Helen.

@hdaviesreflectiveblog

Reflections on work and words at University. DMC Motion Graphics Professional Development

125 posts

DMC – Self Directed Evaluation

I was quite sceptical about this module, mainly because I wasn’t all that confident about motion graphics. However, this project has been really interesting. I’ve definitely learnt new things, like using Adobe Premier and I’ll definitely be teaching myself more about that programme now. It’s also been really useful to use all the photography equipment and have to make decisions about every shot. I’m become a lot more aware of how to find good angles and how to frame things when photographing and that is always going to be useful.

As for making the whole stop motion, it’s been a good experience. Until making the first letter stop motion, I hadn’t every made one before. It’s something I think it’s a good skill to have. I’d like to do more of it, making things and getting hands on with making things rather than being on a computer can get pretty lost when doing graphics so to be able to do that also would be great.

It was good to work in a small team, although that wasn’t originally part of the brief, it’s good to have that experience as it helps team skills which everyone in this industry will need. It was helpful too because we could help each other and show each other how to do things which probably meant I learnt things faster than if I was working on my own.

I’m very happy with the three videos, I think the framing and lighting work well and the song choices were good. However, one thing I wish we could have done is record our own sounds for the video. I realised literally last minute that I could have had a friend play guitar that we could have recorded, that would have been fun to try. Plus then we wouldn’t have struggled with finding music as we could come up with the sound we’d want. That’s one thing I would change, if we were to do it again.

20 Second Sting FINAL

This is our final 20 second video. I think this is the best of the three, the synchronisation of the movement with the music – especially the last few seconds – is almost perfect. Also the shadows that appear on the word ‘Motion’ at the end as ‘Exhibition’ rises, adds a nice change in the pace. Maybe we should have put some of the letters lowering and at different speeds but considering the music, it just felt like they should all be rising, it feels like it should lead up to that. I’m really happy with this one. We did try with some lowering but it just didn’t look right, it made the question why there were the odd few lowing, so I think the decision for every clip to be the letters rising was the right decision.

10 Second Sting FINAL

This is our final 10 second video. I think the music works so well with this one, especially the timing of the first letter that falls flat. It’s a simple little video (with a whole lot of hours behind it) and the music just adds to that. I think possibly it’s missing the reveal of the full type, and maybe it needs that. But considering it as a set with the other two, it works as a teaser to the full 20 second video that shows everything. This video is more focusing on the mechanics so you’d go on to watch the longer video. It’s a little frustrating that it’s quite shaky but that comes with the territory of stop motion and if it were completely smooth it would look like a video and so making it as a stop motion would have been pointless.

5 Second Sting FINAL

This is our final 5 second video. I’m actually really happy with it. I think the music works together with the imagery really well, especially the fade in and the sound. It was really difficult to make this one look nice because we only had 5 seconds. To be able to get all we wanted into just 5 seconds was tricky because we had to figure out what we wanted to show and how to make it look good. We wanted all the videos to have a similar structure of close ups and then the reveal of the full type, but that was pretty impossible for this one. We realised that as it was only 5 seconds, we needed to be straight to the point with showing what we had created. The slow fade in and out makes it feel like a teaser to a longer film and I really like that, because that’s what it is I guess, it’s a snippet of the full creation.

20 Second Sting TEST

This is our 20 second video but with a different song that we tried it with. I think the song is a too usual; it makes the video seem confusing because the track isn’t very simple. We wanted to find a track that sounded nice but had one or two different sounds in there to add a little twist on the video but I think this one is too far fetched to work with the flow of it.

10 Second Sting TEST

This is another version of our 10 second video but with a different music track that we tried. I really didn’t like the track mainly because it didn’t fit with the others. Also because it just sounds too rushed and a little annoying. It completely changes the feel of the video. Definite no in my opinion, but we had to try to make sure!

10 second sting TEST

This is not our final 10 second video. This is a version with one of the songs we first tried. I like the actual video and how we put it together but I think the song here makes the whole thing feel a little too structured. It is a bit abrupt and doesn’t flow as smoothly as it should, considering the close up shots and how we want it to look. Also the music didn’t really fit, in my opinion, with the tracks we chose for the final versions of the other two video, and I wanted them to sound quite similar so they’d work as a set.

DMC - Self Directed

Choosing music is a nightmare, and can be even more of a nightmare when it's two people with different opinions on how it should sound. Luckily we both agreed on the basis of it needing to be just a backing track that wasn't too loud or well known. It couldn't take over the video and distract the attention from the actual stop motion, but it needed to work nicely with the movement of the letters. Also, Luke figured out pretty quickly my 'no way' expression when we were going through loads of different tracks, so that made the whole thing a little easier.

