Customer Success Story - OpenGenius Seedrs Campaign

Last month I was delighted to see that OpenGenius had successfully completed a crowdfunded investment round of $1 million for their company to spearhead the development of their digital workspace software - Ayoa. I have worked with Open Genius a number of times to design marketing material for their software. Most recently I was taken with developing the final edit of the video that would be put front-and-centre on their Seedrs campaign to pitch the software to potential investors.

I was responsible for taking stock footage, previous Ayoa marketing materials - including some I had produced in the past - and tying them together into a new edit complete with new pieces of animation that depict future features. It was a collaborative effort with the company fine-tuning the video to best represent their brand and ideas.

Overall, I am thrilled our combined efforts have enabled OpenGenius to embark on the next stage of their journey!

Picturing Wildlife

I was very excited to collaborate with filmmaker Phil Duncan last year in creating a teaser trailer for his upcoming series - Picturing Wildlife. Phil approached me with his idea of creating a series examining the history of the human depiction of animals, all the way from ancient cave paintings to smartphone-powered augmented reality. As a preliminary step to realising his vision, Phil approached me to create a teaser trailer featuring a fly-through of historical and modern animal imagery.

It was a challenging but highly rewarding project, featuring a breadth of motion graphics techniques. One focus of attention on the project was taking old paintings and posters and reconstructing them into 2.5D projections which could be flown through with a virtual camera. This brought a new dimension of life to these classic images, emphasising the new perspective that Phil was going to be presenting in his series.

It was also a fun opportunity to apply some compositing techniques including integration and colour correction in certain scenes, including the cave paintings animation towards the start the sequence.

With a filmmaking background, Phil was already very visually-orientated and brought a very well defined script to the table. At the onset of a project, a clear vision of what the client wants, in turn, streamlines the preproduction process making it easier for me to visualise the end-product. Overall, working with Phil on this project was a blast and I am looking forward to future collaborations.

PervasID demonstrate their next-generation technology

I recently completed a project for PervasID in collaboration with Szupernova to demonstrate their RFID reader technology. The client agreed that an isometric perspective style to the visuals would suit the technical nature of the product and I was happy to help design motion graphics for the project.

The timeline for this video was extremely tight. After creating and collecting the assets I got to work on animating it together and integrating Szupernova’s footage they had filmed with the client. I had well-defined requirements of how the product should be visualised I adhered to; it was important this was a functional but stylised representation. 

We successfully completed the project in time for the client’s on-stage debut presentation of their next-generation technology.

'WTF is Dovetail' wins award for Channel 4

I had the pleasure of working on ‘WTF is Dovetail’ for Channel 4 in collaboration with Acteon. The campaign won the ‘Excellence in Research Presentation' award at the Mediatel Media Research Awards last week. Our goal was to convey the next steps of Channel 4’s ‘4Sales’ tool Dovetail which informs advertisers of their advert’s performance across multiple platforms. The project involved multiple videos, animations and graphic design elements; I worked with Acteon to produce these visuals.

Motion graphics were used extensively to convey ideas and functions; the motion graphics provided complimentary visuals to the narration and script provided by Acteon. I produced these to be compliant with the client’s colour branding and visual identity, keeping a consistent look in the animation to other elements of their branding.

Alongside the animations and graphics I was tasked to video edit many aspects of the project as well. There was a particularly interesting instance where I was asked to use my visual effects skills to alter a clip from Channel 4’s ‘Countdown’ changing the famous letter board to spell out ‘Dovetail.’

This was a fun opportunity to practice several integration practices. I started by taking a still from the video clip to give me a base image to work with. I then removed one of the letters towards the centre and moved the left and right sides of the images closer together to make sure the wide angled perspective on each side of the remained symmetrical. I then painted in the missing parts of the side that this process created. I tracked down a similar font to the one used for the letters and inserted new ones and tilted them to the correct perspective. There were thankfully a couple of opportunities to simply move letters from the old sequence instead of creating new ones. I then added blur, shadows and artifcating to ensure the new letters appeared integrated. Finally, I added a grain effect onto of everything to make it appear that the new letters appeared to actually be part of the original footage.

I had a lot of fun working with Channel 4 and Acteon and hope to do so again soon in the future! You can find Acteon’s press release for this project and related award here:

https://www.acteoncommunication.com/stories/2019-02-22_01.html

The Difficulty In Defining Motion Graphics For Clients

Motion graphics is a term that very broadly defines animation and moving imagery for use in media projects. From a purely technical definition almost all animation could be included under the term, but that is evidently not reflective of many businesses’ and designers’ intent when discussing motion graphics.

