The Story: Orignal Cinderella and Movies

Talking about the story background of the project, Sharon suggesting me to read the original version of Cinderella's story. So I looked up the story on the internet and found some very interesting elements that I'm glad to use in my own project.

One is the pigeons who helped Cinderella to alight amongst the ashes. In the story, it's said that "(birds)odded with their heads and began pick", singing "The good into the pot,The bad into the crop." In my project, I simplified them into three chicks talking about Cinderella's wish.

Also in the story, there's a hazel-tree helping Cinderella when she begged "Shiver and quiver, my little tree,Silver and gold throw down over me". Here I drew 3 tree in the farm who can wave there leaves when them heart Cinderella's words.

I also watched Andy Tennant's Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998). What impressed me was that her two sister didn't have to be ugly or really so bad. It's that they were so beautiful and proud made Cinderella think the ball will be a place to find happiness. So in my project I showed two girls dressed up with really glamour.

Reference:
1. Cinderella by The Brothers Grimm, translated by Margaret Taylor (1884)(http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/grimm/bl-grimm-cinderella.htm);
2. Ever After: A Cinderella Story (1998)(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hcj9fyx6DXI;

Reflective Writing

My project aims at creating an online animated data visualization system, which is based on female style preference and the story context of Cinderella. During the past 5 months, I have done a lot of technical preparation and concept design. When I think back on these times, I’m glad to see that the project have changed so much and everything become more clear.

For the context part, I’m really fond of the idea that as some kind of reflection of real life, data can tell us an interesting story if we could better comunicate with them. In this project, I use the data of figure to find the suitable clothing for women who pursue fitness and beauty. And then the story of Cinderella and Snow White came up to my mind. Sometimes girls might want to be a Cinderella, go to the ball with a shining dress and have a great evening. I hope using some background of the fairytales can make the visualization part more attractive. But as my supervisor suggested, such context will involve massive amount of character design and drawings, so for the next step I will do the storyboard and try to simplify the whole story.

As for the interaction and visualization, I tried to do it on the website with some programming works. The main point is ask the user to input their choices in a friendly way. Based on some research on fashion design and sociology, to gather the information and make up the dressing advice, we need data of occasion, color, age, body size and style preference. To make this part more funny, I will try to do it through the interaction with the magic mirror. And I also had a lot of discussion with my supervisor about the data to be visualize. In the end we came across a useful material, the fashion segments of female types done by Experian United Kingdom, which we believe would answer most people’s curiosity about women’s fashion style preference.

About the technique to realize all these design, at first I were excited by the powerful tool named Processing, but after several test, I’m afraid that it’s not easy to do the whole interaction part and it’s not very friendly to ask the user to wait for the Java environment to set up. And then I was inspired by the Image Sprite which was used by Google Logos and the new technique of HTML5. They own a lot of possibilities in online interactive animation. But still they might be not so enough for the project. In the beginning of this semester, my supervisor suggested me to look into Processing again, and I’m pleased to find that there’s a new tool to translate the processing code into javascript code, which means we can run the Processing programme really fast and cost less resource of the system. So I decided to try finishing the animation part in the language. 

During these five months, I’m afraid I have wasted so much time on hesitating about what to do and whether I could work out what I thought about. Maybe I should have done the storyboard earlier and tried to simplify the project according to the main goal. But I really do enjoy this process of exploration and looking for all these possibilities.

Lost and Found, for the Critical Reflection

This animation is based on the children book of Oliver Jeffers, and produced on Christmas eve in 2008.

It's about a small boy and a naughty penguin. One day, a penguin show up in the boy's house. The kindhearted boy thought it has lost its way, so he made a boat and try to help it to go back home. After a lot of difficulty, they reached the south pallor and say goodbye. Then they realized they have became part of each other's life and decided to be together as friends.

As for the characters, he boy is cool, kind hearted and smart. So we didn't see much facial expression and dialogue. The penguin is curiosity and lonely, and kind. And we can see a lot of action and facial express. But of cause, it did not talk, it looks like that it has the feeling and thinking like human.

This animation can remind all of us the style of Oliver Jeffers's children book.The color of the background is warm and relax, and the technical part of the water is also impressive.

It's a story that tells you a lot. Some people lost, some people found. In the world of friendship, we found each other. So we should try not to lose each other so easily.