Applied Animation: Competition: Week One 9th - 18th February 2018

I grouped up with Liam S and Chloe for this project. We decided on doing the Mircosoft Surface brief because of the freedom in creativity and allowed us to make an animated solution. I suggested that we combine live action footage with animation to save time and also show the idea of how the person using surface can be creative.

I researched into the way that Microsoft create their promotional videos and took notes on the kinds of themes they go with;

Clean, sharp visuals. Cinematic. Smooth camera movements. Often showing real world equivalents of the things the surface can do (essentially trying to take away the aspect of technology and make it tactile and natural). Optimistic music which the visuals are cut to. 

We decided on roles. LiamS will be doing storyboards, animation and music. Chloe will be doing concept art and animation. I will be doing a little animation and all post production. This will include editing and chroma keying the footage, compositing all elements in, and animating/masking elements into the scenes.

We drew lots of thumbnail ideas and wrote out many keywords of the things we wanted to evoke.



As LiamS storyboards, I have started a few VFX tests for some ideas we have had. The ones I've done this week are echo trails left behind by the moving hand.



These tests are a simple idea of part of the visuals we are wanting to make. They show the weird, flowing and creative world in a slightly psychedelic way that once refined within our final product, should really help to get across the creativity.
When we come to do this kind of effect in the final video, I will work to make sure the specific shots that contain this effect are much more refined and appealing.

We have a good solid idea on what we are going to create. The brief asks for 1-8 videos that come to between 1 and 2 minutes. So we are making one main version that will aim to be just over one minute, and then from that we can edit multiple short version using the various sections within the creative world.