Some of the music we looked at and considered:

Brian Eno (sound cloud search);

An Ending https://soundcloud.com/elf-city/brian-eno-an-ending

Dreams Nails https://soundcloud.com/search?q=brian%20eno

Dreams Nails https://soundcloud.com/search?q=brian%20eno

The Who;

Baba O’Riley https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2KRpRMSu4g

Ben Howard;

Esmerelda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYUKsRL-YBM

Burgh Island https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqULZjSYo5w

Kasabian;

Ovary Stripe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJE59vLXdzk

Secret Alphabets https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApkAD_J89Ac

Pinch Roller https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqzfP4k0o14

Underdog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gw09tAcNB0Q

DMC - Self Directed

A lot of the inspiration for the look of the stop motion, for me, came from the ‘Going West’ stop motion created by Andersen M Studio for the NZ Book Council. That was something we originally looked at before creating the letters. I also looked at the stop motion created for Pottermore.com, which is very similar. Below is a screenshot which reflects the idea I wanted for our final video, to have the close up shots with the short depth of field. It adds an intensity to the video which is far more interesting an engaging that had everything in the shot been in focus. I also really like the long shadows, as the shadows change in each picture you take at the paper moves. We tried to have shadows in our final video but it didn’t work how we wanted as they caused a distraction too much from the actual words.

DMC - Self Directed

I’m not the best skilled at Adobe Premiere Pro, but Luke showed me the stuff I didn’t know so that I could help with creating the actual videos once we had the photographs. The main part of the process was changing the speed of the clips, reversing some, and cropping and scaling parts of it. Then it was just the case of finding music and fitting the movement of the letters to the music. I was a little bossy during this, but it’s always important to try all the different ideas to make sure you finish with the best possible outcome. Below is some screen shots of the things I did with the video, cropping it down, changing putting the fade on the music – this was something that actually took far more consideration than you’d probably expect. Getting the right amount of fade and for the right length of time for it actually to work smoothly and not seem abrupt takes a lot more different tests that I originally thought.

When considering what kind of music to use, I wanted to find something with the same kind of sound as the start of this song (the first minute) that soft, pretty guitar sound, because it seems like it would be a nice fit with the music. The footage for the stop motion, along with the material that the letters are made out of, seems quite soft and intricate so this sound would match more than something fast/loud.

DMC - Self Directed

I’m not the best skilled at Adobe Premiere Pro, but Luke showed me the stuff I didn’t know so that I could help with creating the actual videos once we had the photographs. The main part of the process was changing the speed of the clips, reversing some, and cropping and scaling parts of it. Then it was just the case of finding music and fitting the movement of the letters to the music. I was a little bossy during this, but it’s always important to try all the different ideas to make sure you finish with the best possible outcome.

This is us getting frustrated because song choices are difficult, especially being able to get a copy of one to use. We tried to find some music using the royalty free music I use for my videos usually, but the terms have changed so we had to find an alternative instead!

DMC - Self Directed

Filming day. This was an incredibly long day, but totally worth it. The card was put in the middle of the table, and we created a backdrop with black paper, and set up three Canon 700D cameras. Two of the cameras were arranged at the end of the table looking directly on to the card, one higher than the other so it had move of an overview of the letters, while the lower one was pretty much as table level so the words would rise in front of each other. The other camera was set up in different places throughout the day as we used it for the macro shots, the other two had to stay in the same place to ensure that the face on shots would be in the same place throughout the video. The exposure on all the cameras was set so it was slightly under exposing the scene so that the letters rose into the light, it looked pretty.

DMC - Self Directed

Test day. Testing the different angles and lighting before we actually shoot for the final stop motion. This meant I spent hours sat on the tables (because I’m too small to reach across the paper) moving each letter a few millimetres while Luke took the photos. Surprisingly it was not fun, the final video will make it worth it though. We had one of us moving the letters while the other took the photos, mainly because I knew exactly how much I was moving each letter and it would be pretty stressful trying to both be as precise as each other, and also because it was far easier and quicker than moving a letter, and then getting up to take the photo constantly.

Figuring out the lighting took a while because there’s so many different angles it could be put, and we found that when we put it low down it created a nice shadow across the table but that meant that when the letters rose, the shadows interrupted the look of the letters, whereas we had thought that they’d add some nice effects within the video – and that is why testing is important, to find these things out before you actually film!

DMC - Self Directed

Here’s some sketchbook work where I considered camera angles for the video. It’s important to consider how each part of the video will work so that we know what angles to have the camera when taking the photos because it takes such a long time to even get one set of movements, that camera angles really need to be thought about prior to the day of filming. I like the idea of having close ups because, with a short depth of field, we can put the focus on the mechanism before revealing the actual words.

DMC - Self Directed

We considered lots of different ways to create the letters, and were going to have each word being made differently as it could be really interesting as a video. However after a lot of ideas and some testing of different ways we could create paper letters, we decided that rather than having a lot of differently created letters, moving differently, it would flow better if we just stuck with the original idea for the movement. If each word was made differently, it wouldn’t really fit together very well, as it wouldn’t make sense, plus we don’t know how the different ways would work. But with the original idea of the letters standing from being flat, we know how to do it, and we know how to make the movement work so, considering the time scale too, we decided that all the letters will move in that way, but at different speeds.

DMC - Self Directed

For the self directed brief, me and Luke have decided to continue with the stop motion paper letters as it would be nice to expand on that because it could make for a really nice video. It made sense for us to do the three short videos for the Fact Type Motion Exhibition. This is some of my sketchbook work, coming up with ideas for the movement of the letters and what we could do differently to make the videos really interesting.

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