Wednesday 28 January 2009

More Test Pieces

Here are a couple more test pieces from this afternoon.



With this first test piece I wanted to animate the pedals so that they looked like they are turning and the perspective looked correct. I also put the handle bars and front wheel on a seperate layer and moved the anchor point so that it is easy to animate and make the bars look as though they are turning.


This is a very early test piece for number 1 the timing is about right but I'm not really happy with the sound and colours so that will be a problem I have to solve soon.

Tuesday 27 January 2009

Test Pieces

After spending this morning completing the storyboarding of my entire 50 second title sequence I used this afternoon to create a few quick test pieces. The title sequence is for an E4 program called Great British Bike Rides.



With this test piece I was seeing how I could animate a bike. I put all the moving parts on separate layers in illustrator, then when I opened the file in After Effects it was relatively easy to make them all move by rotating them around their anchor points. Mike showed me how to add an expression, which is basically a piece of code, that meant that all the movements would loop and basically go on as long as I decide to make the composition.



With this piece I just wanted to see how easy it was to sync the speed that the wheels turn to how fast the bike moves across the background.



Here I was seeing how easy it was to make a 'rolling road' so the bike could remain stationary in the frame and the background would move. I used the same expression code on the background so that it would loop and keep going for the length on the composition.

Sunday 18 January 2009

Bike Videos

I have been looking at some bike related videos and animations.


You will probably remember this orange ad. Technically its way out of my league but in terms of mood and tone of voice I really like it, I might consider a similar feel for my animation.


Cool bike animation probably made on after effects.


I really like the way they have animated hand rendered elements on this, probably using a program like after effects.


This is a cool stop frame animation where bikes put themselves together and take themselves apart again, I would really like to do some stop frame animation and was considering doing it for this project.

Sunday 11 January 2009

Research

So I've conducted a few different types of research for this best and worst brief. My chosen topic is BIKES. The first thing I did was to go around York and photograph 100 bikes, here I have catagoriesed the 10 best and 10 worst.

Here are the 10 best

10 Worst (CLICK TO VIEW LARGER)


The next piece of research I did was to obtain the list of bicycles available from a local bike shop, Cycle Heaven, I then catagoriesed 100 of their bikes from best to worst and traced all of them. In order to differenciate between the best and worst bikes on the stock list I spent only 10 seconds tracing the very worst bikes going up, in incriments, to 5 minutes to trace the best ones.

This is one of the worst bikes and only took 10 seconds to draw.


This is one of the best bikes available in Cycle Heaven and I spent 5 minutes drawing it.

All 100 bikes (CLICK TO VIEW LARGER)

Top 10 Bikes with their specs. (CLICK TO VIEW LARGER).

Saturday 10 January 2009

Research

In my research I looked at some vintage bicycle adverts, I think they are very rich source of visual research. I really like the typography on them, they have some great illustrations which are very much of their time and they are all fairly witty and entertaining.

Over 100 bike related postcards


Here are my personal top 10:










Thursday 8 January 2009

E4 Idents

There are a load of E4 stings/idents on youtube I get the impression a lot of them are amature entries for for the competitions E4 run, but some of them are really good.


This is an amazing piece of stop frame animation, I'm suprised it didn't win, or maybe it did it seems kind of familiar. The sound works really well with the movement and altogether it feels really professional.


This is a nice idea and well executed, I hate that music though.


This is a very cool reworking of that iconic Channel 4 ident.


Conceptually this is hilarious I actually loled a little bit. However the execution feels a bit amaturish, it is clearly an entry by a student for the E4 competition. I think a good, witty concept or idea is probably the most important part of a good ident, the implementation can be quite simplistic and it can still be effective.


Cool ident for channel 4 uses some interesting blending effects.


Ident for more 4 which I think is awsome, apparently it was made in after effects.

I couldn't find some of my favouite E4 stings on you tube but you can watch all of them on the E4 site Here.