YCN trip and Final Decision

On the 13th January 2011 we went on a trip to London to visit the company YCN. YCN are the company who hosts the YCN Student Awards every year, which allows for Students and younger people to show what they can create for the briefs that are set.
The trip was very insightful into what the clients are really looking for. We also were shown past winners, and they made me think that I owuld have to think outside of the box to get noticed.

After looking again at the different briefs, I found that my shortlist had changed from 20th Century Fox, Sega and Fairtrade to Green and Black's and Fairtrade. I chose Green and Black's because I had come up with many different ideas.

However, we then had to pitch our ideas to the whole class, to see which idea they thought was the strongest. Some of the comments of my Green and Black's idea made me think, for example, one person said that they were looking for a viral campaign, and my idea wasn't really viral.

And therefore my final decision for my assignment is Fairtrade. This is because I feel that I had more ideas for Fairtrade, and I think that I will be able to match the Fairtrade Brief better then the Green and Black's Brief.

Videos for my 2 concepts

Fairtrade:





Green and Blacks:

Expanding on Short list

To begin with I am expanding on the briefs that I would like to do.


20th Century Fox:
This is the artwork that the company provided for us.


The 20th Century Fox brief states that I would have to create a campaign that would promote their new film, which is called Rise of the Apes. This film is a continuation of the film Planet of the Apes. (Rise of the Apes explains how the planet had become overrun with apes.)






Sega:

The artwork and everything is provided for us by the company.



In the Sega brief they want us to create a piece that would celebrate the 20th anniversary. This means that we would have to make something that would appeal to the older generation as well as the newer generation. They did not specify what type of media we had to create.

Fairtrade:
The artwork are provided by the company.

The Fairtrade brief states that we will have to create a 3 minute video, that communicates how people can do more for fairtrade, the target audience for this project is people who are already ethically aware.

My Short list

I have looked through each of the different briefs to decide which one I would like to do and which one I may do. I will then expand briefly on these to then allow me to make my decision on which 2 or 3 briefs I will expand further on.

The briefs I would like to do:

• 20th Century Fox
• Sega
• Fairtrade

The briefs I may want to do:

• Warp
• The Open University
• Thames Clippers
• P & O Ferries
• Green & Black's Organics
• British Music Experience

New Brief - YCN Award

YCN is a design agency which describes itself as 'Producing work across all media and representing the finest creative people for commissions and collaborations'.
YCN Student Awards shine a light on new creative talent, and centre on a collection of live creative briefs.
For this assignment we will choose from a list of YCN Award briefs.
The briefs we get to choose from are:

• Glayva Liqueur
• Tuborg
• The Big Issue
• Ted Baker London
• M & S
• Fedrigoni UK
• Direct Line
• Boost
• Warp
• The Open University
• Thames Clippers
• P&O Ferries
• Green & Black's Organic
• British Music Experience
• Sega
• Fairtrade
• 20th Century Fox

The Brief:
FdA Digital Media Design Year Two
AF205: Specialist Digital Media Design Practice
Assignment 1: 50% Weighting
Assignment title: YCN Award Briefs

