Rationale

Rationale:

Our Big Issue is single use plastic bags and the effect they are having on our oceans and marine life. Our Small Action is to use recyclable tote bags to reduce the use of throwaway plastic bags. Our target audience is young adults. Millennials are going to be the next leaders. We believe that the motivation for change has to come from the top. We want to make sure our next leaders are aware of the pressing issues facing our environment, and are motivated to make a change. 

Our inspiration came from The Little Mermaid. We wanted to take beloved Disney characters that Millennials grew up with, and turn their happy ‘under-the-sea’ world into a horror scene of pollution and destruction. We ended up with two ‘movie trailer’ type animations that we feel are different, funny and most importantly, memorable. We wanted to create something unique that would make people stop and watch. There are so many websites and videos and graphics around the subject of the environment and most tend to be very similar and easily ignored. We feel that we have made something that will stand out, that sticks in your mind and that will be remembered next time you are at a supermarket checkout.

We have designed our website to work with our motion graphics. It is similar in look, and has all the facts and information we wanted people to know about this topic. Our videos are there to grab the audience’s attention, and our website is there to provide more in depth information. 

We both feel we have learnt so much over the last 6 weeks, and are really happy with our final product. There is obviously always more that could be tweaked or adjusted, but we both feel proud of what we were able to create in this timeframe. 

Workbook - Website, final illustrations and refinements

Our website is now fully responsive, and we have added animation to our website headers - video files below:

Some more illustrations - further refinements like getting Flounder's eyes to move and making the goldfish bag transparent (which looks much better!)

And a couple more screenshots of some of the animation:

Illustrations for our fact points and information on our webpages:

Thursday 01.06

We finished our final motion graphics and have added animation to our website as well. Our motion graphics are below:

1. Big Issue - Plastic Bag pollution and it's effect on marine life:

2. Small Action - Use recyclable bags instead of single-use plastic:

Screenshots of our finished website:

We presented our finished work in The Pit this morning and were pleased with how it went. We are really happy with our concept and our videos. They are different, funny, and memorable.

Workbook: 1st Motion Graphic

We really love our Small Action motion graphic and we want to improve on our Big Issue animation now that we've learnt so much about animating with After Effects. We think they feel too different now - our Big Issue animation feels a bit more serious, whereas our second one has really embraced humour and is slightly ridiculous and we're really happy with how it looks. We'd like to make our first animation a bit more over-the-top silly to match.

We have re-thought a few scenes that were lacking in character, and have added in the creepy-faced bags, and added a few more personalities and refined the last scenes with Flounder, Sebastian and the Eel in the goldfish bags:

2nd Motion Graphic/Workbook/Sound Effects

Since Monday's class we have been working on getting the sound effects for our 2nd motion graphic, and refining the concept. We have fixed some glitches in the animation to make the movement more natural, and have re-worked some illustrations to make it all flow a little better.

Our video with sound effects is below. We think it's working well and we still find it hilarious so hopefully this will make it a bit more memorable than the usual, more serious motion graphics that you see around this topic.

We have also changed the timing slightly on our first motion graphic to make it flow a bit better and to give our audience time to take in the text and animation. The refined version is below:

A few more versions of our second animation - small changes and refinements, we have added faces to the plastic bags to make them creepier and we have been working on secondary animation of things like the background bags spinning away when the main bag is killed, and we have the recycling symbol flying in a boomerang around to the bag and back to the tote bag's chest. 

Further refinements below - we've changed the faces of the spinning bags when the main bag gets hit so now they change from grinning to dead. We've fixed the rotation on the recycling symbol so it's moving much more naturally.

We have also included Danielle's new illustrations below:

We have also worked on an animation for our website which we really hope to include, however the coding for this is proving difficult!

Monday 29.05

Today we refined our first motion graphic, and started to focus on our second one.

We have also added sound effects to our first video and it is starting to come together well. We have gone for some classic horror movie sounds effects, mixed with a slowed down version of 'Under the Sea' from The Little Mermaid for a creepy, music box-like effect.

After showing this to a few people, the general feedback was that is was a bit too fast to take it all in. The text flashed away too quickly and some of the scenes were too quick also. This was really valuable feedback, as we know the script so well we don't actually need to read the text. For people who've never seen it before there is a lot going on very quickly. We will now work on making sure everything is readable and there is enough time to take in the important scenes.

