Monday 3 March 2014

"Talents" Motion Graphics Video

The Brief

I am part 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.

Target audience for this project:

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

As our target audience is of the ages of 16 to 24, we have decided to implement teenagers stereotypes while keeping the intro colorful and fast paced for the active young minds, we are presenting elements of each characters individual talents, most of which are highly possible to be relate-able for the audience. Using visual effects I will be able to visually exaggerate the characters abilities, so we will have an artistic character who will be drawing magnificent artwork with ease, a intellectual programmer capable of many virtual things and a gaming expert who can master any game in a short amount of time. We will be using a lot of techniques and effects to boost visual appeal, 1 we'll be focusing on getting is a rotoscope to fit in with some of the hand drawn sketches / pictures we will be using. Along with the sketches we are going to have a stop motion animation using a drawn character cut out from printed pieces of paper. We will be having the sketches and drawings in an anime-like style as we believe this will appeal to our target audience who have grew up with anime and cartoons. Considering our audiences age we will probably go with fast paced, up beat music however this may change depending on how the opening turns out.

I should not be allowed to use a copyrighted work unless I get permission from its author/creator, unless it’s under some kind of license which allow for public use (Such as creative commons). I will probably be using custom text from the internet, this could possibly be a copyright problem if this were not a college project. Music could also be copyright protected material however there are sites you can find copyright free music. In the case we did use copyright protected music for commercial use we'd need to at least get the consent of the author and credit them. All of our ideas are not stolen, they are original, as well as the drawings which will be used, however like the music if they were not ours we'd need the consent of the creator and credit him/her. At the same time if we were doing this professionally we would not be allow to falsely attribute our work to a person, not involved in the creation of the project. A reason we would ever think of giving someone false credit for our work would be for example if the person was of more experience, that way we'd be promoting our product (Again, this is a wrong thing to do). 1 may think so however we are not allowed to take another persons work and edit it to "get past copyright", if we have permission to display / use their image, song, etc we are still not allowed to edit or alter their work without their permission to do so. Putting this in example for us, we could want to edit and use a certain music track with our film however we'd would need the authors permission for both use and allowance to edit.

We will be using high quality cameras thus I expect the resolution of the film to be 1920 x 1080, we will be recording 25 FPS, this will be the exported frame rate.

I will be using Adobe Photoshop for the editing of single frames, rotoscoping and background creation. Adobe After Effects for controlling the lighting and colour grade of  the footage, typography, zooms and other visual enhancements.
Adobe Premiere Pro will be used for piecing the film together as well as exporting the finished film.

Researching Techniques

Firstly I researched rotoscoping and how to accomplish it's effect. Through what I found you may use multiple filters in After Effects to achieve the effect however it will most likely not look as good as the manual way of doing it, which I have decided looks like a more appealing option. Doing it requires me to use Photoshop to select the characters, essentially extract them from whatever background and use layer blending options to gradually merge them with a solid colour. The problem I found looking into this technique is that you have to do it for every single frame, and considering our film is 25 frames per second doing just 1 second would require me to do the technique flawlessly 25 times. This is when I started looking into ways to speed up a repeated process and then I came across Actions. They are a way of recording and playing back your literal actions in Photoshop, even things you wouldn't expect like creating a new document / canvas. The only disadvantage I found is that they are incapable of certain actions, most of which involving tools which would be used with the hands and mouse, for example selecting with a magic wand brush is not record-able, neither is using the dodge tool or pen tool. For a moment I believed I had to make separate actions in-between times I had to such tools however after researching enough I found it possible to pause an action mid-way through, however this can only be done by putting a "stop" during the phase you're recording the action, meaning you'd have to perform the technique once while letting the action know it is incapable of doing a certain action and thus must stop for you to do it manually. While creating a stop you may also enter a message to remind you what you must do. Once you've done the task Photoshop cannot record you have to press the play button on the action panel to allow it to continue.