One of the coolest guys I occasionally get to work with here at ASU is James. He's some strange kind of faculty-staff hybrid who teaches and does a bunch of media-related stuff. One of his big projects every semester is putting together a few events in the Philosophy and Film series.

 

These events take a movie (past ones have ranged from Zombieland to Dr. Caligari's Cabinet), watch it, and then have an insightful, offbeat discussion about the varying philosophies at work in the film both internally and externally. From what I hear, there are some pretty wacky and funny interpretations at work which have been entertaining and insightful. 

One of the first things I was assigned to do when I got here was to help make a motion graphic intro for this series (potentially something to be reformatted as a .gif, etc.). Other projects cropped up and James was busy, so the project was iced for quite some time before we started work on it again. In fact, it might not ever have come back unless I hadn't been bored and dredged it up. 

 

So I started with a few conceptual sketches like the ones above and below of what I thought might be interesting pieces to incorporate. 

Since my boss and I were the only ones who knew that I was working on this, and therefore it didn't really have a deadline or any direction whatsoever, I skipped the "tell the client about your plans" stage and went right into the drafting process. 

 

The first attempt looked like this:

There was still some tweaking to be done with the animation...and definitely the colors. I'm not entirely sure what possessed me to try out that bleak-looking gray (which is mysteriously blue in the still frame preview?), but surprise-surprise...it was nixed in the feedback, as well as the Forrest Gump quote. 

 

Getting everything to the second draft was kind of annoying insofar as I had to make different, more specified versions of the icon in Photoshop/Illustrator to get the functionality I wanted.

At Jame's behest, I changed the gray to white to give that a go. The sound work, which I'll comment on now, was kind of fun to work with. I knew it needed a little something something for the beginning when the "can" rolls in, but unlike almost every other obscure sound effect I can think of--a rolling can is REALLY hard to find on YouTube. There was only one like the one I ended up using, and the quality was poor, but I think it served its purpose. 

 

The feedback was positive, but a colleague of James was wondering if there might be a way to give it some more style and depth. I agreed, and got to work changing the aesthetic from the very high-contrast black and white this: 

To the much more stylish and ambient this:

Now these pictures aren't really the greatest illustration of the effect, so I'll explain it a little bit more. Basically I added an adjustment layer which roughened everything up and then made everything 3D so I could rig some faux lighting to animate with the "turning on" of the "projector." It works best to just show you what ended up being the final draft. 

As you can see, the theme seems more complete with the addition of the noise, film burns, and lighting. They ended up really liking this one and that was the end of that!

UNTIL it wasn't the end of that! I ended up with a request to turn it into a .gif file that could be used in a powerpoint and displayed as an ad on the big projector screens in the lobby. It took some finagling (After Effects doesn't have a .gif export by itself, and Photoshop didn't want to process it [read: crashed] if the image sizes were 720p or above. But after some experimentation-frustration, it worked out and I got a spiffy .gif for their next event! 

 

However, the file size is 12.5mb and this only supports uploads of >8mb so I'm teasing you by having no way to show it!