Motion Graphic
Brief
Collaborating in a group we were asked to engage with narratives, design and produce storyboards, undertake tests, explore the relationship between sound and image, to create a iterative anamatics and produce a short motion sequence of between 30 seconds and 90 seconds duration. For our starting point we researched into the following themes set out in the 2023 Creative Conscience Competition Briefs:
Health and Well-Being
Social Issues
Climate Crisis
The Natural World
Research and context
Working as a team we generated our ideas for our sequence. Collectively we did our research into social issues, coming across loneliness in the elderly. We all agreed that this wasn't touched upon enough and decided to research and expand our knowledge on this issue.
Individually we researched into organisations that raised this issue, one popular charity being AgeUK.
Collectively we visualised our initial ideas and thinking process by using storyboards to delve into a potential narrative for our sequence.
Narrative and storyboarding
Using storyboards to visualise a narrative for our sequence.
Using inspiration from a animation found, we decided to take a collage cut-out style for our scenes. Using a chair for our main character to avoid presenting a prejudice character.
Within our research we considered our target audience and why we wanted to raise awareness on this chosen social issue. As a group we chose to aim our animatic towards 20-40 year olds. Our purpose: inspire those to help those later in life feel noticed.
Building upon this idea, working as a team we finalised a storyboard using all of our feedback given from our presentations.
Style frame
Once we had our finalised narrative for our animation we initially created style frames to invision how our scenes would look. We sourced our imagery from images we took ourselves digitally and manipulated this using Adobe softwares.
Using our style frames we had a vision of our animatic and started to create selected scenes from our narrative and to create these individually to create an initial animatic test. After attending our after effects workshops we worked together to create our own animatic tests. We still had many routes to explore such as rotascoping animation, stop motion and more. These workshops were very applicable and helped me individually refine my skills to a greater extent.
Initial animation testing
Working as a team we developed a short animatic test. Using our knowledge from provided Adobe after effects workshops we started to experiment with motion.
Following our feedback from this short animatic, we decided we liked the stop motion style of the animatic as it complimented our collage cut-out style. We came to the conclusion this worked well and developed it further scene by scene.
For our audio we decided to keep it minimal to highlight the saying 'hello' in our sequence to then enable the final call to action to tie it all together.
Our final outcome uses our collage cut-out style and minimal audio to allow our visual narrative to tell the story in support of AgeUK elderly loneliness movement.
Reflection
Most of us will feel lonely at some point in our lives. For a lot of us, particularly those in later life, loneliness can define our lives and have a significant impact on our well-being.
Our animation focuses on small interactions going a long way. Highlighting that a simple ‘hello’ could make those in later life feel noticed and seen.
I believe overall that our animation communicates our purpose in an ingenious way. We worked well as a team to piece our knowledge of motion together using our feedback as ways to improve this animation also.
Lastly, I believe there are ways in which we could improve the animation project, our narrative sequence could be adjusted to enable our message to be communicated better.
Overall, this was a great learning opportunity to learn a new software to communicate design. I enjoyed working with such a talented team and using our understanding and purpose to bring this project to life in a motion form. We will also be entering our motion graphic into the Creative conscience awards 2023 in hope to showcase our animation to other creatives.