Wrap-up

Well, It's the end of the project! Officially, at least. I haven't blogged what I've been doing today because from the moment I woke up, I've been working on assembling the second chart. I really wanted to get this piece done as I feel it really expresses the potential of my idea, and I wanted the final animation to do justice both to the idea, and to the research and painting that I had done so far.

As with all such projects, it has expanded to fill the time available, and heredity turned out to be rather a large topic to tackle. I found it very interesting though, and greatly enjoyed making the scripts, with their changes in space and time.

I was inspired by the title screen for the flash game Samorost 2, where the vines which grow into the title flex and straighten with mouseover, and by the Monet 2010 project, which has the most beautiful spreading watercolour effects.

Alas, even for an animation student something along either of those lines is somewhere of the mangnitude of a major project, and so I haven't been able to live up for my dreams. It does the job though, and given that I was restricted to using open-source software that'd run on Ubuntu, I'm very proud of what I've achieved in such a short space of time.

Only for those interested in the process:  I drafted the script by hand, created it on multiple pages in OpenOffice Draw, and exported to html which created  .png for each page as a by-product.   I used Gimp to change the white background of each of these to an alpha transparency.  I also used Gimp to clean and separate my scans.  I then assembled the project in Pencil (which I heartily wish was further along in development, and could actually export any kind of animation instead of stand-alone image frames). First I added the frames of the script, then added interleaving frames, added and removed the scribbles (there are a couple of errors I haven't had time to fix), added and edited the backgrounds, and added a transparency layer to fade the image behind the text (much, much harder than you'd think it would be).  I then exported the animation to a series of .png files, uploaded them, and used a bash script to create entries for each of the 85 frames in the html/javascript files which display the final animation.

I wish I'd had a single piece of software to do all that...  I wish you could get Flash for Linux for $cheap...

It may still be crude, but I love it dearly.

I'm also immensely glad that I've created the website to hold these Charts in an expandable, future-proof way.  The concept I've tried to convey is a message close to my heart, and the medium one which is very useful to know. I think that expanding this project further will be a good way to practice and hone animation skills as I acquire them. I also feel that the design and layout of the site suit the content quite well.

I don't believe the project has yet grown to achieve my goal of self-dissemination through beautiful, elegant simplicity, but I've taken a major step in the right direction, and it's something I hope to pursue in future.

It's no Information Is Beautiful, but it's an accessible look at the history of an idea, and I hope it will inspire people to think about science in a new way.