Collaborative Communication Artifact

For my artifact in the collaborative design project, I chose to create an animated promo for the endorsed product. Being an aspiring post production specialist, I wanted to see how I could flex my editing, animation, and typography design skills to best advertise for the 'Luva'. 

The Luva, when first shown to me at a group meeting, wasn't an eye-catching concept. However, I knew creating a design campaign around this product would be (and was) a solid challenge in showcasing the skills gained in class.

When conceptualizing my piece, I knew I wanted to get the message across in as little time as possible. Being very active in internet culture, I more than understand the importance of a message being conveyed in as short of a time frame as possible. The reality of online presence is: Nobody is listening after 30 seconds. Keeping this in mind, I settled on a goal of ~15 seconds for my total time. After the group settled on a concrete style guide, I sat down and started working with what I had. I began by animating the product's logo, the final design of which was created by Amanda Wilson. I decided on a hand-drawn, heartfelt style when doing so, but I didn't want the logo to end up looking unprofessional. This is why I kept the lettering solid, while making the shapes hand-drawn. The coloring of the logo was based on a photo, which is also seen on the website under the 'group' tab in our style guide. The photo is of a winter sunset, which I mapped to a gradient of the first three colors. The background is utilizing the fifth color in our palette, and the lettering utilizes the fourth. This gives the entirety of the logo and animation harmony and closure.

In the meat of the piece, I decided on a scene that would best fit the winter sunset in which our entire styling is based around: A couple on a park bench. After viewing our live-action promo in it's post-production phase, I felt a bit cliche upon choosing this setting. Although, I knew I could take my own spin on things as far as the design is concerned with the freedom of animation. I decided on a feel of simplicity, with the hand drawn bench, lettering, and characters along with the diorama-esque pop up background. Also, I utilized only one font from the four listed on our website. I did this both to match the logo animation, and the overall feel of the piece. In transitioning from the park setting to the logo animation, I meshed the snowy hill into the white background of the final animation for solid closure, whilst giving a nice figure-ground relationship in tandem. Finally, being an animation with a simplistic styling, the use of both shape and line are extremely important, and are the foundation upon which this piece is built. In minimalistic design, artists rely on clever usage of the simplest forms of line and shape to create something recognizable. While my design didn't go quite as far into the minimalist realm as I'd have liked, I still think the design choices present get the message across to a fast-paced browser of the ever-expanding internet.

For the full, 2K quality animation, please click here. Blogger is still apparently stuck in 2005.