Process

Project For Mai is a product of 4 process elements:
 Research:  The story of Mai was made based on the team's research about Vietnamese school zone safety culture and target audience.


 * Week 4:  Competitive Landscape


 * Week 5:   We had made google forms to learn about the school zone safety culture in Viet Nam and target audience behavior. The information that we gathered reinforced our Mai's character design and partly shape the project like its duration length and where we were going to distribute it.   There was also a research about real life school zone safety measurements to keep our script and background design well-grounded.

 Design:  From the collected information, we design details such as Mai and the surrounding around her.


 * Week 4:  Mai's character design Mai .pngMoodboard, Background sketches


 * Week 6:  Poster sketch


 * Week 7: Final Poster

 Animatic:  This process involves making storyboard, rough animation and sound.


 * Week 4: Script, storyboard


 * Week 5: Storyboard Timing


 * Week 6:

Animatic: Storyboard adjustments, still images, refine background scene, base for detailed timing

Sound: Rough voice over, SFX, BG musics.


 * Week 7:

Animatic: Storyboard adjustments, inking, refine BG and character

Editing: Combine sound and animatic


 * Week 8: Full animatic video

Animation: This process involves turning the animatic into a full animation with sound refining and editing

Week 9: Mai and background coloring, boiling lines, refining sounds

Week 10: Detailed coloring, detailed timing and detailed editing

Week 11: Final editing, quality assurance

Week 12:  Final product

Wiki: During the working process, I did keep in check with the Animation Director to see if we are still on schedule and he said the team was working smoothly without significant issues. Therefore, I went ahead and made the Wiki.

Week 8: Getting used to Wiki, making a main page

Week 9: Adjusting the page theme, figuring out how to make a navigation bar, making the project’s pages which are the Risk Form and Process

Week 10 : Adding in character pages with individual plot lines and figuring out how to add more custom detailed such as change in font, font color and a small box for comics.

Week 11 and 12: Adding in information related to school zone safety and illustrations to the page.

Software environment:

 * COMMUNICATION



Originally, the team members would distribute the work through Trello and communicate through Messenger. But then we realized that the limitation of Messenger was that it couldn't categorize different work tags like Discord or Slack.



Benefits:


 * Beside basic feature like texting, pining messages ,and sharing files, Slack has a feature to remind you the information that you need, which is very useful.


 * Another benefit is that you can create different channels to categorize your work.



Drawbacks :


 * When we used the free version of Slack, one major drawback of Slack is has 10k messages viewed limitation


 * Cannot do group meeting with screen sharing. This interfere with our animation process since when getting into some technical issue while working from home, it would be easier to share the screen instead of taking screen cap and writing instruction.


 * TOOLS:



Photoshop: Storyboards are made by using Photoshop. This is because it allows the team members to be expressive and flexible in term of changing individual artboard.

Krita: Krita is a new application for animation. We decided to use Krita because it is friendlier to new users, more flexible than Adobe Animate in term of sketching and coloring with a wide range of brushes.



Adobe After Affects: We used Adobe After Affect to combine the file from Krita and still background from Photoshop. We also used it to edit frame transition and some effects (scribble effect) that were too hassle to do in Krita.

Adobe Audition: After recording, we used Adobe Audition to refine the raw voice over records and mix it with SFX, background sound and background music.

Adobe Premiere Pro: We used Adobe Premiere to combining the audio sounds with the animation. The reason why we went with Adobe Premiere instead of After Effect is that we could use it to adjust the video's duration (some of the animation moves a little bit faster than sound) and for glitching effect.