Dynamic Visualisations

For my dynamic visualisation to show the app working, I plan on pre-comping the actions in After Effects and then use keying and motion tracking to superimpose that precomp into a video of me using my iPhone. I think will make my app seem more believable seeing as we aren't actually going to code it. Below is the effect I am aiming for, but with with less reflection:

Samuel Palmer

To further explore the woodcut aesthetic that I plan to incorporate I looked at the work of Samuel Palmer. The was artistically active around the early to mid 1800s and mainly worked in watercolour and etchings.

His work tended to focus on very idealised pastoral scenes and traditional imagery which fits very well with the marketing feel of the Shepherd Neame brand. The feel of what I will use will be a lot simpler as it will be presented on a much smaller scale.

Snake River Press

A brand I found that blends traditional English imagery and art styles with a clean and modern aesthetic is Snake River Press, an independent publishing company from Sussex. Their book covers incorporate the lino/woodcut artwork I've been looking at, but also bring in brighter colours and clean type using Gill Sans. The juxtaposition of old and modern really works for me as it seems to cast the traditional elements in a more nostalgic and heart-warming way.

Exploring the Shepard Neame Art Style

After scouring the internet for some kind of branding guidelines for Shepherd Neame and failing I decided to look at their public visual presence and try define what makes their brand.

Website:

The website is quite plain overall with a few very distinct visual cues, quite simple colours with most of the type set in helvetica/browser default. The site makes good use of skeuomorphism with its wood panelling and occasional gold trim, and picks out certain titles in its signature logo font Copperplate.

One recurring element used on the website I really like is the coloured lino/woodcut designs used in the header area. This aesthetic is something that I would really like carry through into my app design.

Ales:
The branding of Shepherd Neame ales keeps the same traditional feel but also incorporates more modern styles in the branding of the newer ales like Whitstable Bay and Canterbury Jack. I'd like to try and blend the 2 tastefully with my final design.

Intial Ideas

My idea at this point is to design an app to promote the Shepherd Neame brand, both beers and venues. To do this I plan to create an app that can recommend drinks based on previous choices and related Shepherd Neame venues that stock the recommendations, if they not served in the pub you are in. I might also integrate the ability to generate a custom 'pub crawl/tour' that takes you around a few venues that adapts depending on how you rate previous venues and drinks. An adjustable time limit will also have to be included with this feature.

A 'share' function would also be useful to include social media tie-ins, allowing you to promote drinks and venues to friends, as well as invite people to join your experience and promote it along the way. Facebook's 'check-in' facility would be useful for this.

Further Research

I decided to go through a roundup of the best Alcoholic brand apps and analyse them:

I really liked the idea of using geo-location in this app as I think it ties the brand into your world, creating a powerful connection. I think this possibility for interactive content based your location also opens up many pathways for further development.

This snow-globe app is not a very good branding exercise as its mostly a gimmick with company branding and doesn't connect you with the product in any meaningful way.

 The bowling app created for Malibu is only slightly better then the snow-globe one but only because the game is a little more engaging. It still doesn't effectively tie-in with the brand its promoting.

I think this recipe app works very well to promote its brand as all the recipes contain the product its promoting, literally making you purchase and use it in order to interact with the app. I think the social media and location based features also bring huge potential to the app.

Research Into Drinks Apps

For some initial research we watched a presentation from Kate about research into drinks apps made by Stanfy.The 2 most important points in the presentation for me were the distribution of different types of apps and age restriction.

AF201/202: Animation/Screen Based Design

The brief for this project is to create an iPhone and iPad app to promote an alcoholic drinks brand. the app is something that needs to inform to entertain the user and must promote a single brand. Rather than develop the app, we will submit a 'dynamic visualisation' showing the app being used on a device, as well as a 20 second teaser/promo video designed to advertise the app.

Evaluation of AF:201

Before this project I'd never fully engaged with animation or the software needed to create it, so this project was full of new experiences for me. Initially I was very worried about the time-scale the project was supposed to be completed in because of the amount of learning software I had to do. Once I started using it I found After Effects very easy to grasp as its very similar to other Adobe products.

