Day 11 - Mo Techniques

All good at BDA - I feel quite at home there already, and 'get it". Those guys work really hard, and tend to constantly work at it.

There are 9 full time designers, and many of them have attended really good colleges such as the LCP (London College of Printing) or worked at ITN. They are all 'careerists' and will work 12 hour days if the job requires it. This kind of work mentality is very London (I guess it costs that much to live in London, long hours in work is normal). I also found that many of those guys and gals did a degree over 4 yeas, with a 1 year work experience year.

The upshot of that is, I now realise that success only really comes from elbow grease, enthusiasm, perseverance and more perseverance.

I have learned piles more techniques this week, from research, a way of going all that same processes we do at college, but digitally (this means the whole team can access the same info via a server) and quite rapidly. they probably research for a couple of days, but they go at it. Storyboards are done on Illustrator and Photoshop (for motion graphics), and on paper if they involve more work, such as live action shoots and 3D (or combinations of both).

Presentations are often made digitally, via phone and comprehensive PDF documents (created with InDesign)

This week, I have been mostly doing After Effects. Using solid layers with masks, animating them, then using effects and expressions to animate in time to music. These single objects are then pre-comped, then combined, pre-comped again to develop busy and interesting animated screens. I think once you get better at it, the results look better than this.

The idea with that test movie is everything is made from the same single shape, which is animated, comped, dupliacted, effects etc all combining to create a richer animation.