Development: one year in one movie

As said in title.

Streetsport, being a part of Design Out Crime movement, has been assigned a separate stand fo the duration of the Degreeshow for which I was asked to provide content for.

My final task for this project, and for the end of the year was to render a compilation of all the sequences produced for Streetsport by myself and Richard Maciver


So briefly...

Design part: will be displayed on a plasma screen (=tv). Make it look like a TV package/podcast.

= I re-designed the opening titles and added 'V' by the end so it transforms into StreetsporTV.




= TV channels tend to have a specific Icon which represent them. I created this as well. A simple banner which reveals the TV icon, which is the very same letters used in the opening titles.

=Take all the footage created this year for the purpose of Streetsport and combine them into a full-length production which will be displayed on the loop.

I had to mix all my footage and all of Richard Maciver to compile this. Other than designing the TV elements it required me to overlay the footage in a natural way (fade in and outs, sound control etc.)

In order to keep the loop relatively random, I decided to avoid situation where two sequences of the same sort would play one after the other (something kind of how a commercial gets in the way of broadcast programmes). The types of footage I had were:

1. Ready movies
2. Zahed's classes shot by Richie
3. Motion graphics (two versions)
4. Raw footage examples from the last Streetsport session (March 2012)
5. Opening ending titles.


After a lot of dragging and dropping and a lot of failed renders, this is what I came up with.

This is the final and approved version which will play during the degree show. Something to be proud of, I think.

Remember, life is better in HD.

Development: motion graphics final

To make it more readable I redesigned the animation in view of how many elements show at given time.

At first sight this not that much different from the previous instalments, but should be a bit less confusing and the pace is slightly less difficult to follow.

At certain bits I unified the text colour so it is easier to follow which word is part of which sentence.
I have removed a couple of graphic elements which did not add too much to the overall picture and made too much chaos in the frame.

This time we are choosing between two version (unfortunately the house CC track has not made it to the finals. It's a shame, really liked that song), or ideally play them both. this sequence is meant to be an interlude between streetsport videos, and as there is a couple of the videos, there's no reason why we would not be able to play both so it's a bit less boring (and maybe someone would actually sit through the entire show).


As of now this is the final, corrected version.
(find the 7 differences from the previous version and you shall win an iPad. But only if you are the 1.000.000th visitor to this site. Yup, pretty unlikely).








Thanks for reading, that's about it!

Development: music for motion graphics

With most of my projects I get the idea of what sort of music I want to accompany it relatively quick.

This however was difficult, as the pace of the sequence is unstable. The tempo is defined by the camera movement, so are the revealing titles.

The idea: pick a song which the young audience could relate to, yet choose something not too striking so as not to make it dominant over the animation itself. Something the youth would aspire to and has the 'authority' among the young listeners, rather than just being popular.  Also not too cliche/obvious as it undermines the quality of the animation itself.

After brainstorming ideas we pointed the animation to three possibilities:

1) a creative commons labelled song:
Souds fresh, merry, upbeat, slightly retro (90s, maybe even 80s), house-ish, groovy, something unpopular (kind of gives me some more credit for being able to dig it up. or maybe not).




As much as I liked this song, when I was trying to visualize it in my head, I would see a plane landing in some tourist city, then a beach, then some disco night in the 80s style. The song is gentle and does not get in the way, but probably it would do a better job being used for some travel agency commercial (Thomas cook anyone?).


2) Dirty Harry
Again, upbeat, melodic, funky, slightly groovy, oldschool, kids (the chorus, due to the lyrics I had to look for an instrumental - kids singing 'getting a gun' does not seem right for a project that's supposed to reduce youth deliquency)



The Gorillaz have this 'being cool' area around them. This is not a scandalous musician, with amazing critical reception among the listeners. Partly due to the music, partly due to the animated image (the alter-drawn-reality).


3) Fatboy slim
Right here right now - probably the best fit in terms of matching this mad tempo of the sequence. Yet like one of the tutors I consulted with said, 'Oh, right here, right now. The most often used song in the last 10 years! It fits for everything!'.
True.
I still told him that it definitely does not beat 'Ghostwriter' by RJD2, but yeah, pretty much.
Anyway, as said, it really does fit.





This version has a slightly updated titles. Don't worry if you haven't seen the whole, you will see it in the next post.

TBC!

Development: motion graphics reshot.

Ok
So I went back to the Greig Court and had another go (a couple of, precisely).
This time I was aiming for slightly over a minute as the last time the reality has verified the length for me. Also, as said before, I was trying to keep the frame off the ground level and the 'facade'.

