Copyright Free Images

Tim has asked me to have a zoom from space into Brighton as the establishing shot for the News intro. After looking for some high detail satellite images from the obvious sources (Google Maps/Earth and Bing) I discovered that if any of there material is used for broadcast, several notices of where the content has been sourced from must be provided. This would be very unprofessional looking for a news intro. I consulted a relative who works in an agency that provides motion graphics for TV channels and he recommended I use a program provided by NASA called World Wind. Fortunately all NASA imagery on the software is royalty free and can be used for commercial purposes with attribution.

After Effects Experiments

For the second weather sting I produced I ran into a problem with how the graphics were looking. The weather logo was displayed above a puddle with the reflection of the pavilion and I masked in a reflection for the logo too, but it didn't look right with the way the water was moving underneath it. I first used mocha for After Effects to create a tracked plane the the text was fixed to:

To better fix the logo into its environment I decided to try and simulate what I could see happening to the reflection in the puddle and apply it to the logo's reflection. To do this I found an effect called 'turbulent displacement' which sounded like it would have desired effect:

To get a proper simulation of the waters distortion effect I combined 2 Turbulent Displacement modules and one for Gaussian Blur. I used one to create very sharp, high-amplitude ripples from left to right as it was what I was seeing in the puddle. The other one was used to create a much more gentle ripple from top to bottom to add some more detail. The Gaussian Blur was used to make it look VERY slightly out of focus, as the focal plane was actually just behind the reflection.

In order to animate the ripples I used the 'Evolution Seed Number' which determines the starting point for each ripple. This was key-framed to increase from 0 to 76 (the number of frames in the composition). This means that the pattern for the displacement shifted by one step for each frame, creating a natural water-like movement. The intensity of the displacement was also key-framed to match the patterns of the breeze blowing across the puddle.

More Test Sequences

I plan to meet with Tim again early next week to chat further about content so I made a few more clips as examples to show him. These versions are what will most likely be used as the stings and introductory portions for each section as they have been edited down to 3 seconds each. Below is what they look like:

Motion Tracking Test

Once I had filmed a few shots I decided to put together a single example of what I intend to create the whole intro from. For this I took my shot of the Ferris Wheel on Brighton seafront and brightened it up with some colour correction. This was necessary because I shot the footage with and extremely flat colour profile to preserve dynamic range, as well as a circular polarising filter to help control the intensity of the sky and in-shot reflections. The resultant footage when shot like this tends to look very grey a washed out but provides an excellent base for almost any style of colour correction. I then imported the latest News logo and used the built in motion tracking in after effects to fix it to one of the pods on the wheel. Below is how it turned out:

Overall I pleased with the result and will continue in this vein unless it's not what the people at latest News had in mind.

First Filming

Today I went out and completed a few of the shots on my register to use for preliminary testing and approval from Tim. Below is my progress so far:

I will probably have to re-film a few of the shots due to the weather looking very depressing.

Research Into Text Motion Tracking

Seeing as I plan to use a lot of motion tracked text elements in my final design I decided to do a bit of research into the various ways its done. Its seems like almost everyone uses -in order of complexity- one-point tracking from within After Effects, mocha for After Effects or a program called Boujou. The tracking built into After Effects generally deals with a single point on a 2D plane which is useful for simple shots not requiring and perspective changes. The program mocha for After Effects is much more useful for shots where perspective needs to shift with the camera as it deals with a planar surface in '3D' space. Boujou is full 3D and introduces far more complexity to shots. I will decide on what route to take on a shot-by-shot basis depending on what I need to achieve, although mocha will most likely be used for the majority of them.

Latest TV Font

After a bit of analysis, I worked out that the font used for the latest TV logo is Frutiger, more specifically a mix of 66 Bold and 66 Bold Italic. I will try to use this font for all of the stuff I do for latest TV, unless it isn't working visually in a specific situation.

Shot List

To get a more detailed breakdown of the shots I need I drew up a full shot list. To make sure I don't miss anything I've printed it out to take with in my sketchbook. Most of the footage wont be in the final intro but I think its best to cover all bases in case I change my mind.

Designing Shots

I have started to sketch out some shots so I can remember them all as well as the composition plans for each location in preparation for shooting in the break in the weather tomorrow. Its essential that I get everything filmed looking cheerful and not all wintery like it is at the moment.

