Animating Print!
While working at Dumbwaiter Design we were challenged to create an internal motion spot that features our capability to do print work. It sounded really easy at first until we faced reality. We quickly realized that print and motion just didn’t go together that well.
We went through many phases of ideation and concept development. Storyboards were made for all kinds of concepts from CG driven, live video to hand animated. Every one of those sounded good but then it was not really that practical to do and it required a lot of resources.
After a couple of months and five different concepts later, I finally hit it. I was sitting at the office staring at my computer monitor and then it hit me. I got up and picked our Canon 30D SLR camera with some sample print pieces and went to our brainstorming room. I called Adam, one of our part timers and asked him to help me out. Here is what we came up with this test
Later on, we showed that test to the group and everyone’s eyes widened and their heart beats accelerated. So at that point we knew that we had something good in our hands and we had to make a more refined one. So we set up shop few days later and we started to shoot again. However, after a quick mash up and a quick edit we realized that we were far from being done.
We couldn’t put our heads around it and we didn’t know why this second try just didn’t work. We went back to the initial test, which got us excited about the spot in the first place and we closely examined it. We found that the animation was too smooth than we liked and the colors were too washed out. The print pieces that we chose didn’t stand out on their own in the piece as well. We needed bolder and more in your face graphics to stand own their own while the motion flow.
So we went back and we created fresh new print work that had bold and colorful graphics that would stand out while being animated. We shot the spot by holding the camera with our hands and not using a tripod to give it a rougher feel. After the shoot we did a quick cut and we were very satisfied with the result. Later on we did some color correction and design a simple soundtrack to go along. Enjoy it.