I added further text, and some graphics. Also I browsed through all my streetsport folders for quality photographs of the events and added them accordingly as well.
To help a bit with the pace, another new element was a motion paths leading through the screen. They are rather thin and sometimes blurry so they will not get in the way of the text, but add something to the overall composition.

Development:motion graphics, the beginnings

Turned out this project would require much more work than expected.

Before started shooting I have been learning to extend my After Effects workflow. I analysed the Glencore movie as well as other examples of motion graphics by P. Clair and figured out some of the transition effects he uses (simple Venetian blinds, and here I was looking for a way to draw a 'mask texture' to reveal it!).


Finally I went on to shoot my 'hand-picked, humane' wall.
The idea is to have a wall-long pan across the building and have the information reveal on the raw footage as the panning progresses.


I had a couple of attempts to get the sequence timing right. Oddly as it seems, one can pass the same distance in anywhere between 20 and 60 seconds!
My idea was to make this relatively short but something visually attractive, to involve the viewer for a bit longer. I was aiming for something close to 50-60 seconds. This obviously meant more work and filling in more content on the empty wall, yet it was an opportunity for me to showcase something more than just a title with a tag-line.

For this I needed to track the motion all over the footage which was pretty dificult for me at first (due to all the reference/tracking points constantly disappearing off the canvas), but 'with a little help from my friends' I finally figured that all it takes is to hold the Alt key. Simples.

this was a simple test with basic animation to see if it works.

The beginnings are never easy.
Turned out that despite of my animation going quite well until a certain point, I lost the pace and sped up my camera movement which rendered the text almost unreadable (not to mention if it was accompanied by revealing images which further distract/delay you from reading the text). Another issue was the ground level: as the camera shakes, the horizon(?) rotates all over : if I were to track the rotation as well, the text would be even more unreadable as it would jump all over the canvas 

we all make mistakes. This one though required me to reshoot the sequence.

I had to repeat the shooting.

The good thing was that working on the same After effects project, I (thought that I) did not have much to do except track the motion of the new sequence, then tamper a bit with the timing of reveal and relocate the images.
It wouldn't be fun if it was easy.
To be continued!

Research: motion graphics

Ironically much like the last semester, the biggest parts of the assignments tend to happen just as the semester draws to an end.

My next task for Streetsport was to design a motion graphics which would match the posters in terms of visual style and provide the viewer with basic information on Streetsport's agenda. This part was pretty serious as it would not only be included in my degree show stand but also displayed on a separate area.

So again I dug up a whole ocean of possible associations we went through when working on previous bits of Streetsport.

Urban, energy, sports, competitions, challenges, alternatives, and so and so.

In the end I decided to take this quite literally as the most obvious association with Streetsport is, well, playing the sports on the streets. In a bit of a short-cut, that is.

Anyway, in my research for motion graphics I came across this





Glencore by Patrick Clair.
Literally blew up my mind, not because of its shocking (apparently) content, but more the aesthetics of the graphic symbols.
This sequence combines information, statistics, numbers, images and tells the story simultaneously. It got me so much I even browsed what this Glencore is about. Quite an impact given that I am rather sceptical on following whatever shows sup.

Anyway, the collage, the infographic elements, limited usage of colours, a sense of urban area as well (not sure if fits here particularly but hey, textured walls always look good).


As of then (and probably now) my knowledge of After effects was not sufficient enough to picture how to operate so fluently in 3d compositing, so my plan (given that the time was short and I was rather reluctant on risking 'maybe managing to learn the 3d and then hoping to finish on time'), was to focus on something I am actually good at: use real video instead!



I give this some thinking as well and as a matter of fact the down side of working on real footage compared to working in 3d-compositing is... well, you can't be really this precise in therms of raw footage especially not having a complete plan concerning the total length, amount of images, number of sentences etc.
Plus after finding a wall which relatively fit to a 'humane length for such production'

I intentionally decided to shoot without stabilization to make the footage more shaky (thus more 'real').

Development: posters one step forward

During the degree show we are bound to have a separate stand for the Streetsport works in the Gray's canteen area as a part of the socially responsible design.

As the graduation slowly draws on everyone, it really is hectic everywhere but this is no reason to stop working. Do the opposite, push it further.

Having the streetsport stand in mind, I keep developing the idea of promotional poster which could be later used to promote the events associated with it.

Following the ideas from the previous posts, I am currently producing more pieces with a similar visual style.

Another one is close to be finished:

I decided to follow the teen-style collage graphics but adapt it to different sport disciplines which Streetsport covers.

This has been an issue back when we started: despite the fact that majority of promotion and activities are associated with football, there are different disciplines Streetsport is involved with and I think it would be good to present this as contrary to previous video coverages which in large proportions displayed football only.

Well, more to come!