Anatomy of a Title Sequence. Interview.

 
Peter Cran­dall, a great friend and fan­tas­tic artist, designed the new open­ing title sequences (see below) for all of our videos. After proudly shar­ing them with other peo­ple, we real­ized that we wanted to know more about the whole process, so here is a recent conversation.

Tell us a lit­tle bit about where you are with your career.
I’ve been free­lanc­ing as a motion designer in Los Ange­les for the past eight years. The major­ity of my expe­ri­ence and projects in motion design have been in the enter­tain­ment indus­try, which has entailed design­ing motion graph­ics for tele­vi­sion shows/networks, open­ing title sequences to film, TV pro­mos, com­mer­cials, and web videos.

Apple Inc. con­tacted me last fall (2011) to work at their Cuper­tino office to help out with some projects in their mar­ket­ing depart­ment. In short, I’ve recently relo­cated to Sil­i­con Val­ley and I’m now work­ing more reg­u­larly with Apple. The rela­tion­ships I have with the LA stu­dios are still very impor­tant to me so I do my best to con­tinue work­ing with those stu­dios when they con­tact me.

I under­stand you worked on Apple’s new iPhone cam­paign, can you tell us a bit more about that expe­ri­ence?
Work­ing at Apple for a few months in prepa­ra­tion for the iPhone 4S launch was excit­ing and unique in a few ways for me. First, the focus is not on any celebrity, tele­vi­sion show or other con­sumer media, but on a prod­uct; in this case the iPhone 4S. Sec­ond, Apple has a very estab­lished and suc­cess­ful mar­ket­ing brand. Since the over­all visual lan­guage of Apple is very sim­ple and clean, the design­ing doesn’t lend itself explor­ing a wide spec­trum of cre­ativ­ity like other brands in the enter­tain­ment indus­try I’ve worked with. Over­all, the expe­ri­ence of work­ing with the very tal­ented team dur­ing the launch of the iPhone 4S was sim­ply amazing.

Could you take us through the design process of “eduardoangel.com” from the early con­cepts, to the devel­op­ment stage and final exe­cu­tion? We are espe­cially curi­ous about how you decide on spe­cific design ele­ments like color scheme, typog­ra­phy, audio, and even the length.
Just like any project I start, the first thing I did in the design process for cre­at­ing the intro ani­ma­tions of “eduardoangel.com” was to talk with Mr. Angel about his com­pany and the con­text in which the intro sequence would exist.

The key con­cept I came away with from talk­ing with Mr. Angel in devel­op­ing the intro ani­ma­tion was the impor­tance of the con­tent itself. The web site cov­ers many top­ics, so I thought about how they could be con­veyed and ulti­mately turned key­words from the “tag cloud” on the site into a slot-machine style ani­ma­tion based on the keywords.

Hav­ing many dif­fer­ent words whiz by helps give a sense of vol­ume to the con­tent, but at the same time help it remain play­ful. Since the func­tion of the ani­ma­tion is an open­ing sequence to video con­tent, I wanted the length of the ani­ma­tion to be infor­ma­tive and con­cise. After doing some tests and get­ting a good “feel” for the ani­ma­tion I started to explore some sound effects that would com­pli­ment the motion and rein­force the pro­fes­sional and friendly qual­i­ties of the web site as a whole.

What soft­ware and tech­niques did you use for this ani­ma­tion?
I used Adobe After Effects for the entire process. After Effects is great soft­ware for the wide spec­trum of pos­si­bil­i­ties in motion design, whether it be very intri­cate and com­plex ani­ma­tions or very sim­ple ones. While I def­i­nitely wouldn’t cat­e­go­rize this open­ing sequence as a com­plex ani­ma­tion, the sim­plic­ity of the design aes­thetic made me con­sider refin­ing the tim­ing of the ani­ma­tion to give a sense of speed, at the same time finess­ing the leg­i­bil­ity of the words so they wouldn’t become a blurry mess as they quickly scrolled by. I scrubbed through the After Effects time­line frame by frame to make sure that all the words would be leg­i­ble at any point in the ani­ma­tion. This is par­tic­u­larly impor­tant for videos on the web since the viewer can start and stop the video on any given frame.

