Motion Graphics

For this project I had to produce and evaluate a motion graphics sequence between thirty and sixty seconds long. I wanted to create a gantt chart so I could keep track of my progress and make sure I had targets to hit to ensure the piece is finished in time.

 I had a few ideas for this piece, I initially thought about animating some fast paced music with lots going on so I could have a different thing pop up for every thing that was going on in the song because I thought it would be nice and fast paced and keep the viewer interested. Upon doing some research I felt that this may live up to the potential that motion graphics offers. The best animations I saw were ones that brought narratives to life. I found that quite a lot of this was put to use in advertisement.

There are many different types of motion graphics being used today and different purposes seem to favour the different styles. For example TV networks and films tend to use the more flash 3D, expensive looking, slow moving style. Here are some examples from the network HBO:

And 20th century fox:

Although if there is a lot of information that needs to be put across, the piece seems to be less visually stimulationg because the focus is on the information:

 

The style that occurs in quite a lot of adverts that I'm going to try to imitate is the 'cut out' kind of style that is fast paced and keeps throwing new information at the screen and keeps the viewer interested, I think one of the main challenges will be to keep the project flowing well as well as keeping up the fast pace.

Not too long ago some friends and I made a short advertisement for 'buck matthews' had crafted mannequins' for a laugh and I thought it would be fun to recreate this advert in motion graphics form. I will have to chop it down a little because I think there are a few parts that wouldn't quite fit but on the whole I think it will work pretty well.

The audio starts by asking 'how much would you pay for a good quality hand crafted mannequin? $40.95? $30.95? how about $14.45?' the motion graphics piece will start with a mannequin walking across the letters of the narrative and when he gets to the prices he steps down them to emphasize how much cheaper it is. As the narrative goes on the mannequin continues walking with the surroundings going passed him, the ground is a circle in the bottom middle of the screen turning so although the mannequin is walking he is walking on the spot. It gets to a bit that says other mannequins fall apart and at this point he falls apart and a giant foot comes in and squashes him. It then pans out and the giant foot belongs to another mannequin who carries on walking along with the narrative. After that there is a list of things the mannequin can do and he acts each of them out with appropriate props flying into view when necessary. The narrative then boasts that you get a mini one for free and there will be a mannequin holding a small mannequin holding a smaller mannequin. The mannequin then says 'I'm glad I bought it' but glitches and says it about 30 times and at this point a load of mannequins will fall around him.

Here are some basic story boards:

      

I have started working on some rough concept drawings for the piece.To create my mannequin that features throughout the piece I have drawn it out front and side and then I plan on going over it on Photoshop and chopping it up in layers so I can take it into After Effects and move it around. 

After finishing a simple design of the mannequin I wanted to take it into after effects so I could look at rigging the character up. using the puppet rig:

I've just started playing around with how to create the rotating hill in the bottom middle of the composition. The easiest way to achieve the effect seems to be creating a sphere of grass that simply sits at the bottom of the composition. I took the rounded off photograph of grass into photo shop and added a dry brush filter.

I added this effect just to make the image look more 'cartoony' so it would match the style that I have used with the mannequins. 

Here is a test of how the grass ball looks in the scene with a background I created in Photoshop:

I had too many problems with the puppet rig so I ended up just separating each part 

of the mannequin and parenting each part up to the appropriate part. For example, the 

foot is parented to the lower leg. 

Here is how it looks walking over the grass hill in the previous test:

My research into motion graphics has shown me that good transitions between scenes is integral 

to the flow of the piece which throws up a big contradiction to me in that I am creating an infomercial 

type piece, which traditionally maintain a lot of screen wipes. As a compromise for the most part 

the scene transitions flow well but I put in one screen wipe and I think it works.    

I changed the intro slightly from my storyboards because it looked a little
too linear but it's essentially the same. I added motion blur to all of the
lettering, just to make it look easier on the eye:

The third section of the vise is just created on Photoshop using a number of layers 

with a soft light overlay to create the rust/smoke effect:

I then used the same rigged up mannequin from before to act out the different poses. Additional props

such as the party hat were also created in Photoshop. 

I completely changed the final scene from the storyboards because after seeing it the way I had

originally planned it, it didn't work so i thought it would be funny to have another pretty irrelevant

graph because that's what seems to happen a lot in infomercials.   

Here is the finished piece: 

There are a few things with the piece that I am not happy with but due to time constraints I couldn't fix.

For example, the scene where the mannequins parts fall off they don't roll round with the grass like I 

wanted it to. The cycle of the mannequin walking couldn't be changed because of how it was layered 

in the composition, I would have just gone back and done the whole scene again had there been time. 

Technical breakdown:

• The moving text in the first scene is simply animated on key frames with a motion blur added. The words that shoot up on their own (good, quality, had, crafted) are parented up to the initial question that shoots in. (how much would you pay)
• The line, that gives the impression of a graph going down showing how cheap the mannequin is, is just a line animated onto a mask that I drew on the composition. 
• The bundle of money is split into three sections in Photoshop and the opacity of the separate parts are turned down to make the pile smaller, again to show how cheap the mannequin is. The money is also attached to the mask previously mentioned. 
• The mannequin was created in Photoshop and split up into separate parts so it could be animated in After Effects. 
• The parts of the mannequin were parented to the corresponding parts in after effects so it would animate efficiently, The foot parented to the lower leg etc. The cycles were then simply created using key frames. 
• The grass ball is just an image of a grass ball with a dry brush filter added to it to make it look more animated. 
• All of the backgrounds are also created in Photoshop. Just a block colour with a few different textures, rust, honeycomb etc, added on top with a soft light filter. 
• The scene where the circles containing the animations of the mannequin roll by were done by creating the circles in Photoshop and then animated along a curved mask line. The mannequins are parented up to the circles with a mask around them so it looks as though they are inside the circles. 
• The narrative is just a recording of myself and the music is some generic lift music.