YCN is a design agency which describes itself as ‘Producing work across all media and representing the finest creative people for commissions and collaborations’. They say of themselves that ‘YCN today produces advertising, design and other creative communications in all media; both for its own projects and ventures, and on behalf its various clients’. They are a ‘group of designers, art directors, developers, writers, illustrators and project managers work together at 72 Rivington Street in London’. (http://agency.ycnonline.com/) They also run an annual competition which offers students the chance to fulfill creative briefs from a range of high profile clients and enter that work in a competition. ‘The YCN Student Awards shine a light on new creative talent, and centre on a collection of live creative briefs’. (http://awards.ycnonline.com/)
Winning a competition such as this one often results the work being commissioned commercially is a good career starter.
For this assignment you will choose from a list of YCN Award briefs. The internal deadline for your degree assessment is in advance of the YCN submission deadline. It is recommended, but not compulsory, that you enter your work into the competition.
Deadline and Key Dates
On Monday 10th January, you will put forward proposals for two of the briefs for discussion and evaluation. This must include research, sketchbook and blog work for idea development and a concept you can pursue for two of the YCN briefs.
We will be visiting YCN to discuss the briefs and the competition on Thursday 13th January. This trip to London is a required part of this assignment, so make plans to be available and able to travel that day.
The crit is on Monday 7th February and the final deadline for submission is Thursday 10th February.
What you will produce
Your research, design and planning needs to be shown in a combination of sketchbook and blog. You will submit your finished digital products in suitable formats on a disc and on the submissions server.
To Pass you need to have research and idea development work in your blog and sketchbook (e.g. links to or embedded media for sources of inspiration, initial sketches, analysis of existing media that relate to the brief, information on the client etc) for at least two of the clients, then full design development for your chosen brief (e.g. further sketches, storyboards, animatics, mock-ups, flow diagrams etc). Your blog also needs to reflect your software techniques and problem solving, and a critique of your finished work.
To achieve a higher grade, you need to show thoughtful and useful research, inventive idea development, careful attention to detail in the refining of your ideas, appreciation of the needs and requirements of the client in developing your idea and product, the product you make in response to this brief is a creative solution, aesthetically pleasing and technically well executed and the work is exported in relevant formats.

My finished Video

I feel that my animation is good, however if I was able to do more I would have done. I would have liked to add a few more effects to make it looke darker and more visually interesting. I feel if I had more time I would try out more of the effects and different techniques to make it better.

Overall I feel that I have done well in this project, I feel I could have done better at time keeping, but with the lack of time I did have I feel I have done well. The things I would change is that I would do things in moderation instead of all at once, also I would maybe used different materials to maybe make it look better then it is.

Production Log - for video, billboard and magazine

Using the images that I had scanned in I was able to start work on my Video first, as I thought that would be best because I could get everything sorted to then only use some of the main components for the Billboard, Magazine and Poster.

To begin with this is the screen that I get when I want to create a new composition. I have to choose the size of the composition, which in this case is 1280 x 720, which is standard for a widescreen video.
I also have to decide how long I want my video to be, which again in this brief has to be 30 seconds long, this is because normally adverts last about 30 to 60 seconds.



This is the screen that I have after opening the program After Effects. The next thing I had to do was to import all of the files that I would need to animate within my video. These could be either Illustrator files, Photoshop files, Jpegs or Gifs, it depends on the files that I want at the time. In this case I will be using Jpegs, Illustrator files and Photoshop files.


This is the window that I get when I want to import something, I also get asked if I want to make it a piece of footage, or a composition. And to make it easier for myself, I made everything that I imported into footage.








I also had to keep an eye of this window here, which has the frames per second in it, as long as it was at 25 frames per second then my video would run at the correct speed that I wanted.





I had to use Photoshop to get the scenes that I had scanned in to the way I wanted, therefore to begin with I wanted the moon to rise up as it changed from one scene to another, therefore I had to crop out the moon from both scenes and then create a new file, which then made the moon layer.




I also wanted to create the look that showed it was windy, therefore I had to use the same technique to cut out the trees to then make them sway in the wind as the clouds came across the screen.










I then got told that my background images were not as dark as they should have been, therefore using Photoshop again, I copied a bit of the black tissue paper from the first scene and then made that piece partly see through, to allow the colours to come through and then copy that layer until the whole image was covered, to then create this darker image.

This lighting bolt I created to give me a way to make the different components appear, and after looking closer at dark things, I thought about a storm and that is how I came up with my idea, of having a storm, because lighting can create fire, and the rain can fill up a glass that I will create.

This glass I created using an image from the internet of a glass. The way I created this glass was to first open a new document in Illustrator, and then use the line tool, and the circle marquee tool, making sure that the there was no fill, this is so the galss in see through, and then using the paint brush tool and different opacities of the same colour I was able to make the image look more like a glass. I then created another glass, with ice cubes in and then another one with the liquid and ice cubes in, this is so I can have each of the different stages.

