Analysis of The Fedrigoni Brand

 In order to better understand the overall brand I would be developing my idea for, I chose to do a bit of research on Fedrigoni. The have been operating since 1888 and are based in Italy. The main brand feel is one of great heritage, but also innovation and cutting edge products. The specific brand is part of a wider group the specialise in all aspects of paper, including the divisions Fedrigoni, Fabriano, Sadipal, Arconvert and Manter. The portion made up by the Fedrigoni division is as follows:

Within their product range, most of the emphasis is on paper for digital printing and publishing.

This information won't directly inform my creative processes and design decisions, but it will be helpful to keep in mind the standing and overall feel of the company. 

Proof of Concept

Before fully committing to my idea I decided to mock up a quick plan of my final design and test out the origami aspect of it. First I folded up the design (Yoshizawa Butterfly) on regular cartridge paper:

I then unfolded the paper and scanned it so I could get the exact location of the fold lines for my design.

Once I had the scan I imported it into Illustrator and used the pen tool to fill in each 'facet' of the finished model in differing shades of the same colour palate.

I then printed the design out on regular cartridge paper, cut the square portion out and then folded the origami model again. This is how the final product came out:

 Overall I really pleased with how my test went. It worked exactly as I wanted it to and reassures me that my idea will work in the real world. My only concern at this stage is the weight of the WoodStock paper that I need to promote being too heavy, making folding intricate designs much harder.

Origami

For my desktop calender idea I need to find several Origami designs that are simple enough follow instructions and make with small paper, but are interesting enough that people actually want to make them. The first model I found is called the Yoshizawa Butterfly, which fulfils al of my criteria. Below is what the finished design should look like:

Final Idea

Even though I would've been happy doing any of my ideas, through a process of elimination I decided to pursue my Fedrigoni desk calender idea. I ruled out my Marriot idea as it would rely too heavily on photography I don't have time to travel to many different locations and carry out. I didn't want most of my idea just to be someone else's photography with some text placed onto it. Eastpak was scrapped because the nature of the brief meant that most people would home to the same conclusion/concept, but carried out via a different media each time. I wanted to make sure that my idea remained reasonably competitive without follow a pre-destined route. LTA was also not an option for the same reasons as the Marriot brief, and they also didn't want the campaign to only be print.

I think the Fedrigoni brief will allow me to think creatively as well as provide a little more freedom in terms of time scale as I think it should take me less time then most of the others.

Initial Ideas

After looking through the YCN brief list several times I came up with a few ideas to explore;

Eastpak:
For this brief Eastpak wanted a campaign that reinforces their brand story and emphasises the high quality of the products. My idea for this project would be to create a print campaign showing turning points of the last 30 years with someone wearing an Eastpak bag, with the tagline; 'Eastpak, Always There'

Marriot:

Marriot want to attract a new younger audience to their brand, using them to inform and shape what they do using a website they created. To do this, I would use an in-hotel vinyl sticker to replace the existing view out the window with one from another hotel, the words 'Share Your View' along with a QR code to the website would be present.

LTA British Tennis:
The British Lawn Tennis Association want more female and lapsed players to start playing again. My idea is to have really well photographed everyday scenes with tennis equipment place in the foreground.

Fedrigoni:
The brief from this company is to create a desktop calender to promote their Woodstock range of recycled paper. I want to create a calender that tears off when each month is finished and turned into an origami sculpture.

YCN Brief

YCN is a design agency, which describes itself as ‘Producing work across all media and representing the finest creative people for commissions and collaborations’. They say of themselves that ‘YCN today produces advertising, design and other creative communications in all media; both for its own projects and ventures, and on behalf its various clients’. They are a ‘group of designers, art directors, developers, writers, illustrators and project managers work together at 72 Rivington Street in London’. They also run an annual competition which offers students the chance to fulfill creative briefs from a range of high profile clients and enter that work in a competition. ‘The YCN Student Awards shine a light on new creative talent, and centre on a collection of live creative briefs’

So far since starting this course, this brief has been the one that has excited me most of all. The fact that we have to pick from 20 different briefs over a wide range of disciplines and client profiles is something that I've found both challenging and extremely stimulating so far. 

So far my initial thoughts are to try and stray away from the obvious choices for me and try to step further out of my comfort zone. Another is to make sure I choose a brief/method of fulfilling a brief that fits within the time constraints of our schedule, rather than a much lengthier idea that can only be  accomplished in the full time scale as set by YCN (March 27th, rather than February 10th).

 

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.