First Meeting

I had a meeting with Tim, the head of Latest News today to discuss my ideas. I pitched a combined version of the zoom in from space and landmarks of Brighton ideas but I also plan to include some motion tracked text that displays the names of the segments (News, Entertainment, Sport and Weather). Below is a good example of what I want to achieve with the text elements:

Overall he seemed pleased to let me run with it as long as check-in regularly to make sure I was on the right track. I'm happy to carry out the project in this way as it gives me plenty of scope to be creative with how I tackle the brief.

Soundtrack

The soundtrack for the news intro is going be produced by Diana Frangi, the in-house composer for Latest TV. So far I have been sent a very rough version of this by her which seems to work well, although it still has quite a bit to still be completed. She is composing to a 30 second time-limit which is double mine, I intend to get around this problem by cutting out half the intro and having it loop over the Headline summary. Overall I'm very pleased with her work so far and cant wait to see the final product.

Style Guidelines

So far I have been provided with minimal branding guidelines for the news, they only really specify colour and size of the logo. This is pretty much what I expected given that there is nothing produced for the show yet, its going be up to me to shape a determine the finer aspects of the graphic style for the news. Below is the information I've received so far:

An issue I have noticed with the guidelines is that the size of the logo seems to be specified for print rather than screen display. As all the software I will be using for motion graphics work in pixels I decided to calculate a relative size that will be much easier to use.

The average screen resolution works out to around 72 pixels per inch, or about 28.34 pixels per cm (1"=2.54cm ∴ 72/2.54=28.34ppcm). This means that the logo should always be displayed at around 30 pixels or more in height (10mm=1cm).

Ideas from Tim

So far I've received 3 ideas for the main titles.

Idea 1:

MG: Slow Spinning, Pulsing Globe, a bit like this (but latest colour pallet, pulsing and no blue lazar scanners) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1N_G6fT4YQ0 with each pulse a major city name pops out, (c TEXT) then we see giant arrow in space earth bound (a bit like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NB_c7TrNn9g 0:38-0:41) then arrow jettisons towards earth (Arrow has Latest News written on it) passing over major cities of the world. Then Passes major landmarks of Brighton, ends up at the latest music bar which transforms into our logo (Style Slick).

I quite like this idea in principle but the main problem is that its almost exactly the same as the BBC news intro, mainly because of the colours.

Idea 2:

http://www.youtube.com/wa tch?v=G_yCXHqJgh4
In slick modern motion graphic style. We’re propelled inside a clock to see the inner cogs ticking, we come out and a person is looking at their watch, the second hand ticks and we see the graphics etc...

Not sure about this one as it seems like its strong on concept but doesn't tie in with the theme of news that solidly.

Idea 3:

Camera sweeps into brighton from outer space, zooms in on the world, then zooms in on UK, then zooms in to Brighton, where we see lots of Brighton Landmarks such as The Pavilion, the pier, the wheel, the Amex Stadium, The lanes, The theatre Royal and some Hotels.

So far this is the strongest for me as it would be very engaging to the audience, given that it is going to be a local news show. People can relate to locations and feel like the programming is very close to their daily lives.

Production List

My first thoughts surrounding the list of things I need to create are that its going to be quite a lot of work to do. Thankfully we have a slightly longer time-frame to complete the work than previous projects as well as a more relaxed structure surrounding crits and pitches. Although its a fair list of things do, most of them are only 2-3 second pieces of motion graphics that can be produced very quickly once the main style and ideas have been established.

Latest TV Brief

For our next project we have been sent to create motion graphics and footage for the soon-to-launch TV Channel Latest TV. Soon after the initial briefs were released we were divided up and assigned the section of the channel which we would be working on, I was assigned the news. At first I thought this would be a slightly boring and stale program to be designing for in terms of visual style, given that it's one of the oldest existing TV formats. However, the main thing in favour is the amount of exposure me work would get.

I'm very excited to get started of this brief as its a live project where we get to liaise with actual clients. This should provide an excellent chance to gain experience and build my skills for entering the professional environments. Networking opportunities should be plentiful too.

Evaluation

So far this project has been a firm favourite for me. I was initially slowed down by the choice of briefs, finding both the variety of clients and ways to tackle each brief slightly overwhelming. I also surprised myself when it came to actually choosing, as the one I went with was far from my preferred one. I thought it would be useful exercise to get way out of my comfort zone and as a result I did find myself thinking in a much more creative way.

Overall I'm very pleased with how I answered the Fedrigoni brief and although I found it challenging working through each problem as I came across it, I think I came to the best decision each time. The only remaining thing is waiting to see how well I managed to communicate my concepts to the Fedrigoni marketing team through my pdf submission. I am reasonably confident that I have been successful in doing so.

