We decided we would focus our big project around the work of George Wood, a statistician from Huddersfield who contributed a great deal of work to Heritage Quay. The six members of the club each made a piece of motion graphic work and they were displayed in a shop by the Piazza centre.
The exhibition was a success and came together really nicely. Everyone's work complimented the overall aesthetic and it's something I'm really proud of.
But more than simply giving me another project to work on or another exhibition to participate in, the true success of motion go has been the chemistry within the group. The six of us and Sara have such a great dynamic as a group, and I feel like this, more than anything else, has contributed the most to the success of this project.
Admittedly I could talk for hours about how great the club is, but instead I should talk about my piece. One of my personal aims for the project was to say a little about George himself, as the project focussed itself mostly around the information he gathered rather than his own life. So I came up with the structure of having a series of animations joined together by sequences within his office. Below was the original plan I had for his desk.
For ease of animation, plus the chance to do something a bit against the curve, I made the office environment in Cinema 4D. I learned a lot in the process too. Figuring out the book animation was especially troublesome and I had to frequently look at forums and help videos to keep myself on track. Thanks to the work I've learned in Jay's production sessions and my own work with the Collide brief, the rest of the build went smoothly.
I also created a poster for the event using the assets from the office:
The other important stage was the portraits we had to make of George for posters around town. Just coming away from the visual appendix, I drew him in my current slightly exaggerated drawing style. It's almost at the level of a caricature, especially when seen in back and white. I then coloured it using Photoshop and a graphics tablet.
I decided to make three separate chunks of motion graphics to add between the C4D segments. The first one was a largely hand-drawn affair. I used a series of facts about the wellbeing of schoolchildren as a basis, and for each category in the list I did a new drawing. A lot of the work was done using templates to save time which was a technique I learned from the Daily Mail animation. I tried to make the pictures visually interesting, and injected a little humour into the mix at a few points. Look out for a rubber duck. The artwork was Multiplied over the paper texture and the text added later.
For the second, based around diseases, I wanted to take a yuckier aesthetic. My original pitch for this section was to base it around a typewriter, so I used ink splats. Realising After Effects was the wrong software for the job, I went back to cinema 4D. Using techniques from the rather excellent tutorial I've linked here, combined with some tricks from myself, I created a set of ink splats, each one corresponding to a certain disease statistic. These were then multiplied into After Effects.
For the final one, I created a series of art assets using Illustrator and Photoshop to mimic the foil covers of old books. The art here proved specially difficult, as the formatting I had chosen to achieve the effectw as incredibly time-consuming to apply. This was the most conventional of the pieces, inspired by many pieces of motion graphics before it (but mostly the sequence found in Johnny English). This one focussed on the homeless.
The finished video is found below. The whole thing came together in less that a week, which I'm really impressed about. Anyways, enjoy!
UPDATE:
I also produced a pair of postcards to accompany the presentation packs for the exhibition. These were made using renders from the C4D file with screenshots from the animation added in Photoshop.
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