M G Blog

You are one of a team of Motion-Graphic specialists who have been commissioned to produce a 45 second web-based trailer for a Channel 4 ‘Inbetweeners–style television series based in Weymouth College.

Your target audience for this project:

Gender – Male and Female. Race – All. Age – 16-24 Socio-Economic Status – C1/C2/D

Treatment

The short motion graphic trailer is going to be about three students that signify their own personal talent. There will be a girl who will show the characteristics of being an artist, drawing on a tablet and having cartoon/anime like activities occur in the trailer to signify her imagination and talent. There will be a boy who will always be seen playing some form of game, for example a PSP will be in his hands and his body will always been stiff and still while his fingers move constantly as he pushes buttons, this will show his dedication and passion for gaming which will symbolize his talent. There will also be a girl who will be seen using a laptop, she’ll be typing constantly on it to show her passion for coding which will also be shown with short snippets of coding being written in the backgrounds of the trailer, this is to show her talent for creating coding.

My motion graphic piece is aimed at adults for the “Anime/Comic” style that I drew it in, but also can appeal to a younger audience between the ages of 16-24 and for both genders. I first started working on designing the 2D Stop motion using a anime-like character to run across a wall, creating fifteen frames for it to run smoothly once animated. I drew the character with each frame using a program called Paint Tool Sai, similar to Photoshop, then after printing I cut out each frame and held them up against the wall with blu-Tack. Using a Digital Stills camera to take an image of each frame, I move the character along the wall by switching the cut out frames.

This is a scan of our original idea for our motion graphic piece.

This is our storyboards

Copyright

Copyright is a law that states that any work or idea that has been created belongs to the rightful owner and creator. Any profits or credit from the produce goes to the rightful owner of it and the work cannot be copied, changed or remade without the rightful owner’s consent or they could risk getting sued. This law is immoral in some people’s viewpoints. These people believe that work should be free and it is unfair to keep people from working together and promoting creativity and inspiration through others’ work. This common view created the Creative Commons association which I shall discuss further on in this essay. Associated with the copyright laws are the three moral rights that further protect ownership of work.

The three moral rights include:

The right of attribution – the creator of the work has the right to be identified as such. This means that any work you create can have your name or alias placed upon it or tagged with it so people know who owns and has created this work.

The right of integrity – the work may not be altered or changed without consent. An example of this could be when a musician decided to adapt an album created and produced by the band The White Stripes. The musician put a bass track over all the songs and then re-released it under a new title but still featuring the band’s name. There was a lot of controversy of this issue as to whether or not the musician had permission to do this. But luckily, the musician happened to meet Jack White, a member of The White Stripes, and Jack said that it was okay for the musician to do what he did. This is a rare case. Not all people are lucky enough to meet the people who produced work they would like to adapt, or lucky enough to contact them to make sure that what they are doing is legal and right.

Lastly, False attribution – the work cannot be attributed to a creator falsely. This means that the real creator must be stated. Anyone who steals work from another creator or author cannot, by law, attach their name to the work in-question.

Copyright is heavily included in any industry, especially the media industry. Because it is such a creative industry, everything made and born into it is protected by copyright. This means that when working in this industry in the future, I cannot copy existing work or use or change it in any way (for example, a game idea, music, designs etc.) unless the work is under Creative Commons.

Creative Commons are an association based in California that oppose the copyright law so they created their own laws that state when creators and people want their work to be shared and used in any way. The creative commons licences that you can use include, Attribution – this allows other people to use, change, tweak and adapt your work as long as they give you original credit. Another licence is Attribution-NoDerivs, this license allows for redistribution, commercial and non-commercial, as long as it is passed along unchanged and in whole, with credit to you.

For my motion graphics project i must not use or copy any work already produced if i am to publish or release it publicly. If i use any work that has already been released in my project i must credit it at some point in the feature. Otherwise i could risk getting sued, also any music i use must be credited.

Ethics

The industry that we are working in is very male dominated, yet in our group we have two females which we find brings a nice variation in the work environment. We believe that everyone should be treated equal no matter what race or gender and we will portray them equally. 

Research
Motion/Techniquemotion technique using cutouts

I used a very popular advert created for the company John Lewis called The Bear & The Hare. They created this beautiful advert with simple cutouts and additional touch-ups for effects. In order to achieve this complicated combination of animation techniques for my project, the whole film was created against a live backdrop with the character drawn to scale, thus integrating the different disciplines and processes before the set was filmed or the character was printed.

The 2D animation frames which was 15, were printed onto mounted paper and cut . Being the only animator, i then spent 2 weeks bringing the character to life. in a whole, this was all about the animation technique combining 2D and 3D, all with stop motion animation.

Animation

Cell animation

I looked into an animation called The blue umbrella created by Pixar. It 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, giving emotions and personalities to certain objects. They started to plan the story by using storyboards which leaded into a story reel which was then animated with 2D cell animation. 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. This was quite relevant to my own animation since i used heavy research for the character i was eventually going to use, which turned out to be my graphics logo character. I then sketched out all of my frames for the run cycle and followed it up with reassurance from the group and cleaning up the art to finish the final frames.

A screen capture of a work in progress of the running girl.

Me and Adam working on the stop motion animation of the running girl in our film.