Presentation

At the start of the IC-Project, I thought it would be a nice idea to keep track of progress.

I stored most of the sketches, as well as around 170 unfinished pixel art illustrations, which led towards the final illustration.
Initially, I had the idea of making an animation showing the progress in a few seconds. After some thought, I realized that the animation could be extended, so a visitor could interactively peel off layer-by-layer, and, just as I did, slowly see the end result appear.
The amount of data required for this interactive animation was a concern, since 160 illustrations, the size of 1600 x 1040 pixels, result in quite a lot of data, which had to be transferred over the Internet.

Instead of using a file format for animation like FLV, AVI, or QuickTime, I used another technique for the flash animation. By using images that gradually fade into each other, the overall file size is much, much smaller in comparison with, for instance, FLV.
The GIF file format is good enough for the Internet and uses lossless compression, which reduces the file size.

The palette of the pixel art illustration was made up of three 'colors': black, dark gray, and light gray, which dramatically reduced the file size of an image in comparison with a normal image, like a full color photo.

The combination of a limited palette and the compression used by the .gif file format offered possibilities to realize the idea of an interactive flash animation with an acceptable file size.

After some thought, I came up with the idea of reducing the file size even more, by using an extra compression technique, which will be explained later in the following chapters.