Sending off my Calender

To support my submission I've decided to send off a physical copy of my calendar. Even though it isn't a requirement I feel like it would help my design stand up against the competition. YCN only give an address to send it off to so I will have to find out from them what needs to be included in the package to identify it as mine.

Photographing the Calendar

For my final PDF submission I needed to photograph my calender. As per the advice given to me by everyone is the crit I included some photos of the calender with the models. The set-up was quite simple, the same as for photographing the instructions minus the fill light on the far left. This is a sample of how the photography went:

Calender Base

To keep the calendar upright after binding I kept a long strip of card included in the stack. This was then folded around the back several time sand then glued into place to form a stand for the calendar.

Ring Binding

In order to keep my whole calender together and give it a much more professional feel I decided to get it ring bound. For this I went to Ryman's and had it bound in something called snap binding which was the best looking option. I also chose to have a clear acetate cover put on the front to protect the pages underneath. Here's how the binding looks:

 

And the clear acetate:

 

Crit Changes

After doing crit yesterday I received some helpful feedback from 2 of my tutors and my classmates. In terms of my actual product people seemed to think no changes would be necessary, and the rest of the points were all about how to present my work in the final pdf for submission. The most important points were to make sure that I make up a range of the models and display them with a version of the calender, having a short flow diagram explaining both the process of making the patterns on the background as well as the way its used, and displaying the full years worth of calender pages on a single A3 page. All these will be acted on when I produce the pdf booklet.

Test Printing

To get a better idea of what my physical calender will look like on the paper I'm using I made a test print of each calendar page on its chosen paper colour. Overall the way the transparent graphic overlays works well, keeping the original tones of the paper, just altering the individual tones.

One thing I do need to change based on this experiment is the shade of red, its very hard to read because of its brightness.

Pre Crit

For the crit on this project I plan to show all 12 of my designs as well as printouts of the actual pages of the calender. Unfortunately due to time constraints I haven't been able to get the final pages ring bound for crit, this will have to be done outside of Uni and I will try to get some interim feedback via out group facebook page. Here is what my final designs look like printed out pre crit:

The things I will be trying to get an opinion are during crit are:

• Ease of instructions
• Clarity
• Overall consistency and coherence
• Adherence to brand identity

As I haven't bound the pages I will also ask the class what they think of various methods of joining everything together, as well as some suggestions for what to put into my pdf and submission to YCN.

Ready to Print

Quick shot of all my finished model photos and calendar pages:

QR Code Scanners

After asking a few people I realised that not everyone has a QR code scanner on their phone, or even a smart-phone. To combat this problem I have added a custom shortlink just below the QR Code on the calendar. This link takes the user straight to the imgur image site.

QR Code Generation

To make my instructions accessible to smart phones via QR code I first uploaded a full resolution image to the image hosting site imgur:

The reason I chose to use imgur for this is because of their very short embedding URLs. Shorter URLs mean shorter QR code size, as well as more potential for increasing error tolerances.

I then took this URL and generated a QR code that lead to the full size image using the online tools available at the-qrcode-generator.com. After a quick test I then saved the image to be used on the January month of my calendar.

Editing Instructions

Once I had photographed all of the steps in making the model I then needed to edit them all together in Photoshop. To do this I created a canvas at 640x12000px (640px wide to be wide enough for average smart phones) and stacked each photo in, adding instructions and arrows in between.

 Once I had everything where it should be I then exported it as a single image. In order to keep file sizes down -especially on smart phones- I exported at ~jpeg80 compression levels, resulting in an acceptable file size of 1.1M considering its dimensions.

Making Instructions

As a trial for the format I want my instructions to take I decided to take a series of photos show my building the first of the models (Koshizawa Butterfly). In order to make sure the photos were clear enough I set up some lighting equipment to both reduce shadows and enable me to shoot at a smaller aperture, which increases the depth of field in the photos. Here is a picture of my set-up:

And a sample of the kind of photo my set-up produced:

Shooting in this way with total control also meant that I could take photos with the same settings each time, meaning I could sync my settings in Lightroom and apply any changes from one photo to all of them and know what it would look like. This made editing the photos very quick and easy.

Origami Models

I've now decided on the following list of Origami models to use in my calender:

• Angel Fish
• Waterbomb
• Flower
• Desk tidy
• Stingray
• Dolphin
• Pinwheel
• Butterfly
• Bird
• Bat
• Chicken 

 I tried to strike a balance between animals both land and sea as well as toys and useful items. I think overall I manage to include enough of a variety to keep most users interested.