Surfer Dude Studios

The ultimate elevator pitch

Creative pioneers was a 2012 UK wide apprenticeship programme led by Chartered Professional Institute the IPA, in media partnership with free newspaper the Metro. It was a programme that aimed to find roles for talented individuals within the digital development sector. Entry to the programme was based on the delivery of a short video (up to minute) where the applicant had to explain why they were a "Can-do creative pioneer". Successful applicants would be invited to apply for roles and apprenticeships divided up country / region accross the UK.

Quality versus Content. Really?

The brief for the application video stated that the quality of the video was not important, it was more important for the content to be clear and demonstrate why you should be chosen above other applicants which kind of irritated me.

The reason for this irritation was my opinion that in all things digital quality and content should be the same thing, the two cannot exist without each other. If anything it felt like an over simplification of what I was trying to achieve both with my video content and web development.

A poor quality visual effect can ruin an entire movie, and likewise a poor edit or mis-matched scoring or sound effect can have the sme destructive influence. Likewise poorly formed web content can do the same for any site. Which ever way I considered it, content inevitably is king and determines the quality of a product, particularly in the digital realm. What ever was delivered in this project woud have to reflect this ethos.

The content

One minute is not a long time to cover a diverse range of experience, skills and ambition. A lot of content had to be covered in a very short period of time and it was worthwhile jotting down everything I needed to cover.

• Video editing on Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro
• Visual effects creation with Adobe After Effects
• Blu-Ray and DVD menu authoring with Adobe Encore
• Animation with Adboe Flash
• Web development
• Previous (relevent) work experience

Topping and tailing the content to give it some branding and consolidation gives about 6-8 seconds to deliver each point.

Montage! Even Rocky had a montage.

As anyone who has seen Team America: World Police knows, when you've got to cover a lot of content in a short period of time, you've got to have a montage. As it would turn out montage'sand collages would very much be the theme of this project. Visual effects are realistically moving collages. Going back to the earlist animations these were static backgrounds where only the moving character would be painted onto the celuloid. Ever wonder why all Hannah Barbera's chracter's all wear neck ties? Same thing. A layer for the background, a layer for the body and finally several reusable head frames posiioned between the two.

It's a technique used in stop motion animation too. Aardman animation uses pre-fabricated mouths for all of their characters to speed up development time and provide consistancy to the expressions. Visuall effects similarly will build up a collage of layers to achieve as realistic as possibe finished look.

In video terms, a montage is a linear series of clips, that combined creates a narrative. A long period of time can be condenssed into a short time space and adds a dynamism to the scene that may be lacking particullarly if the subjct can be little dry or unappealling.

Process and screen capture

Early on in the development process it became clear that one of the most appropriate means of demonstrating my skillset would be to actually capture the process of turning out content. This was something I was doing at work at the time, creating videos that demonstrated how to use various pieces of software, apps and cms including Adobe Premiere and Microsoft Sharepoint. Online learning particularly in the digital sector has a plethora of video learning resources, and parent learning sites, which is a natural extension to the screen captures found in previous books.

Lego animation

Using inspiration from the process by which the claymation film "Wallace and Grommit: A matter of Loaf and Death" was filmed, a reference plate was shot. This involved getting two friends to sit in chairs with their backs to me and responding as if to a cinema screen with a variety of emotions that I would ask them to project. "You like it, you don't", "you both love it you're not worthy", "It's disgusting and makes you want to hurl", "you've had enough and are walking out now", and so forth.

Using this reference as a layer in Adobe Premiere, the best four responses were chosen and the lego figures selected to be animated in pairs. Using a nokia digital slr camera each pair would be matched in movement with the frame in the reference layer, then the image copied in to the layer above as a single frame. Typically this was (for even a short sub 6 second clip) a long and exhausting process particullarly when the whole process had to be replicated four times for four different responses, but it was done this way for good reason.

Timing, resolution, and colour

Timing was a critical issue. Not only did this project have a date it had to be submited by, the animated movements of the lego pieces had to be timed perfectly also. Filming the pieces two at a time meant;

1. If time ran out the project could be completed with less lego pieces in the scene, but still be submitted with content.
2. If a mistake was made in animating a sequence only one section had to be rolled back and repeated,
   • If all four sequences were filmed together this would mean repeating them all, and
   • Possibly ruining an already successfully completed section.
3. The four final sequences could be played back and repeated at different frame rates depending on what looked best.

The timing alone was sufficient reason to break up each section into pairs of figures. However there was other reasoning for this. Animating all four pairs at the same time would reduce the resolution of each pair, while animating them in individual pairs meant that there was more options for adjusting the size of the layer to match the size of the cinema seats in the masked image in the layer above. The spaces surrounding each layer of animation could be adjusted rather than adjusting one layer that might end up with a few characters slightly out of place with their seats.

The final reasoning for breaking up the individual animations was chroma-keying also known as "green-screening". This was an issue identified by the makers of the 1999 Spiderman movie, you can't green-screen the Green Goblin, nor can you blue screen Spiderman in his red and blue suit. So both sequences had to be filmed seperately, green-screening one, blue-screening another. The same was true of the lego figures with one prominantly green character, and one prominantly blue character, and a couple of others where one technique was preferable to the other. Fortunately the pairs of figures were paired by which could be chroma-keyed together. In the end two pairs were blue-screened, two green screened.

The offer

In terms of success the Creative pioneer video achieved its goal I was selected for the second round where I got access to the available roles and apprenticeships. Personally I was very pleased with the project as searching around YouTube and Vimeo I could see the results of several other candidates and felt I had excelled. I had attempted to deliver quality and largely that is what I had delivered. The studio logo always looked good, the light through text was dynamic and having delivered it once I now had a template project that I could use going forward.

Another strong positive was the whole animated lego sequence. I had been worth the long hours to deliver, but I honestly could not say I felt drawn back to the whole stop motion animation process. It takes a special kind of patience and although I felt accomplished in the small sequence I delivered, the return on investment seemed small. I'm clearly no Ray Harryhausen or Nick Park.