Making the cut-scene

Now that all the comic strips/pages are done, i went ahead and animated them! i don't know if ill have time to do all the pages but i have one down for now along with an introduction.


At the start of the cut-scenes there will be a comic on a table in the office of the police station.  On the table, along with the comic will be things like a mug, pens, sticky notes and other crime/office related items that will change every cut scene.  The comic will be turned open by the hand of one of the main characters.
For the animation of the cut scenes, they will take you to one panel at a time and have a motion blur when moving onto the next panel.  The effect that is achieved is that it looks like the camera's a pair of eyes; focusing and un-focusing, zooming in and out, from one panel to the next.  There will also be audio, in this case for this cut-scene it will be Blue Monday by New Order.  It is a real funky song and was one of the top songs of 1983.

This is the comic on a desk table that opens up and reveals the comic inside.  I don't know how to get someones hand moving to open it; making the comic open was a massive challenge in itself! I don't know how to animate well and finding the patience for it was difficult.  I learnt some animating skills and key terms last year when we were being taught how to animate in Maya.  So that did help a lot, but i had to figure most of this out myself and there was a lot of trial and error in getting the desired outcome.  Even the outcome isn't that great!  It is my first animation i have ever done in flash and i think i did okay considering   It is also my first time doing comic strips!  Not to mention an 80's themed comic book cover!
With the cover i wanted it to look edgy  wanted it to reflect the true seriousness of being a member of C.I.D and what cases they are dealing with.

here are some examples of the stop motion:

This is so far the final animation.  If i have time ill add to it or try and clean it up some more.  Some of the problems i had with it was the comic strip opening.  I tried a few methods to get it to work.  In the end the best for me was to do stop motion in painter; i would move the book page sightly, save the file, then go back and move it again and save it.  I put that sequence together in Movie Maker.  Where the camera pans the comic strip, i put that together in Adobe Flash.  I looked up videos on YouTube to help me out by the YouTuber SamGreenMedia2.  Very helpful!

Here are the textures/images i used :

coffee stain: http://www.kendalton.com/images/coffeeStain3.gif
mug: http://images-en.busytrade.com/178327100/Sublimation-Mug.jpg
table: http://test.detaildesignonline.com/contentimages/wood-texture.jpg
comic texture: http://nclaeystextures.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/denim-fade2.jpg?w=500&h=332