responsive: brompton instagram campaign

Once I'd finished the animation I then needed to tend to the what I thought was the harder part of this brief which was to get lot of Instagram likes. I don't have a particularly large Instagram presence which made the task harder but I had other social medias at my disposal. I plan to use poster campaigns, get people in person to like it and try and get it shared a lot on facebook, tumblr and twitter to hopefully get as many likes as I can.

I made a poster to stick around college to try and get people from all over the college to like it. I also asked a graphic designer I'm working with to give me some feedback on the poster just to make the layout more effective as this is something I know little about. The bottom poster is the final layout after feedback.

Brompton: getting feedback

I find after working on a project for a few weeks you start becoming blind to some errors or bits that could easily be made better so I always try to get feedback on my work both from tutors and class mates. The feedback was generally very positive however both tutor and student said that the character could be a bit more "animated" to give it a little more life. A couple of suggestions where to try and make the character look around and to have the character speed up and slow down. I didn't want to have to do any frame by frame animation as this would have stuck out a lot so i needed to find a solutions in after effects. The speeding up and slowing down was the easier task, I just used the time remapping function to alter the speed of a cycle. Since the animation was split into 2 second loops of the bike ride I could easily split one up. The second solution was a bit tricker and required futher research. I tried just moving the eyes and facial features but it didn't look right, I also tried tilting the head as a 3D layer but it made the head look very 2 dimensional. I found online a method which involved warping the head with the liquify effect which made it look like the head was moving slightly in one direction. By controlling the amount of distortion (from 0 - 100 %) I could have a gradual heat tilt in multiple directions which looked 3D. Adding these made the animation a lot more gave the animation a lot more character.

responsive: Brompton designing buildings

Once I'd animated my character I had to start designing the buildings for the background which was actually a far more important aspect of this animation. I knew I wanted the buildings to be simplistic however they needed to obviously recognisable from simple shapes. This would be both down to the design and also choosing buildings that are more recognisable. 

I started by mood-boarding designs of buildings that I like but also fit the "graphicy" aesthetic I was going for in my animation. The hardest part of the design was establishing a colour palette for the buildings. I knew it was important that it wasn't the same as the character as you wouldn't be able to distinguish the character from the background. I figured the best this to do was go monochromatic, I found a particular shade of blue worked very well with the character however I was worried that just using blue would indicate it was night time. I asked a few of my peers and they advised that if I was only using light shades it wouldn't create a night time effect. I went with their advise and it was a good move. Below are all the buildings used in the animation;

Brompton: animating my character

I first started by rigging the whole character up. This was my second time doing a character rig in after effects so I had to re-learn a few things. I the most important part was the IK's in the legs, however I decided to also put IK's in the arms so if I wanted the to be any motion in the body the arms would move against the handle bars accordingly.

Once the character was all rigged up I placed the animated version of the bike in and animated the legs, then the rest of the body accordingly. I was really happy with how it turned out as I felt the motion look good especially since I'd never animated someone riding a bike before.

responsive: Making a Brompton

I started the designing with the bike itself. I thought the bike should look like a Brompton as this is whether it says so or not advertising for them so I'm sure they'd like to see their product.

I first tested how the bike would look to see if it would translate to animation how I'd pictured in my head. I then started on the harder task of designing a character, I knew there were certain limitations on the design since I wanted to rig it in after effects. This meant I had to design in a particular way to so that it would work for this. I wanted to design the character around myself so because its supposed to be about your personal city. I started with rough outline designs then selected a palette to work from. Since I'm not the best at creating palettes I searched many different works to find one which I thought would be suitable for this production. For the first time I started using Pinterest to help mood board, its a really great resource as the keyword function helps you find exactly what you're looking for.

responsive: Brompton brief

For my last personal responsive brief I chose a small competition being run by Brompton bikes. This brief was really appealing to me for a few reasons; the prize was a very nice bike (which would be very handy), a majority of the entrees would be filmed on phones so an animation would really stand out (giving me a good chance) and it would force me to have a good social media presence to win.

The brief asks for a video that is up to 15s long (this is the max time for instagram) which is about seeing your unseen city by bike. I don't own a bike in leeds so I knew getting live action footage would be tricky if I wanted to do so. As a student on leeds I thought it would be nice to show all the places that I go to on a regular basis for fun in leeds. Unlike film I have the advantage of being able to lay all these places out together as it may be a bit crazy if it was to cut to a knew building every second with live action film. Since it was for Brompton and a lot of the entrees contained one I figured it would be good to have one in my animation as I'm sure the brief as all about good advertising for them. A big part of the brief is to get lots of likes on your instagram video as only the top ten will get judged to win the 3 prizes. This meant I needed a plan on how to publish my animation effectively. I also needed to make sure that I get my animation finished with a good amount of time before the deadline which is 31st march.

I wanted some very clean animation for this brief and I figured a graphic style animation would hit their "hipstery" and minimal aesthetic well. I thought 2D character rigging would be a good solution with this as it can produce some very nice motion relatively quickly considering the deadline was quite tight and I've gotten aquatinted with it before. I was unsure what I want to do with the building design but I figured I'd tackle that after I'd designed the character.

responsive: choosing our groups

We had to make presentation slides to advertise our work and to show what work we're interested in to potential collaborators. I found it really difficult to select still pieces of work to best show what I could do also selecting artists as there were so many to choose from. I took down a few names of peoples work I really liked and ones who were interested in doing the same briefs as me.
When in came to meeting everyone I found a lot of animators where interested in working on the dazed brief after talking to a couple of illustrators I felt the other brief may have been better for me. I didn't want to work with a group that was a majority animators as this was an opportunity to work with new people. The group I ended up with forming was with a graphic designer, illustrator and an animator. This was a great group as we can have a very strong design team and have an ambitious animation because the work load can be split in half.

responsive choosing a collaborative brief

Choosing a brief was quite a difficult challenge there were plenty of briefs that I found pretty repulsive however quite a few that looked interesting as well. The main things I looked for in a brief were ones I knew could be resolved through animation whether it was specified or not, I also wanted a brief that had messages I was happy getting behind. After looking through all the briefs I liked I narrowed it down to two briefs since it would be a bit easier to choose a partner.
The two i went for were the D&AD : dazed brief and the YCN: marine stewardship council brief. I chose the dazed one as I have had a big interest in mixed media animation and I thought this was a good opportunity to experiment with that also the brief was very open leaving a lot of room for experimentation. The MSC brief was appealing to me purely because it was a cause I believed in and it asked for a video response which meant the brief was more tailored to animation compared to others. I was torn by choosing on making a documentary on the environment so this was a good oppertunity to do something similar.