I continue to explain and delve deeper into the development of my major project in the following blog post, which follows on from blog post 4.

The only improvements I have made since writing my last blog has been that I scrapped my first opening sequence completely and started over from scratch. I did this because i just didn’t like how it looked and i felt like it gave a ‘PowerPoint presentation’ vibe – and it was just not it. Therefore, I decided that less was more. There was no need to have a random stream of activities going on at once, but rather to have a few things that compliment each other in the way that they moved and were animated together. In this way, I was able to understand how motion literacy, such as spatial consideration and sequence, has a more effective way of helping communicate what I am trying to convey. 

The task of finding a background that was of both high quality and suitable for my composition proved to be extremely challenging for me. While I began with a sandstone background that I felt would be appropriate for the Arabian desert in which Aladdin takes place, as time passed, I felt like it was out of character with the rest of my cartoon-themed design. In order to make it a match for the cartoon style, I chose a purple night sky and image traced it within Adobe Illustrator to a ‘low fidelity photo’. The cartoon style was chosen based on the fact that the first Aladdin movie produced in 1992 was animated in this way. However, you will see that I have used the names of the actors who play the lead roles in the remake live-action film, together with the song ‘Arabian Nights’ sung by Will Smith in the same movie.

Keyframing scale allows the opening scene to begin with a black vector that gradually zooms away to reveal the background and what the vector was. YouTube tutorials were an essential tool for me to be able to grasp how to adapt some effects to some images so that they could look more realistic and 3D. By incorporating these transitions I was able to add a few interesting transitions that correlated to the movie, such as adding a ‘light sweep’ on the lamp at the beginning of the composition. This particular effect helped add depth to a 2D black silhouette image of the lamp as well as create a subtle nod to the characteristics of the lamp within the movie.