Colour changer Ping-Pong
Maker blog entries
The final exhibition took place on Tuesday. The final animation was showcased for students and staff to look at during the exhibition. Overall, I think the project was a success. I was able to bring David's invention to life. David and his dad were very pleased with the ping-pong animation.
I received some great feedback from people in the exhibition. The exhibition was a great experience. It was a great confidence boost to see people appreciate and enjoy my work. I've learnt a lot from this project. This project has taught me about the different ways in which I can design and create things. Collaborating with people from different disciplines has allowed me to understand that there isn’t one right way to create or design something. This is something that will be beneficial to me now and in the future. I really enjoyed working with David to bring his creative vision to life.
I've been working on the logo design of the game animation. I wanted it to look realistic and not too complicated. I think the final design I chose works really well. I'm also working on the animation. So far, I've animated the main menu of the game animation (frame/scene 2). it's still a work in progress, but I'm happy with it so far. I will continue to work on it. I am aiming to have frame/scenes 2-6 animated by Thursday, and 6-12 animated by the weekend.
I've come up with a definitive visual style for this video game animation. I want it to be in the style of a mobile/tablet sports game. These types of games usually allow you to play as characters with special strategic abilities. Each character has a different ability and a way to change the game. I chose to go with this style/concept because I remember David had requested that he wanted the ping-pong ball to teleport. Making the animation this way would allow that to happen.
Another idea I had was to create some kind of advertisement for the video game. Maybe some posters and digital adverts. I was even thinking of creating a mini trailer for the animation to make it feel like a real video game.
I did a quick draft storyboard to help visualise how I wanted the animation to look. By the end of the week, I plan to have animated half of the final animation.
On Monday, I met with the little inventors team to discuss how to bring the invention to life. I explained how I wanted to make both a physical model and digital animation. The animation aspect of my idea seemed to work well and I got lots of positive feedback for it. With the physical models, I had to rethink some things. One thing that was brought up was how the models would work with the animation. Would they somehow interact with the animation video? was the animation an interactive experience? I hadn't thought about the models in relation to the final animation. There was also the issue of time. Making both the animation and models would be too time-consuming. In the end, we decided it would be best to make just the animation and forget about the physical models. The animation had more of a strong style and "selling point" than the models. The animation also worked well with this particular type of invention idea.
After the session, I decided to start storyboarding and coming up with the visual style of
the animation.
After a week of brainstorming ways to make the invention real, i came up with a solid idea. The idea was to create both a physical model and animation of David's idea. Since i specialise in motion graphics and graphic design, i thought it would be more effective to create an animation. I also wanted to try making something that David could actually use and keep as a souvenir. That's why i decided on also making a physical model.
i plan on making a physical model of the ping pong bat or ball. For the ping pong bat i was thinking of adding LED light tape around the bat to make it light up. i have not decided if i will make the bat from scratch or customise an existing bat. If i decide to make a ping pong ball, i was going to use UV Glow Neon paint to make the ball glow in different colours. I also plan on making a short animation that demonstrates the concept but in the style of a sports video game. David loves video games, so i thought this would fit in very well with his invention idea.
I have started making a plan/blueprint of how i will make the invention.
Today i visited Christ Church Primary School and met David. We came up with ways in which we could make sports more colourful. He came up with a number of very good ideas, but ended up choosing one. He liked the "Colour changer Ping-Pong" idea. So we ended up going with it. We created a card prototype of the invention idea to see how it would work.
After the visit, i started to brainstorm some ideas of how to make David's invention real.