If you follow my personal blog (www.asouza.com/blog – Twitter: @alexandres), you probably have read already I am working on a personal illustrated book for children, called Candice (see the characters studies and the overall story plot at the blog).
My intention is to share a few tricks here, while building my book project (when published, I will share also part of the files). The first one I used in a demo I used at SCBWI workshop in Orlando this past weekend, is explained below.
Let’s see the final result first:
The Photoshop file is pretty simple, containing only 3 layers (sky, witch and Candice – the title).
The first trick is the background movement. To simulate the gain of altitude (the same process applies for horizontal backgrounds), create the background with the double size of the device height. In this example, the device target is the iPad, landscape orientation –> meaning the original resolution was width: 1024 x height: 768. The background image has width: 1024 x height 1536 (768 times 2). The dotted line shows the original iPad screen size.
The biggest the height, better the sensation of altitude.
This is the animation setting:
The end position moves from –670 to 0, meaning the image will go to its original 0,0 coordinates (showing the moon). The delay is just to show people that a “boring” cover page could be just the screenshot of the witch, with the title, on top of a background. For the duration, it will depend of the speed of the witch flying you want to simulate.
For the little witch, I used a simple linear animation, with a few add ins:
I used the outQuad easing, to simulate a long flight path till the moon. Also, I scale down the character to 30% to simulate distance. Same trick was used with the Alpha settings (you don’t see many details when an object is far way). The final position (in front of the moon), was a simple homage to Amblin/ET/Spielberg.
The Candice title followed the altitude trick (moving it a little higher, also provides the idea of the title getting elevation).
Hope you have enjoyed! Ideas? Just comment them here!
Alex