Monthly Archives: October 2015

PSA Final – Robert Ditty

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For this project I created a Public Service Announcement for Vancouver community access television. I chose to address the issue of littering. It may seem like a trivial subject but it is something that has always bothered me. When I was 18 I was able to visit Switzerland. When I saw how clean the streets were in their country, I wondered why our streets at home couldn’t look as nice.

I created most of the figures and backgrounds with Adobe Illustrator, which I then imported to After Effects. I used a combination of vector graphics and digital collage. This use of collage was influenced by Terry Gilliam’s illustrations for Monty Python.

For the background music I used a piece called “Perfect Corporate” by MagikStudio. It is a moderate paced electronic song with a contemplative feel. The soft sound works as a backdrop for the animation while providing an upbeat rhythm that propels the action.

There are a few things that I would like to add to this video in the future. I had originally envisioned more animations in the background and more use of collage in the latter half of the video. In addition, I would like to rerecord the voice over and possibly add more lines of dialogue. Overall, I am still happy with this version for the time being.

Randy Luttrell – Plasma Donation PSA

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[su_vimeo url=”https://vimeo.com/141855097″]

 

 

I had donated plasma over the summer and had good experiences so I thought it would make a cool PSA video and encourage the city of Vancouver to donate as well. The only plasma center in Vancouver, WA is CSL plasma, so I decided to use their colors and main font in order to keep continuity between the video and local plasma center. My original storyboard and voice over script were changed significantly in order to fit the 30 second duration. I feel that this had an impact on the more simplistic and clean stylistic approach. I recorded the voice over using a MXL V67g microphone and created some of the graphics myself and found some creative commons graphics which I altered or added to, in order to fit my needs. I focused on animating shapes, text, camera movements and objects as opposed to character animation or environments. I made use of creative commons sound effects and music as well. I wanted the vibe to be happy so I found a song called “Colorful Spots – Upbeat Ukulele Background Music” by Nicolai Heidlas which was perfect, so I edited it to fit the 30 second duration. I loosely used a “circular timeline” to choose how to animate each shot to try to add more balance and continuity as a whole. The video came out very different than I originally imagined but I am happy with the results. I hope that this video encourages our local community of Vancouver, WA to look into donating plasma and helping out.

Sources:

*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zCSe5_cCBg

https://freesound.org/people/JohnsonBrandEditing/sounds/173932/

http://freesound.org/people/Zott820/sounds/209578/

http://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/heart

http://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/hands

David Seaman Wetlands PSA

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https://vimeo.com/141849522

When making this animation, I wanted to focus on more of a narrative approach with a single voice over call to action at the very end to make it have more impact. Making it somewhat abstract until the very end was intentional, as I think the sudden realization of what the narrative focus was at the very end, again, adds impact to the call to action. For this project I focused on creating IK character rigs to make movement more fluid and consistent. As I have never made rigs before, there were some issues with limbs slightly detaching from their character, or odd deformations due to the IK chains. However, I constantly fiddled with the individual bones and controllers until I got it to the state it is currently, which I think is not too offensive in terms of deformation. For sound, I used free sounds from various websites and did some of my own foley work for a couple selected parts. In addition, the garbled voices of the stickmen is obviously my own work, ran through several filters to try and make it sound humanoid, but still abstract. The reason I went with the strange but familiar feel of the whole project was admittedly an attempt to try and bypass the uncanny valley and go further into cartoon world. The beaver lacks eyes due to him looking extremely strange when wearing them when he was placed alongside the other characters. Overall, this project was a fun way to try and focus on my character driven narration, rather than visual or textual information solely based on text/fact.