Laurence Roper - Commercial project - Ha! Fest
We began another project a few weeks in to the commercial projects' module.
This second project's brief is to create an animated ident for the 'Ha! Fest' animation festival in Hastings. The ident is of an unspecified subject matter but it was suggested that it could be humorously themed to relate to the word 'Ha!' that features in the title of the festival.
The only other specific requests of the brief were to make it fit to a definitive colour scheme, somehow integrate the HiFest hand in to the imagery and of course feature the general information such as the title, location, and date of the festival.
Beginning my idea generation I intended to create something abstract and unusual. Initially I was considering featuring the hand as the main focal point of the animation, giving it a life separate from a human such as showing it swimming through the screen like a fish or crawling around like a spider however these ideas would have been very labour intensive to animate and we had a very short time frame to work with. This made me lean towards some more simplistic ideas. The idea I began to explore further was using an orange blob with a character pushing out and eventually crawling out of the blob entirely before performing some undefined action to locate the time and place.
The issue with this idea was that the hand logo didn't feature very strongly in the animation and any of the possible variations of the idea would have ended up too long for the intended purpose.
Instead of scrapping the idea all together I thought the use of the blob and limbs protruding from it could be aesthetically quite interesting as well as utilising the hand logo more prominently, and fitting better to the time frame suggested for the project.
In my initial iteration of the animation the blob entered the screen as a viscous ball but when the limbs began to move about within it the ball settled in to the shape above appearing to begin resting on a surface, I thought due to the nature of the animation being quite abstract it wouldn't appear too unsettling but unfortunately it didn't work out how I had intended. To fix this problem I initially planned on completely scrapping the limbs protruding from the blob up until the end when the hand would rise up from the middle. However I addressed this problem to the class and although opinions were mixed more people were in favour of the limbs than not. This made me consider another alternative in which I might be able to both fix the off-putting appearance of the blob settling as well as maintaining the integration of the limbs. My solution for this was to use the limbs in the earlier parts of the animation where the blob was entering the screen and bouncing about making the appendages appear to be leading or drifting about the blob from the inside.
This solution was quite successful and a reasonably effective way to approach the problem. It also allowed me to focus more on the motion of the blob giving it a much more naturalistic sense of movement using timing and spacing and anticipations more effectively.
We weren't given the exact font intended for the text which lead me to approach it in my own way, instead of using a pre-made font I created a hand-drawn font that would boil and create a more visually interesting aesthetic than it would have if I used a still type-face in the same place.
The hand comes out of the blob and the other portion drains down out of the screen the blob turns from a viscous material to a more watery liquid, I was somewhat worried about this appearing awkward or unappealing. However fortunately this works quite well, I think that might be due to only one component of the animation changing which allows the viewer to understand the transition without too much confusion from additional information.
Another issue I was somewhat concerned about was the potential lack of colour as I was only adhering to one colour from our given palette. I addressed this problem with our tutor however and apparently it was acceptable to limit colour use so long as I wasn't using any outside of the palette. This was quite fortunate, I felt that additional colour although possible to integrate would only have detracted from the animation as how it stood I was particularly interested in how simplistic I could keep it.
So far I've found that this has been a really interesting project. The importance of considering how motions transition in to each other is something I've definitely found useful taking from this project. Using more effective timing in the animation is an incredibly important aspect and turns a moving object in to something with form, and weight with a much more believable motion.
Something I'm worried about approaching is the addition of sound as in my animation sound could add a huge amount to the visuals but if it isn't done correctly it could also detract from it. Finding copyright free sound effects is also somewhat challenging which makes it harder to find the correct and well-fitting sounds that will work with the animation.
This second project's brief is to create an animated ident for the 'Ha! Fest' animation festival in Hastings. The ident is of an unspecified subject matter but it was suggested that it could be humorously themed to relate to the word 'Ha!' that features in the title of the festival.
The only other specific requests of the brief were to make it fit to a definitive colour scheme, somehow integrate the HiFest hand in to the imagery and of course feature the general information such as the title, location, and date of the festival.
Beginning my idea generation I intended to create something abstract and unusual. Initially I was considering featuring the hand as the main focal point of the animation, giving it a life separate from a human such as showing it swimming through the screen like a fish or crawling around like a spider however these ideas would have been very labour intensive to animate and we had a very short time frame to work with. This made me lean towards some more simplistic ideas. The idea I began to explore further was using an orange blob with a character pushing out and eventually crawling out of the blob entirely before performing some undefined action to locate the time and place.
The issue with this idea was that the hand logo didn't feature very strongly in the animation and any of the possible variations of the idea would have ended up too long for the intended purpose.
Instead of scrapping the idea all together I thought the use of the blob and limbs protruding from it could be aesthetically quite interesting as well as utilising the hand logo more prominently, and fitting better to the time frame suggested for the project.
In my initial iteration of the animation the blob entered the screen as a viscous ball but when the limbs began to move about within it the ball settled in to the shape above appearing to begin resting on a surface, I thought due to the nature of the animation being quite abstract it wouldn't appear too unsettling but unfortunately it didn't work out how I had intended. To fix this problem I initially planned on completely scrapping the limbs protruding from the blob up until the end when the hand would rise up from the middle. However I addressed this problem to the class and although opinions were mixed more people were in favour of the limbs than not. This made me consider another alternative in which I might be able to both fix the off-putting appearance of the blob settling as well as maintaining the integration of the limbs. My solution for this was to use the limbs in the earlier parts of the animation where the blob was entering the screen and bouncing about making the appendages appear to be leading or drifting about the blob from the inside.
This solution was quite successful and a reasonably effective way to approach the problem. It also allowed me to focus more on the motion of the blob giving it a much more naturalistic sense of movement using timing and spacing and anticipations more effectively.
We weren't given the exact font intended for the text which lead me to approach it in my own way, instead of using a pre-made font I created a hand-drawn font that would boil and create a more visually interesting aesthetic than it would have if I used a still type-face in the same place.
The hand comes out of the blob and the other portion drains down out of the screen the blob turns from a viscous material to a more watery liquid, I was somewhat worried about this appearing awkward or unappealing. However fortunately this works quite well, I think that might be due to only one component of the animation changing which allows the viewer to understand the transition without too much confusion from additional information.
Another issue I was somewhat concerned about was the potential lack of colour as I was only adhering to one colour from our given palette. I addressed this problem with our tutor however and apparently it was acceptable to limit colour use so long as I wasn't using any outside of the palette. This was quite fortunate, I felt that additional colour although possible to integrate would only have detracted from the animation as how it stood I was particularly interested in how simplistic I could keep it.
So far I've found that this has been a really interesting project. The importance of considering how motions transition in to each other is something I've definitely found useful taking from this project. Using more effective timing in the animation is an incredibly important aspect and turns a moving object in to something with form, and weight with a much more believable motion.
Something I'm worried about approaching is the addition of sound as in my animation sound could add a huge amount to the visuals but if it isn't done correctly it could also detract from it. Finding copyright free sound effects is also somewhat challenging which makes it harder to find the correct and well-fitting sounds that will work with the animation.
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