Pre Crit Visualisation

This is the version of my App in use I will be submitting for crit:

 

The things I will be looking for feedback on are realism, atmosphere and brand adhesion.

Filming for Final Tracking

For my final visualisation I filmed some footage of my hands gesturing and using my iPhone. As this would've been a problem shooting of location in a pub given the amount of equipment used and time taken I decided to recreate a pub in my kitchen:

For this set-up I used a couple of props to surround the phone and give it a more pub-like feel. Lighting was a simple 3-point set-up with the slightly cold fluorescent bulb in the kitchen as a pub/neon keylight, a warm incandescent bulb shone against a shoot-through umbrella for a diffused, glowing fill light, and a small candle used as a rim light to provide a subtle moving shimmer to the ale inside the bottle.

The camera rigging is an old tripod head taped to a mic boom stand with the camera levelled on the end. I used EOS utility to control the camera via USB to prevent any slight camera movement when pressing buttons as well as a larger and better screen to compose the lighting and prop position on. Below is a still from the footage I achieved:

The results weren't particularly amazing but they were the best I was able to achieve with what I had and the time I had to do it in, apart from maybe lighting the whole scene much brighter and shooting in a lower ISO as my footage is a little too noisy for my liking.

Evaluation

I found this project to very enjoyable overall. The time scale was very tight but I think learning to do things in the smallest amount of time will stand me in good stead in the future. The freedom to conceptualise and visualise an App without worrying about the finer details of whether it was actually possible, was very freeing and I found it a lot easier to generate ideas. The only part I didn't enjoy was making the preview for both iPad and iPhone, because it felt like we were doing the same thing twice but slightly differently each time.

Overall I feel like my final products fulfil their intended purpose and communicate the intention behind them clearly, although my iPad visualisation wasn't as good as the iPhone one, due to me being unable to film an iPad and the waning enthusiasm because I was just repeating myself.

Post Crit Changes

After the crit I received advice and opinions on my animations so far. For my video showing the app in use, no improvements were suggested so it remained the same. My promo however was view in a much more critical way and all changes suggested were acted on by me.

The first change I made was to include an App store icon to make make it obvious I was promoting an app, this was an oversight by me and should have been included pre-crit. The stroke outlining the words that scroll through was also removed so that the final company logo and tagline stood out more clearly. The final change was a simple spelling mistake in the word 'Shepherd', something I didn't notice until submission day and wasn't picked up by anyone during the crit.

Here is how my promo looked once these changes were applied:

Pre Crit Promo

This is what I will be submitting for crit:

The main things I will be looking for feedback on overall feel, pace and soundtrack.

First Keying and Tracking Experiment

I decided to experiment with the idea of using live footage as my framing for the dynamic visualisation of my app, with the purpose of showing it working in its in intended environment. To achieve this I used a combination of mocha and After Effects. First I filmed my hands holding and manipulating my iPhone with a completely green screen, to make it possible to key-out later. That clip was then trimmed to a few seconds and imported into mocha for After Effects so that I could motion track it. Once in mocha, I used the Create x-Spline tool to circle the iPhone and define it as the area to be tracked. The program was then left to track forwards and then backwards through the clip to define the areas it will work with. The Planar Surface tool was then used to set up the 'flat' surface that the image will then be paired with it, with minor corrections being made using keyframing to keep it on track. Below is what I ended up with at this point:

Once all the tracking was completed the corner point data was copied from mocha and pasted into the timeline of the Bishops Finger layer as keyframes. After slight adjusting using the anchor point tool the image is the aligned and skewed to match the iPhone screen. The Keylight tool was then used to remove the green from the iPhone screen and let the Bishops Finger image show from below my finger. Here is the clip before the process:

And after:

Evaluation: Overall the test achieved what I set out to do but the visuals were a bit lacking. I think the tracking looks a little skew but I didn't want to invest hours on something that wouldn't be used, when it comes to the final outcome I think I will be able to correct the tracking so that it looks much more realistic. It also isn't too obvious on the resolution of the YouTube video but when played back in After Effects the extreme sharpness of the graphic on the screen didn't match the slight, natural blur of the video. This will be corrected using a simulated lens blur as well as a bit of colour correction to make it tie-in visually with its surroundings and ambient light.

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.