Evaluation

This overall project has come together fairly well. I feel that I’ve created a product that meets with my target audience but will also transfer into one or two other audiences also.
Originally I had aimed to create an animation that was simple in visual style and movement that focused mainly on one character. My intended target audience was people interested in cult retro television shows, mostly cop shows, probably aged in their early twenties or people that grew up in that period (early to late 1970s), aged in their mid 40s to late 50s, people who listened to funk and soul music or who have an interest in blaxploitation styled cinema, and It has also turned out to be suitable for teenagers, young to older, because of the level of difficulty of the game, which makes it less suitable for younger children.

It is a simple style of animation which caters for a universal audience, and follows influence from the animation featured in the Wario Ware Smooth Moves video game.
I felt that the animation featured in that game was successful in expressing movement from minimal animation, using still images with parallax sliding and changes in facial expression. I wanted to include that uncomplicated movement in the movement of my minor characters. My main character however i felt needed to stand out, so i used keyframe and posing animation to create a more fluid movement with him at times, but kept with the same visual style of still images at other cuts.
With the visual aesthetics, I aimed to have colours suitable for the time period in which it’s set, but solid to keep a simple cartoony style.

For my soundtrack, I created an instrumental funk track in Garageband from the apple loops that took influence from 1970s funk and disco. After researching, I developed influence from artists such as Kc & the sunshine band, Jackson 5, Charles Earland, Edwin Starr, and the Commodores to name a few..
This style of music for my soundtrack also supported the style of animation whilst remaining true to the animation’s setting and intended time period and following the influences of 70s television and cinema, associated with the interests of my target audience.

I decided to incorporate a dancing game to the animation to add interactivity to my narrative. It fitted with who the main character was... A 70s streetwise crime-fighter who loves disco. This is what created a more universal target audience. The idea of a dancing game would incorporate younger gamers who like flash games. I tried to keep it simple with the only objective being to keep the coolness bar up.

I came across a few issues along the way. My first issue I encountered was due to the construction of my character and trying to rig up an IK bone structure to animate him, but it kept falling apart, so I stuck with key-framing the character into poses.
My other issues centred around the construction of my game actionscript code. I couldn’t work out what was going wrong when leaving main game into consequence screens, so I replaced the code with URL requests to link to new HTML pages.
Time was eventually against me, so I had to cut back on a few areas, but otherwise this end product works successfully, and is visually quite appealing.