We have also made an animatic for our second video:

Further refinements below:

We like where this is going, but feel it needs a bit more humour. We have added a cape to the tote bag, and after 'there is hope' we have the reflection of the heroic tote back reflected in Flounder's eyes. We have also added bigger eyes and more tears to the first shot of Flounder surrounded by plastic bags, blood splashes when the bag is split in two, and we have the bag splitting more cleanly.

Our website is also now fully responsive and the design is more resolved:

We would like to have the illustrations on our website animated, so going forward we will be working on that, and on refining both animations.

Week 5: Thursday 25.05

Today was spent refining our first animation. After showing our draft to Mon, he thought we could go even more into the horror movie type genre and try and ham it up even more. He suggested not showing Flounder getting eaten by the bag, as trailers are all about building suspense. Instead he thought we could try a zoom in on the evil bag, and have Flounder being chased from behind rather than swimming into the bag to be eaten.

Danielle has worked on new illustrations to add more character and humour:

And I have changed the animation slightly to try out Mon's suggestions. We have also removed the typewriter effect from the text as we thought it would work better with the sound effects to have the text appearing as one line:

We really like the direction this is going, and we will re-work our second storyboard to fit this theme. Going forward, Danielle will continue to work on coding and the look of our website and I will continue to refine our motion graphics.

Week 5: Monday 22.05

We have been refining our new motion graphic and have decided to make it like a movie trailer for a horror movie. We have some gory elements happening with Flounder getting squashed by the tonne and after watching a few horror movie trailers we think this could be an effective way to go.

After showing Mon our first draft, he suggested getting rid of the tonne idea altogether. He thought it was confusing and wasn't adding anything to our narrative. It was supposed to represent the amount of plastic in the ocean, but we both agree with him that it isn't working in this narrative. Instead the 'villain' will be the plastic bags themselves. We have drawn up a new storyboard with our re-worked script and ideas:

Below is our first animatic. There is a scene missing where some illustration still needs to be done, but we plan to have Flounder, Sebastian the crab and other Little Mermaid characters floating in plastic bags.

For our soundtrack we want classic horror movie sound effects, which we have added in here:

I have also refined the animation a bit so it is looking more natural and the transitions are smoother.

Week 4: Thursday 18.05

Today was a group critique of our progress so far. We have a very rough draft, as I am animating and Danielle is illustrating. I have used super basic drawings to get the timing right and will replace everything with Danielle's amazing illustrations when they are all done!

Feedback:

• Our animatic too slow moving and a bit long. 
• There is too much information/animation happening at once. 

This is exactly how we have been feeling. We are animating our storyboard and have realised that we were incredibly ambitious when planning it out! I am really struggling with all the scene changes, and am finding that animating in After Effects has been really fiddly and is taking much longer than I thought. There are so many illustrations and it is also incredibly time consuming for Danielle to try and draw them all. 

We spent the remainder of the class completely re-thinking our idea:

 

We have cut the first 7 scenes from our storyboard, and are starting our motion graphic under the sea. As our topic is plastic bags in the ocean, that's what we want to focus on. We also want to make use of the fact that we are taking these beloved Disney characters and putting them in a very real polluted environment. We have decided to go for a more gory, cartoony approach. We want to really grab peoples attention and create something humorous, a little bit horrifying and, most importantly, memorable.

A few screenshots from our first draft - playing around with typeface as we want something that will match the Disney/cartoony vibe but that isn't horrible!

Week 4: Monday 16.05

Our website is starting to come together. We haven't used a template so it has been made from scratch. It is responsive and starting to work well.







There are some design elements we need to work on to make our information clearer and the experience more user friendly. At the moment the headings and navigation bar are too large:



And we want to make the bottom of the page more dynamic - perhaps by adding some animation to the background:



Going forward from here we will further refine our website design to achieve a more user-friendly experience.

Week 3: Thursday 11.05

Today was about working with After Effects, and creating an animatic.

We used some basic illustrations, and added our text to make sure there was enough time to read it and take it in.  Below are some screenshots of our animatic in it's first draft stages.

At the moment our video is quite long, we have a lot of text and information so we need to think about condensing this and making it more snappy for our viewers. It also will be a lot more visually interesting than this! However the basic illustrations are a big help to work out the timing of our video, placement of elements and our narrative.