Just a quick post to fill you in on what I’ve been doing the past week at university. Start of term hasn’t been too bad workload wise – it’s been quite laid back with no real assignment deadlines been set. However there was an optional project, which has been quite stressful.

This year there will be two larger assignments (along with smaller ones): a group project and a self-directed research project. A couple of weeks back, we were given the option to come up with an idea for a group project and pitch to the lecturers/class. The brief for the project was either a 20 second tv sting, a 60 second short animation or a music video. We were asked to prepare some concept work, a synopsis, a storyboard and an animatic to help illustrate our idea.

I chose to come up with an idea for a TV sting, my reasoning being that given the time frame a 20 second animation would be a much easier project to turn around at a high standard – the old “quality over quantity” argument. My first port of call was to do some research on the idents/stings/bumps already out there to see how they work and what the main points they need to convey are. During my research I came across an inspiring company called ManvsMachine that appear to mainly deal with advertising projects and stings. I used a lot of their work as inspiration – if you get half a chance, check them out for yourselves!

This is my brain storm. I picked out some existing work which I really liked as a starting point. It mainly consists of procedurally animated and created objects, as these were something I knew I wanted to include in my project from the start. I also included some work by ManvsMachine for More4 and a company called Printed – I liked the idea of a portal that they were creating.

Finally, I added in some 2D motion graphics that I found by a company called DixonBaxi. By the time I had completed this I had a genesis of an idea – I wanted to use a live action plate of an area round Bournemouth and then create a “portal” or opening through to a procedurally animated and created, low poly style parallel universe which represented the buildings/people/objects seen on the live action plate. I would then combine these two by using 2D motion graphics which would create the “opening” to the CG world. As this is a hard idea to explain in words, I’ve included my animatic below.

We hear if our pitches were successful sometime next week, fingers crossed! Really looking forward to the group project.