The project also gave me the opportunity to record sound to a high standard, something I've also never done before. Learning about what microphones and other hardware and software to use was a very interesting experience and I look forward to applying my new-found knowledge to future projects.

On thing I did find very hard was how quickly we had to generate and commit to an idea due to the short project time. It meant that any ideas I didn't feel fully invested in had to be scrapped immediately. I think the ability to not become attached to potentially bad ideas is something that this project has taught me, and it will be an advantage to me to make it standard practice.

Overall I really enjoyed this project as it gave me the chance to try many new things as well as open up new areas for me to develop my skills in.

Post Crit Changes

After considering all the points raised by my class and tutors, I made the following changes to my animation. The bass frequency in the soundtrack was reduced slightly for the duration of the first part of the voice-over, after asking a few people they felt the voice conflicted less with the music and was clearer and easier to hear as a result. At the point where the cactus is knocked by the chair, I moved the keyframes at the point of contact further back in time to even out the speed that the two move at, in relation to each other. After trying the globe tracking in front of the rails it rolls down, I decided that it looked much better that way as it gives the impression that the globe is coming towards the viewer, creating a slightly more dynamic look. The biggest changes were made to the very end scene. I upped the brightness of the cables supporting the picture by 35% because they looked to prominent and didn't sit well in the overall colour scheme. The motion of the cable was completely altered to swing more naturally and knock against a small peg to make it look less like it just stops in mid air.

The 2 changes that didn't make it to the final version were making the cactus fall of the end of the carpet rather than the room, and using the rope to swipe in the text. I felt these didn't add anything to the animation as the cactus change would mess up timings and look unnatural, while the lope doesn't naturally swing far enough to swipe the text in a way that fits the timing of the voice-over. Below is the final 30 second clip I will be submitting:

 

 

Crit Feedback

After presenting my animation the rest of the class and my tutor Andrew the following points were raised and recorded in my sketchbook during the presentation:

• Plain background works well.
• First 2 parts of the voice-over fight with the music (perhaps duck the bass out in the music in time with the voice)?
• Cactus moves too fast when hit by the chair and falls too late, should fall from the end of the carpet.
• Globe should pass in front of the rails it rolls down.
• Movement of the picture swinging at the end looks unrealistic.

I will try all of these suggestions out in After Effects and evaluate which ones add to the animations and which ones detract from it. Sadly there is no time to present my changes to the class so I will have to rely on my own judgement when deciding whether to change certain elements.

Pre Crit Design

After careful deliberation I decided to bring 3 versions of my final animation to crit, 1 with a full voice-over, one with a partial voice-over and one with just the soundtrack. I will present the full voice-over one first and leave it at that if everyone validates my choice. For ease of playback and file transporting I downscaled my video to 1280x720, which should still preserve quality to an extent, the final submission will be in 1920x1080 format. The issues I intend to raise for discussion in the crit are as follows:

• Is the start attention grabbing enough?
• Is the movement of the globe realistic? 
• Does the part from the falling cactus to the rope swing flow in a visually pleasing way?
• Do the soundtrack and voice-over conflict in terms of volume and tone levels?

Below is the version of my animation I will present at the crit:

Anchor Points

While animating this project I made proper use of anchor points for the first time ever, despite being aware of them for a few years now. As I've never really used software for creating moving images that much in the past, most of my previous experiences have meant that I've never needed to use them much. They became a very useful tool for defining centres of scaling/vanishing points as well as axis of rotation.

When designing the pre-comped element of the globe>brackets>candle>canon portion of my animation they became essential to carry out what I was aiming for. Because I was modelling something that was possible to build in reality, as long as I made sure to align the anchor points with the axis of rotation on every element, animating the complex design would become very easy. Below is the full animation element consisting of 10 moving parts in total:

Once I'd gone through and lined everything up, all I needed to do was define the start and end points for position and degrees of rotation and the animation was tweened exactly as it would behave in reality.

I very glad that this project forced me to utilise anchor points as its something that I think I will make extensive use of in the future, both in moving image and static image design.