However I found that I wanted the liquid to rise as it was raining and I wanted the ice cubes to move around seperately and the liquid rose, therefore I had to create the liquid and each of the ice cubes seperately.

Here is the liquid and one of the ice cubes that I created using Illustrator. For the liquid I looked at a normal glass of Tia Maria to get the colours, I then founs that to add some sort of depth to it, I had to add different coloursm or at least different tones of the same colour, and with the ice cube I had to make it as pale as I could without completely not being able to see it, therefore I used a very light blue to go around the edges with.
This image of the Tia Maria bottle I found by putting in a search into Google Images, I chose this bottle image because it is the most recent style bottle that there is, also due to it being quite a large image it is able to with stand being quite big, which means it doesn't get pixelated badly when I make it bigger.
Here is the catchphrase that I will be using for my different forms of Advert. I had previously looked up different fonts at which I could use for my catchphrase, however after showing the class the different fonts they had chosen the same one that I was going to use. I chose this one because I wanted a font which had an old style feel (so like calligraphy), however have a dark side to it, which I felt this one had.

After getting all of my components in place and moving to the music, I showed my animation to one of the tutors, and they suggested about having more things happen in the first scene, especially as I did not really have anything happening. Therefore I decided to make my moon rise. As I was doing this, someone had spotted that my moon was rising in front of one of the trees, also it was rising too straight. Therefore, I made it so that my moon started off of the screen and then from the start of the video to when the scenes change, my moon would rise, until it is in the correct position for when the static moon faded in.

I also wanted to add something else, to give the impression that the sun was going down. Therefore, after having an experimentation session I found an effect which gave me that option. This was called Lens Flare. And I had it slightly moving giving the impression that the sun was setting as well as fading out as the scenes changed, this then made my scene change a bit more realistic.

I also wanted to add another effect that would fit in with the theme of my advert, and this was rain. I wanted to have rain in my scene because, generally with a storm there is rain, also this ment that my glass could get filled up. The way I found this effect was by slowly looking through each of the effects, and in the simulation section there was one calle CC Rain. The way I created it was to first make a new composition, which was the same size and the lower section of my animation, and then add in the background that I was using, I also made it about 12 seconds long, which is the length that I wanted it to run.

I then played about with the different setting and I found I could change the speed, angle and amount of rain I could have, therefore, using previous experiences of storms, I wanted to have it come in slowly and then get really hard, to the put out the fire, and then go quite soft and then hard again, this allows me to the fill up the galss realy for the end position.

Once I had done all of my animation a tweeked what I needed to I then had to render my animation out into a .mov, which will then allow me to convert the .mov to a .ogv and a .mp4 (this process was so that people could watch and access my advert via iPods, iPhones, iPads etc.). I also had to render my video out as a H.264, which meant it is the best quality video I can make. The way I changed my settings was to first click on a part that said 'lossless' and I can change my video and audio settings there, and the change where I saved it I clicked on the one just to the right of the last one.

The way I convert my videos is to use a specific program called Miro. This allowed me to convert my .mov movie to a Theora movie, which can be played via Firefox and mp4, which can be played via QuickTime.

Once I had finished creating my Video I then had to start on creating my Billboard, Magazine and Poster. Creating these were very simple, in the sense that I had everything that I needed I just needed to put the components together in a way that looked good as a print ad.

To do this I used Illustrator, and to superimpose them into the points that I wanted I use Photoshop.

Here are the jpegs of the finished adverts:

The one of the left is for the billboard and the one of the right is for the poster and magazine. I had to look up the sizes for the billboard so I could then scale it down to fit on the image that I had taken previously.




Here are the images superimposed onto the photos that I had taken previously:
This is my superimposed Billboard Advert. With this advert I had to used the Transform tool and the scew tool, this is so I can fit is properly to the edges.
This is my superimposed Poster Advert. With this one it is the same as the Billboard, I just had to use the Transform tool to get all of the edges close to the edge of the poster.

This is my superimposed Magazine Advert. However, with this one I had to use the transform tool to make it smaller, however, to bend it towards the edges I had to use the warp tool, which allowed me to make the advert look like it is in the magazine.