns itself with my skill set.

After spending the day at the Primary School, my Little inventor created the Light-Up football kit.

I will breakdown, analyse and plan how I will approach making this.

Before going to the Primary school we had to prepare some information packs and research to aid the kids in inventing their creation. 

For my research I looked into what kinds of colours and Patterns are already used in sports, namely the ones that are tied to successful sports teams.

I chose to do this as it may inspire the kids to use bold colours that are related to success, making their invention stand out. We will see how it goes.

We were introduced to the basics of the elective and were put into group teams. We were then asked to begin thinking about what topics/subject matter we will present to the kids when we visit them at the school. We Began to think about this as it would give the kids a clearer direction/path to base their invention on. 

After looking at the provided info packs during the workshop, we began to create a Mind Map of topics, and how we could eventually come up with a question to give to our Little Inventor.

Eventually we collectively settled on the question/task to 'Invent a way to make sport more colourful'