In the module 2278 I have been introduced to Motion Graphics and the use of the programme After Effects. My final project consists of a Web Banner, a Title film sequence and a TVident. I would like to mention the difficulties I faced throughout the production period of my final project, the progress of using After Effects, my personal highlights and working strategies.
Getting used to working on After Effects took me some time but soon enough I realised that it had many similarities to Flash, a programme we got introduced to last year in “Digital Media”, which turned out to be very helpful and gave me the confidence to get started.
Project number1: Web Banner
I would like to start evaluating my first project, the Web Banner. The Banner has the function of an advertisement of a new fragrance called “J’adore” by Christian Dior. I decided to advertise for a perfume as I personally like watching their ads. I started working on the project in the first week of October during our Motion Graphic class and continued working on it every week during and after classes and finished the final project on the 19th of January.
I took a while do decide which colours I wanted to use in my banner and what kind of a “theme” I wanted to have. My first idea was to give the banner a hint of romance and sensuality which I also managed to do. The initial starting of the banner was a moving heart, it was my first attempt to use “motion”. I made a heart shape move from the right side of the banner to the left side, which made me feel proud at first, as I managed to use the programme and made something “move” but soon enough I realised that it looked unprofessional. The idea of a heart to start of the banner got replaced by autumn leaves moving in the background which went hand in hand with my motto of “this autumn, fall in love, with the new fragrance of Christian Dior: “J’adore”. This is just an example of how I changed my mind about many ideas that came across my mind. The banner consists a few text effects such as Brush Strokes for the text “Christian Dior” and “J’adore”. It makes the brand and the name of their new fragrance stand out from the rest of text and makes the banner look a bit more glamorous. The challenging part was to fit in the bottle of “J’adore” into the banner as its shape was rather long but after a lot of trying out, maximising and minimising I managed to fit it in and hope that the viewer recognises the bottle and does not think of it as a random shape.
Project number 2: Title Film Sequence
Out of all three projects, I enjoyed the Title Film Sequence the most. It is the longest project and my favouriteAt the beginning I had too many different ideas in my mind and could not focus on one. My first idea was to produce a title film sequence about a romantic comedy movie featuring to of my friends in a video as the background of it which did not work out as I could not find the time to film my friends and make a video out of it. The idea after that was to produce a film about slavery in Germany during Hitler’s era. I took a video from YouTube and inserted it into After Effects to use it as the background of the titles, which I could only do with the help of Fleeta, who showed me how to insert videos. After working on it for a couple of hours I started feeling depressed and thought of doing something more light hearted and something in which I could include funky effects.
The name of the movie for which I finally decided to produce a title film sequence is “Reborn Identity”. The name reminds us of “The Bourne Identity”, which I chose on purpose as it suggests that the movie is a Spy Film. I chose grey, black, white and red as the colours in the video. The grey metallic background, which fades in and out with every title gives the video a “modern” and “technological” look. I decided to keep the background simple, therefore only used the fade in fade out effect. I experimented a lot with the text effects and found it suitable to apply some of them which again gives the title film sequence a very recent and up to date look.
The soundtrack I chose to put in is called “The Crystal Method” which according to me goes very well with the background and the effects. I had some difficulties with the frame timing as it did not quite go very well with the song, as a result I had to change the frames- make some frames last longer and some shorter. At the beginning of the title film sequence I put the “20th century logo” as an introduction of the Title film sequence. In “real” movies the spotlights move around the whole image which I replaced by a “fog-effect” which made the image look a bit blurred so that the fact that the lights were not doing what they should be doing does not look obvious. The knowledge I gained while working on this project is very useful. While creating the banner I was getting used to After Effects and in this project I was able to try out more things as I was a bit more confident with what I was doing.
Project 3: TvIdent
I was really excited about the third project as I wanted to produce something really fast, “crazy” and MTV style- like. After working on my second project, which was rather unhasty I wanted to make the Ident more speedy. I used bright colours, a lot of text effects, a loud and cheerful song and a rather funny ending. The TV Channel MTV is a very authentic, loud, youth-targetted, up to date and “recent” channel. MTV’s target audience are youngsters. MTV is a very diverse channel, covering different areas of the music industry like stars lifestyles, events, news, charts, life gigs etc etc.
My motto for the Ident was: “The crazier- the better”. The Ident which I produced ended up being longer than a and gave a lot of information about MTV. I decided to change that, cut down on some information and concentrate on the fast space and brightness of the images and texts. I also tried to make the Ident in a way that it reflects MTVs style. I tried to come up with a few quotes like “Like it sweet? Get your earcandy hear!” to give the ident an authentic touch.
The song used here is called “Fix up Look sharp” by Dizzie Rascal. It is a song that hypes up the audience and has the “wake up” effect. The song starts with a loud “OYE” which would catch ones attention while watching TV. The Ident is really speedy, maybe a little too fast which is exactly what I wanted to achieve. It is not important to see the faces of the artists properly, which I put at the beginning of the video, what is important is that it catches ones attention and one feels like one is getting bombared with images and motion. The fast moving images and texts stop with the icon of MTV, which functions as an explination for the rapidity of the entire ident.
Conlusion
To sum up the entire experience of the module Motion Graphics I would say I really enjoyed developing skills for CS3 and learning how to apply effects on texts, images and shapes. Llooking at my end result of the portfolio, I get a feeling of satisfaction, as I can tell that this module really tought me something new and something which I will definately will be using in the future, it also motivated me to get more involved with the Digital side of Media. The fact that the module was challenging made it interesting and looking at my projects I still feel I could have improved a lot of things like timing or I could have inserted short videos or more music effects but I believe one can never spend “enough” time on any creative projects as improvement has no limits.
