L5 Infographics

So this is different, Ive always found infographics to be pretty fun things and now I get to make one. We are given a few images to use for our project, or we can go out and find our own. The objectives are to communicate complex information quickly and effectively, taking into account the basics; production pipeline, principles of animation and exploring different methods.

Im really happy with the final piece. I recieved feedback that the video looks professional and this has raised my cinfidence in trusting my own judgement more when animating. Here is the final piece:


I chose this Nerd Vs Geek infographic:

It was clear that I was not going to be able to fit everything into the 3 minute time limit, so I had to pick and choose the relative points. My plan of action was as follows;

1. Get all the text in the Poster written and recorded by Mike, my Voice over guy.

2. Edit all the relevent recorded information into a 3 minute Composition.

3. Make vector images of the characters and create a colour palette for backgrounds and text colour, also choose font.

4. Animate, and edit as necessary.

5. Review animation adding any extra effects and finessing.

I found this fun infographic to use for inspiration:

Looking at the poster, here are the colours that I extracted to use in my animation:

I decied to use this font because it is quite quirky and funny which is the general feel I want in the piece:

 

I created vectors for the Nerd and Geek characters in my aniamtion. I wanted them to have moveable legs so I could have them walking towards the camera in one of the scenes. I found it difficult and tedious to animte the characters legs in Flash so I disguised the walk and re-positioned the camera to show only the top half of the characters moving.Here are thevectorised characters:

These characters were later broken apart so the blinking and mouthmovements could be animted. The Hallway was created in Maya and inspired by the school hallway in South Park:

I rendered the Maya hallway in white so that I could overlay the Blue and Orange colours depending on the character walk in it at the time. I ept the hallway simple because i wanted it to be suttle and not distract the viewer from the main part of the animation. Here is the un-edited Maya hallway:

When I was animating I had a story board that I started following but eventually I realised that this sort of animation was more of an 'in the moment' piece. So I abandoned the story board and developed the scenes using the VO as my guide. Here is the origional story board snd the animtion I abandoned mid way through:   

In the first attempt to create the animtion I took nerdy movie title sequences into account. I started the animation in a similar style to Star Wars, but this was too slowly paced which looked boring. I re started the animation in a more experimrental and free style. Here is the origional animation which I dropped:

At first I was planning on using the movie section at the bottom of the poster in my animation but I felt that theses movies are always changing and so it will mean  soon my animation will be out of date. I was going to animate small characters popping in and out of the animation but I thought this would be too distracting from the main purpose of the main point in the animation. But here are the extra character vectors I made:

For one of the scenes in the infographic, the Geek drops his book and I felt the best way to do this was to animate the book in Maya. The book was made with some simple animation so it syncs in well with the rest of the animation: