Starting the Storytelling Project

To start the project I first made the buttons which sent the user to the next scene. I also added labels similar to previous Animate projects.

After that, I tried drawing some sketches for the futuristic car that would be used in most of the scenes.

Simple sketch by me

I also looked at images like the one above for inspiration

Since I would be making 2 different views of the car, I decided to use Blender to get a better idea of what it would look like from the different angles since it was quite a complex shape.

To get a better idea of the shape I wanted to convey in the drawings, I made a simple 3d model to get an idea of how it would look from different angles.

I purposefully made it look quite unpractical because that is sort of the point. I think this relates to my Grandad buying gadgets that look cool but are not very useful, and that would be something nice to incorporate into the story and it would allow the Grandad character to be portrayed with a similar trait.

After this, I used the model to create simple sketches of both angles and used that to create the car in illustrator. I could then import this into animate. 

Once I was done with this I made a background for the scene using the brush tool (since I find the pen tool a bit challenging to use) the brush tool is set to draw inside by default which I didn’t realise, but I proceeded. 

I then made the elephant salesman who would be selling the car. I made them an elephant since I had the idea for them to spray the car with water. 

I made a simple wave animation for the elephant then I started working on the spray animation. I tried using a shape tween but this was a bit challenging to use so I think I ended up adding more keyframes to make it more fluid. I also added a tint animation to the car so that it changed to a slight blue colour while wet. 

This animation doesn’t really look realistic but that is the purpose since it is just to give the hint that the car is waterproof. Also to make the animation work, I wanted it to play once clicked but I thought that would overcomplicate things since I might be having multiple animations in the scene therefore I made it so the animation would play when the thing(button) that has the animation is hovered over. 

The downside of this is that the animation will stop once the mouse is removed but I didn’t want to make things more complex since that would mean less time to work on the animations and it would also probably make the main timeline more complicated.