Module 1 – Commercial Project – Evaluation

At the start of the 2^nd year I was given the task to complete two commercial projects within 3 weeks. The first animation project I had to create an ident for the St Wilfrid’s Hospice Crafty Friday event, we were informed on that our ident animation mustn’t be associated with the hospice. This was due to how the hospice tends to instil the impression of death, this suggests the event could be exclusive to only friends and family among patients however Crafty Friday is actually open to the public; the sessions are designed to be short, drop-in activities making these sessions more accessible for outsiders. Therefore, our client would like us to have our animation with more of a focus on the arts and craft element of Crafty Friday.

The second animation we were tasked with, involved with the East Sussex College logo, due to this merger between 4 colleges including Sussex Coast College Hastings. The brief states that it needs to break apart the old logo and form into their new logo which is different coloured birds that represent other colleges merging into one organisation.  

Since I only had 3 weeks to work with and produce 2 professional animations within the set time frame. I decided to stick with creating motion graphic animations within Adobe After Effects. The reason for my choice of software is because I’ve had initial experience as well as found comfort with my new found skills and animation techniques, I personally felt it was far too risky to try anything new, when the room for error was extremely low. I was advised from both my peers and tutor, that I should merge CGI from Cinema4D into After Effects. I believe that the blend between 3D and 2D can appear “cheap” and not look visually appealing if not done properly. There was also the uncertainty of transferring files between the 2 programs that I haven’t had any experience with; which could only spell a recipe for disaster in terms of juggling new techniques in CGI as well as produce a professional looking animation within the given deadline.

With the Crafty Friday animation for St Wilfrid’s Hospice I had initially thought of involving the hospice itself, with hospital equipment shown in a crafty theme which then leads to the title “Crafty Friday”. However, I was explicitly told not to include anything to do with a hospital/hospice I had to take a different approach to this commercial project. So I decided to create a Punch & Judy themed tent made from simple shapes such as squares, rectangles and triangles. Shortly after the tent is formed, the camera will do a quick zoom at the stage for text dropping the word “Crafty” on string/rope, while the word “Friday” is drawn on with a brushstroke effect. The tent creation wasn’t too challenging, due to frequently referring to my reference image of the Punch & Judy tent and having it function as a template for me to map out which shapes should appear at and what time. Each of the red lines are the red strips at the base of my tent, where individually animated to come onto the screen in a smooth manner, through easing the position key frames. While creating the tent I discover I had some dead space of the black rectangle that appears the white square, I thought it would be a nice to implement the logo of the hospice rather than it remain as a black rectangle; it’ll be a logo for the viewer to identify that this is where the event will be taken place.

One of the hardest elements I had time struggling with was attaching the letters onto rope and bounce onto the stage. Since I wasn’t able to install any 3^rd party plugins into After Effects for this one specific action, I instead tricked the viewer by pretending the object on rope dropping onto the stage through bounce expressions. The rope was done in a separate composition, using the pen tool, I started with creating a straight white line down the centre of my composition. Once I had done this I then implemented a turbulent displace effect onto my rope line, by playing around with the settings (Amount, Evolution, Size and Displacement type) I was able to emulate the physics of bouncing rope/string until it then settles down into a straight line once again. The actual “Bounce” from the letters is the letter itself, through adding an expression in the layer’s position controls, animation still had to be done manually for the subtle bounce upwards when the letter hits its lowest possible point.     

The next project was the East Sussex College logo animation. The core brief of the project was to have a professional looking transition from the old logo (Sussex Coast College) to the new logo (East Sussex College). I found the information that was provide to me was somewhat vague and all I was able to gather from the brief was that it had to “look good”. The lack of information that was given to me was certainly frustrating because if I did whatever I perceived as “looking good” simply could be rejected, regardless I had to give it a stab for both the client and progressing with the module.

My original plan for the Sussex Coast logo transition was to create the old logo from scratch and appear in a stylised as well as animated reveal. Shortly after that I would then have a radial wipe transition to show the green bird, that’ll then flap its wings and be alongside the other birds for it to then zoom out and reveal the final logo design of East Sussex College. However, the bird flapping its wings was an ambitious element of the animation and I felt would be an idea I would work on if I had any time, therefore compromises were made for my logo transition. Rather than having the bird flap its wings instead I had the bird slot in place with the other birds in the same vein of a jigsaw piece coming into the full picture of the puzzle.

However, I did have some time left to try and work on animating the bird’s wings and see if this idea could work. I started with breaking up the logo into its individual pieces which were recreated in Photoshop and began roughly piecing them together within After Effects. Now I’m able to move each of the pieces on their own; I started with moving the wings by changing the position, scale and rotation values as well as applying key frames onto them. The effect of the bird flapping its wings did appear cheap in my opinion and I did feel as though I was pushing the capabilities of what After Effects can handle; I just needed to hide the fact that the animation appeared ugly, motion blur helped greatly with masking how poor the animation actually was. Since the motion of the bird’s wings were going at such a fast rate the blur helps hide the awful animation, I also applied secondary motion onto the tail of the bird. In order to distract the viewer and give the illusion that what they were witnessing was the best animation of a bird ever! 

      

Another part of the ESC project that I found extremely aggravating even though I had mentioned this multiple times to the client to the point I’m practically shouting at a brick wall are the assets I was provided. That being both their old and new logo arrived at a small pixelated resolution; practically unusable when working at 1920x1080 resolution. Their incompetent behaviour can occasionally set me back many hours of unnecessary works such as remaking the old logos once again. Not only can this be demotivating for me but can potentially limit what I can do, when I expect a certain professional standard from them. 

     

Overall I was able to create 2 animations within the short deadline. There were certainly complications with the challenge of balancing the 2 projects and I personally felt that the Crafty Friday animation was not on par to my liking. This was because the animation was kind of thrown together and didn’t have any correlation to what supposed to be stereotypically “Crafty” or “Artsy” the only part of the animation that was slightly crafty was the text being drawn on with a paint brush as well as dropping onto the centre of the composition attach to some string. As for the ESC logo animation it certainly surprised me that I was able to bring what I had initial doubts about a reality, since I had no clue how to approach animating the bird’s wings and the final animation didn’t come out as bad as I had initially thought. I do believe that I was significantly limited to what I could do, since the bird had to maintain the same appearance throughout the animation, because it is the company’s brand and is essentially its identity. Messing around with the birds’ appearance could cause confusion when it comes down to marketing with your target audience, in this case potential students who want to apply for this college. What I have learnt is that After Effects is an amazing piece of software in terms of motion graphics along with presenting information in a clean and surgical manner. However, when it comes to character animations that’s an area the software certainly lacks in, which shows with the bird I did, this could be due to the limited resources I had at the time and will be something I’ll have to look into.