Simply put - Many clients want motion graphics services but might not be able to define that term precisely when they are requesting services from designers. Here is a list of some of the in-video subjects motion graphics work can include:

• 2D animation

• 3D animation

• Character animation

• Lower thirds

• GUI pre-visulation

• Graphic design

• Illustration

• Compositing CGI ontop of live video

• Motion tracking

• Particle systems

• Video editing

• Visual effects

• Green Screen keying / compositing

• Animated typography

• Animated infographics

• Animated logos / logo sting

• And much more.

Watch my showreel for real world examples of many of these put into action.

Legendary designer and pioneer of motion graphics, Saul Bass lay the groundwork for modern-day motion graphics by weaving underlying meaning and intent behind the motion and form of the imagery being displayed. His title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Vertigo’ is a prime example of writing the film’s psychological themes and a visual representation of the sensation of vertigo into the moving imagery.

Title sequence for Alfred Hitchcock's film 'Vertigo' created by Saul Bass.

The term has risen in popularity in recent times in parallel to software packages that allow the creation of digital animation relatively inexpensively when compared to previous very time consuming methods of animation (such as frame-by-frame cell drawings). Software such as Adobe After Effects and Cinema 4D have been prominent; the digital, non-destructive nature of motion graphics software has enabled a myriad of new art styles to emerge hence their popularity with designers.

‘Stardust Experiments’ by Fried Pixels demonstrates the abstract, impossible imagery that motion graphics software enables.

The large utility of these software suites also accommodate more illustrative and descriptive types of animation. One such style of video is dubbed the ‘explainer video’ which is used to depict a product, service, subject or operation and their functions. Clients have found great benefit using these types of videos for their own services and products.

‘Fracking Explained’ by Kurzgesagt

The animated diagrams and inferred meaning behind each movement is monumentally useful and informative for depicting subjects to audiences. Explainer videos still fall under the umbrella of motion graphics, but the latter term encompasses many skills and design disciplines that clients will also find valuable. A motion graphics designer could assist in the creation of a 2D animation but may also be able to provide assistance with video editing and branding, for example.

In my experience I have found some smaller clients to be requesting the services of an animator when an motion graphics artist would be more applicable. This is one example where the client knows what they want but isn’t using a term that might not immediately connect them to the right person.

Universities and other designers generally understand the term motion graphics while those that require them - the clients - might not. This is especially true for clients who are generally not involved in the media industry. The dichotomy has made marketing one’s self as a motion graphics artist somewhat difficult, as clients who require your service don’t know what terms they might need to search for to find you. As motion graphic designers can we can only hope to try and broadly market ourselves as being involved in animation, graphic design and visual effects.

Let's Begin

After a week or so my website is now fully developed! I suppose the first post on this blog is a good opportunity to give some insight into me and where I'm going.

After working at a video production company in Cambridgeshire for over a year I decided I was in a good position to explore freelancing. Having done it a few times in the past I was excited to see what I could do for clients after gaining valuable experience working alongside other designers and a talented production team.

I've always been interested in animation from a young age, but it's taken me a while to define exactly what genre of animation I wanted to move into. Like many teens who grew up with the internet in the late 90's and 2000's I was exposed to a lot of emerging media formats, particularly 'flash' animation. Macormedia Flash was an animation program almost single-handedly created a new generations of designers and animators and gave them an easy format to share their creations online. Many of these creations were gaming-orientated which exposed me to this breed of media from a young age. I experimented with it, which eventually led me to conventional video creation at the same time amateur visual effects (VFX) designers began posting their experiments online. I followed this path which introduced me to Adobe After Effects, the crème de la crème software package for motion graphics which could also be used to generate the compelling VFX which drew me to it in the first place. 

In sixth-form I used After Effects to create a VFX heavy music video for my final project. This proved to be my ticket to study Visual Effects and Motion Graphics at the University of South Wales. This is where I was fully immersed into the world of Motion Graphics and discovered my passion for visual-communication focused animation. At the same time I was learning all about the world of VFX, which has provided me which a broad skillet that allows me to not only create animation from scratch but also manipulate video with the same techniques used in Hollywood movies. 

Now I am freelancing full-time with these skills and I'm eager to start solving design problems and engaging audiences with great animation. Let's see where this road takes us!