Motion Graphics Research

Examples

Citroen C4

John Lewis Christmas Advert 2013 - The Bear & The Hare

Danger Mouse, Daniele Luppi: Two Against One

Sony- Two Wolds

Pixar- The Blue Umbrella

Citroen C4 - Transformer.

The Commercial for the Citroen C4 sees the car sitting on a rooftop carpark, minding its own business. Suddenly it rears up, Its back doors become legs, its wheels become arms and its bonnet becomes a chest; it is nothing less than a Transformer.
This advert was purely focused on the Citroen C4 car and its advanced technology, it has become a well-known television advertising campaign showing the car transforming into a giant dancing robot, accompanied by the song "Jacques Your Body (Make Me Sweat)" by electronic dance-pop outfit, Les Rythmes Digitales, Marty Kudelka, with motion sensors placed all over his body to record every move. At the end of the sequence, the robot transforms back into a car which is over the slogan "Alive With Technology". The entire sequence of this advert was digitally created; Apple Shake was used to digitally generate the visual effects.
The purpose of this sequence was to show the Citroen's heritage of style and cheekiness, also being one of a kind commercial with a very thoughtful and well motivated idea.
I think this advert is very well done and very powerful towards the viewers, it shows a form of futuristic technology and a strong sense of science fiction. I believe that the advert is at a perfect length, if it was any longer i think the impact that it would have on it's viewers would be less.

John Lewis Christmas Advert 2013 - The Bear & The Hare.

In order to achieve this complicated combination of animation techniques, the whole film was first created in as 3D previsualization  animatic with all the sets and characters built to scale. This allowed everything to be developed and planned alongside the model makers and animators, thus integrating the different disciplines and processes before the set was build or the characters were printed.
The 2D animation frames which was nearly 4,000, were printed onto mounted paper and cut with a laser. Feature-film stop frame animators, then spent 6 weeks bringing the world to life. in a whole, this advert has amazing animation technique combining 2D and 3D, all with stop motion animation.
>Here< is an example of the 2D and 3D animation taking place.
This was a very effective form of advertisement since it grabbed allot of attention and was very unique at the time of it's release which was very eye catching and family orientated for Christmas.
My thoughts on this advert are very strong since i do favor the techniques used here. The animation using stop motion and 3D models really adds an impact to the story portrayed, making the story even more eye catching and beautiful. At first glance of this advert i thought that it was all done in 2D with possible 3D graphical software used for the backgrounds and props, but as i dug deeper in the making of this short i came to discover a underrated and very powerful technique which did eventually impact the viewers greatly.


Danger Mouse, Daniele Luppi - Two Against One ft. Jack White.

This music video was created for a band called Danger Mouse, it is shown as being brooding with cinematic orchestrations and twisted tales of madness and depressions, one of the 2011's most surprising and arresting releases. Directed by Chris Milk and Anthony Francisco Scheppard that features Schepperd's stunning animations. The stark, mostly black and white images twist and morph into sometimes hideous, blood-stained figures, reminiscent of the avant-garde work of illustrator Gerald Scarfe.
Two Against One is a hand-drawn/sketched cell animation, the film would become live action as it is essentially the fever dream of the antagonist of the story.
I found this music video to be very dark and meaningful, the sketchy techniques and dull, simple colours gave a very emotional feeling but at the same time wanting me to keep watching until the very end, it proved to be very eye catching for viewers.


Sony Two Worlds.

Spy films director Arev Manoukian and Spy3D produce a global stereoscopic 3D commercial for Sony. "Two Wolds" was initially inspired by Manoukian's celebrated short film, Nuit Blanche. What Sony wanted to do for this advert was find something that emotionally catches the power of 3D, they wanted the viewer to experience the feeling of wanting to get physically closer to the things they love and to make it more real. They spent most of their planning figuring out how it would work best in stereo 3D, So after they decided on the idea they did an animatic to illustrate how it would work in a 60 second format and from there that developed into their previsualization. The whole world of the film was created digitally so they began with getting the lightening just right the first time, because they where shooting at extreme slow motion speeds between 500 and 2500 frames per second so the lighting was indeed valuable so they where using half a million watts of power for their lighting. They used lots of organic elements such as smoke and debris and sparks and books. These real elements where there to compliment the otherwise one hundred percent CG environment and serve as a reference for the visual artists. Everything seen on the scene was meticulously modeled and rendered in 3D with no mat paintings or any image projections because they wanted to create the most physically accurate world so it looks flawless when the viewers see it in 3D.
When first seeing this advert i was very surprised at how emotional it came across, the graphics where crisp clean but flowed softly throughout the 60 seconds. I believe that it was nicely put together with the best 3D visual graphics, leaving me wanting to see more.

Pixar's- The Blue Imbrella.

Pixar had many steps to create this very emotional and beautiful short story, they started with inspirations, such as the "City Faces" that are seen throughout the clip, giving emotions and personalities. Also the umbrella himself was inspired by a moment in one of the creators life when on a rainy day they walked through the city when they saw a broken umbrella lying in the gutter in front of them, they described that moment as one of the saddest things in the whole world, with the overwhelming feeling of sadness that should "just" have been an object. They started to plan the story by using story boards which leaded into a story reel which was animated with 2D cell animation which was created with sounds but no words.  Once the story reel started to be roughly representative of the location that they chose they started to create their first rough CG model of the set. They first collected references taking photo's and sketches, which perfected their CG version of the "Singing City" that they needed for their entire shot. They decided to treat the city characters as if they are pixilation or stop motion animation since they felt that that characters would not feel cohesive and slightly off if materials like stone, cement and rusty metal that would just transform and squash and stretch. So they purposefully used held frames in their animation to have their movement convey a rougher and more jerky feel that would be more in tune with the material they are made of. I thought this short movie was very moving and beautifully done, making the scenery look truly realistic using CG that you wouldn't even realize that it was all animated. I couldn't find a way that they could improve it since it was created as a short but making the watchers want to see more as it progressed into the story.


Frame rate, also known as frames per second (FPS) is when an imaging device produces unique consecutive images called frames, devices such as computer graphics, film and video can create this. In the motion picture industry where traditional film stock is used, the industry standard filming and projection formats are 24 FPS. Shooting at a slower frame rate would create a fast motion effect when projected, but shooting at a frame rate higher then 24 FPS would create a slow motion effect when projected. Frames rates in video games refer to the speed at which the image is refreshed in FPS, Many underlying processes such as collision detection and network processing, run at different frequencies or in different components of a computer. FPS effect the experience in two ways: low FPS does not give the illusion of motion effectively and affects the user's capacity to interact with the game, while FPS that vary substantially from one second the the next can produce uneven, choppy movement or animation. Many games have their frame rate at lower but more sustainable levels to give smooth motion.
Video formats involve two very different technology concepts such as containers and codecs. Containers describe the structure of the file: where various pieces are stored, how they are interleaved and while codecs are used by which pieces. It is used to package the video and its components and is identified by a file extension such as .AVI, .MP4 or .MOV. A codec is a way of encoding audio or video into a stream of bytes. Video format is known simply as an electronic medium for the recording, copying and broadcasting of moving visual images.