Reading & Writing
Liz Blazer discusses in depth the topics of storytelling and storyboarding. One might think, “What you just need to have a beginning, middle, and end. What’s so hard about that?” The same person may say “Yeah, storyboarding. you just draw a bunch of pictures like Walt Disney did.” However, Liz dives deeper into storytelling and storyboarding. Let’s take a quick look!
Storytelling (Traditional)
Chapter 2 of Animated Storytelling talks about beats, structured and nonlinear storytelling. Beats deals with getting your big idea down and following through. Then once you’ve done that decide if you’re going to use a structured “three act story.” That is define the problem, attempt to solve it, and then, finally solve the problem. Or will you take the nonlinear approach? With the nonlinear approach you are still using a structure but to drive inspiration. What’s interesting here is that anyway you slice it, your stories have a structure to them.
Storytelling (Unlocking Potential)
Chapter 3 dives deeper into unlocking what your story is all about. To do this Blazer suggests two possible approaches. One is through narrative exercises and the other is using an experimental form. In the narrative exercise approach you have to decide how you’re going to initially use the narrative. Is there a conflict? Then make it clear and reveal what that conflict is early or take a look at maybe your character has a big secret. The other approach is to experiment by anchoring your story to a specific form type. Does music drive the story, like a music video? Or is is just as easy to cut out what you need and film it. Interesting point here is that Blazer specifically call out Terry Gilliam, of Monty Python hall of fame, as the “Cutout aficionado.” (Blazer, 2020, p71).
Storyboarding
Chapter 4 takes what you learned about getting your story formalized to now visualizing how your story will come to life before reaching it’s final medium. Right off the bat a nod is given to none other than Walt Disney for the innovation of storyboarding. Once past this nod, Blazer points to eight areas to make sure you include when you’re storyboarding. We won’t go into each one. You can pickup a copy of Animated Storytelling and read chapter 4 yourself. No, instead, you want to make sure you have the following when storyboarding; varying shots, framing and using the rule of thirds, staging the story, have continuity in the areas of spatial, temporal, and directional, keep timing in check, and laying out your storyboard on a timeline with dialogue and sound.
And Now for Something Somewhat Related
For those unaware, the topic subtitle is a nod to Monty Python’s movie titled “And Now for Something Completely Different!” (Python, 1974). Why do I have this BBC archive on Terry Gilliam and cutout animation you might ask. Well, to be frank about it, I’m a huge Monty Python fan and their animator Terry Gilliam was fantastic at storyteller. However, as mentioned earlier, he is quite the expert in cutout animation. While he is a “classically trained” artist, he explains why and shows viewers how to do cutout animations. Yes, I could save this for under stop motion animation, but Terry’s use of both traditional and cutout animation was just brilliant. I didn’t want to have you miss out on some good retro fun! Also, check out Dr. Michael Gheraz’s short but to the point blog titled Monty Python’s Animations which includes the video below.
Resources
Archive, B. (2022, March 25). 1974: Terry Gilliam on cutout animation | The DIY Film Animation Show | Classic Clips | BBC Archive. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaG_EiFX7a0
Blazer, L. (2020). Animated storytelling: Simple steps for creating Animation & Motion Graphics. Peachpit Press.
Gerharz, Dr. M. (2022, July 31). Monty Python’s animations. The Art of Communicating. https://michaelgerharz.com/blog/monty-pythons-animations.html
Research to Inform
Motion graphics are used all around us. The art of live action mixed with animated text and even animation itself all mixed together to provide a brief story to visually connect, tell a story, change a behaviour, or just be entertaining. This mixture of motion and text along with background music and sound effects calls out to my creative side. Below, I’ve found a few motion graphics which help drive home what motion graphics is all about.
Artistic Motion (Stella Artois)
Thinking about inspiration for this weeks assignment on motion graphics, I came across this really neat Stella Artois video. The video seems to pan across various drawings of folks indulging in some libations. What’s neat is how the motion graphic artist uses their medium. As the video plays the camera zooms out and you find out these are actual paintings. Layered into the video are very well done motion. The video moves back and forth between zooming in and intersecting animated graphic elements to tell the story as the narrator fills in the gap. This is what I aspire to do with my job in visually telling stories that keep you engaged.
Call to Action Motion
Next up I found this video on cinematic trailers. For me, I’ve always been captivated by great cinematic trailers and game cut scenes. Probably the foremost authority in this area of the film industry has been Marvel (for me at least). While this video only shows movie trailers, some of my favorite games (Star Citizen, Diablo series, etc.) also employ great motion graphics. The way animation, live action, and text are seamlessly stitched together into a fluid 30 seconds to 3:00 minutes is truly amazing.
Smart Polar Bears
My last motion graphic example is the classic Coca-Cola Polar Bear commercials. These advertisements usually appeared around Christmas time each year. They even did a special version for the 1994 Lillehammer Winter Olympics. Each version of the commercial had cute animations, a story, graphic overlays, and a final call to action. I can only imagine the number of layers, special effects, and text animation that was put into a 30 second spot. This is yet another reminder of how a motion graphic can move people depending on your message.
Create
Person of Interest
For my project on Personal Introduction, I decided to take a slightly different approach. While the “Hello, I’m…” approach is straight forward, I wanted to stretch myself. The personal introduction video below was done in After Effects. While I have used After Effects in the past, my experience is limited. Most of the time I would download a AE motion graphic template and play with the settings. However, this time I created the main part of the video from scratch and only imported elements from two templates to use.
All of my assets, minus my personal images and videos, were downloaded from my Envato Elements account. Assets downloaded included stock videos and templates, stock photos and illustrations, along with music and sound effects. Additionally, I used Audition to record my voice as the main narrator and the voice of Darla was generated in the Vyond animation software. I used Illustrator and Premiere Pro for asset touch ups before importing them into After Effects. With my general story idea, I employed Chat GPT 4.0 for the initial script and then rewrote the final script to fit the visual narrative. In After Effects, I was able to explore using pre-comps, easing, and replacing. Also, I experimented with using the glyph and colorize effects.
The timeline had a total of 39 assets of which 11 were pre-comps. After rendering in Media Encoder, I was able to bring it into Premiere Pro where I used the two-pass method to decrease the video file size from 157MB to 34MB without sacrificing quality. Below the video are a couple of my motion graphic in After Effects. Enjoy!
