Emperor's New Sound

For the Interactive Media Fairy Tales brief, I decided to base my interactive storybook on The Emperor's New Clothes. The story is about being sold something that was never there, and it made me think of adverts for a mobile phone ring tone you could get sent to your phone for a few pounds I saw a few years ago. They were aimed at school children, with the selling point being that the pitch the tone rang at was at a higher frequency than older people could hear, so teachers wouldn't hear your phone going off in class etc. I was pretty sceptical about these ads, imagining that they probably sent nothing at all, and wondering how many kids would still insist they could hear it. I decided I wanted to adapt this to the Emperor's New Clothes, but using a band who get sold some hollow amplifiers that supposedly play at a special frequency in the Emperors role, the dodgy Music Agent who sells the amps as the tailors and the crowd at a gig as the crowd at the emperors procession. It was then a pretty obvious choice to call the band 'Emperor'. The problem with this was, that with the whole thing being based around sound, I didn't think it would work so well with the band being silent because of the rip-off amps. I't would seem like something had gone wrong with the sound. So I adapted the idea so the band was actually sold what was supposed to be the most cutting edge sound of the moment, and making it a really horrendous sound.

The story runs through in a linear fashion, there aren't any different routes or choices you can make to navigate through it. I'm really into Hotel on hoogerbrugge.com, it's utter genius, and the episodes usually run through in a linear fashion, but with lots of things to interact with, and this is what I was aiming for. I really haven't managed to include as many different interactive things as I'd have liked to.

Style wise, I was trying to combine a few different looks. I'm really keen on Jim Houser's art work, simple shapes and solid block colours, and I wanted to use this style for my characters. I also really liked the menu screens on Son of Rambow, the handrawn by a kid with felt tips on lined paper look, so I decided to use that style for my backgrounds. The simplicity of my characters meant they'd work well on this kind of background. I originally intended to hand draw all the backgrounds on lined paper and then scan them in, but after several goes with fine liners and felt tips I found it wasn't coming out quite right. When your trying to draw things badly it's actually prety hard to acheive the right kind of badness. So I gave it a go with having plain lined paper in the background and drawing the actual details in flash. This wasn't exactly the look I wanted, but having it looking like it was drawn by a kid in Paint is close enough to the drawn by a kid with felt tips look I was after. The benefit of having the lined paper background is being able to place text on the lines like in an actual book. I used a handwriting style font for my text to keep in with the look of a scrappy sketchbook. I'd also wanted to include some Monty Python/Phonejacker style elements, and I created the agent, Don, with that look. I didn't want to steal a random photo off the internet for this, so I dressed my housemate up in some dodgy agent looking attire, photoshopped a phone into his hand used an airbrush filter on the picture to make it look less sharp so it wouldn't contrast quite as strongly with all the other visuals.

This was my moodboard for this project. Probably a bit too varied.



As for the actual scripting, it turned out to be a lot more complicated than I'd anticipated. I thought it would be straightforward creating my characters with up, over and down button states, but it wasn't nearly that simple. It actually took a lot of work to get the characters animations to play when you clicked them without you having to hold the mouse button down over them to play the full animation. And then when sound starts being involved, there's yet more scripting. A big thanks to Szymon for taking the time to help me sort out those problems. I also used some scripting for animation, namely on the wheels of the cassette tape. Trying to get them to rotate with tweens was leading to them stuttering and not running smoothly all the way round, but scripting the rotation lead to a nice smooth looking result.

The sound in this story is all important, so creating good sound clips was pretty crucial. All the sound clips recorded are either a human voice or a keyboard. I think it adds a nice quality to the story having a voice making the phone/bass/drum etc sounds rather than recording the real sounds. Thanks to Rob for helping me out on that one.

Overall, I'm not too pleased with the end result, for several reasons. There could have been a lot more interactivity in each scene. I'd also wanted to combine several different visual styles, and as much as I wanted the whole thing to look a bit rough and sketchy, it could've done with more visual polish. Positives are I really like my band members, I think they all have a lot of character inspite of their simplistic styling. Also, recording the sounds was an enjoyable process. Scripting is a tricky one, when it goes right it's satisfying (or is it just relief?), but when somethings not working it can take an hour to find you didn't give something a capital letter or something equally small and infuriating. I'd like to get better at scripting, as it's definately a useful skill to have, but I don't think this area is where my strongest interest lies.