What kinds of movies do you like to watch as a motion graphic designer?
One recent movie that caught my atten­tion for its inter­face and info-graphic spe­cial effects (not so much the story!) was Iron Man 2. The scenes in par­tic­u­lar are the holo­grams and inter­faces that Robert Downey, Jr. inter­acts with in his home.

Achiev­ing such seam­less inte­gra­tion of these graph­ics with the actors and live action envi­ron­ments is noth­ing short of bril­liance in my opin­ion, since it requires the exper­tise of many tech­ni­cal and cre­ative dis­ci­plines work­ing together. The design/visual effects com­pany that cre­ated those effects is called
Pro­logue, and is one of the best in the industry.

How much does know­ing tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion serve now with com­puter ani­ma­tions? Which do you pre­fer and why?
From a broad per­spec­tive, tra­di­tional cell ani­ma­tion has def­i­nitely lost “market-share” to com­puter gen­er­ated ani­ma­tions and graph­ics when it comes to movies, com­mer­cials and even in mar­kets where it seemed invin­ci­ble, such as children’s pro­gram­ming. With that said, tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion is used in a vari­ety of ways in motion design and in con­junc­tion with CG animations.

A com­mon tech­nique I see with some com­pa­nies such as Psyop give a tra­di­tional ani­ma­tion aes­thetic in their work even though it may be entirely CG. Com­pa­nies like Psyop use highly spe­cial­ized artists expe­ri­enced with a vari­ety of media. I think this com­bi­na­tion makes for a very suc­cess­ful hybrid of the two dis­ci­plines, so I can’t say I pre­fer one or the other, espe­cially when they both lend them­selves well in telling dif­fer­ent types of stories.

What kind of trends are you see­ing in motion graph­ics and where do see the future of it?
What new tech­nolo­gies are you embrac­ing?
For a lit­tle more than the past decade, I’d say motion design has truly taken form as a very robust com­mer­cial art indus­try by itself, and much has to do with how easy it is to get into the field. Col­leges now offi­cially have Motion Design/Motion Graph­ics degrees, on-line soft­ware train­ing is ubiq­ui­tous (Lynda.com, Dig­i­tal Tutors, FXPHD to name a few), soft­ware appli­ca­tions are increas­ingly more sophis­ti­cated, and the hard­ware to run it all is much more pow­er­ful and cheaper than ever.

Now with all this expo­sure and excit­ing work be cre­ated, which I con­sider to be an indef­i­nite trend, one par­tic­u­lar trend I’ll make note of is the com­modi­ti­za­tion of motion graph­ics. On-line mar­ket­places for ani­ma­tion projects and pre­sets have been gain­ing more trac­tion over the past few years, which is to con­tinue. For motion design­ers the lever­age that these mar­ket­places can pro­vide for expe­dit­ing projects, or for sell­ing projects, can be very entic­ing. On the flip side, I find such com­modi­ti­za­tion and off-the-shelf projects as becom­ing too much of a crutch for some design­ers, dilut­ing the art form and their own cre­ativ­ity all at once.

Could you share any advice to aspir­ing motion graphic design­ers?
Under­stand­ing fun­da­men­tals of art/design, typog­ra­phy, com­po­si­tions, editing—I think those are essen­tial. For­tu­nately their are lots of schools, blogs and com­pa­nies with amaz­ing work to learn from. Know­ing your strength and inter­ests are also key to find­ing a niche as a motion graph­ics designer.

Being a “gen­er­al­ist” in a vari­ety of dis­ci­plines is fine, but some­times com­pa­nies are really look­ing the experts in a very spe­cific aes­thetic, which also usu­ally means being very pro­fi­cient with the pop­u­lar soft­ware application(s) required in the pro­duc­tion pipeline. Some com­mon must-know appli­ca­tions are Adobe After Effects, Pho­to­shop, Illus­tra­tor, but also hav­ing solid skills in a pop­u­lar 3D soft­ware pack­age such as Cin­ema 4D or Maya has become essen­tial. Under­stand­ing tech­niques of edit­ing and using an edit­ing soft­ware such as Final Cut Pro or Adobe Pre­miere Pro is also helpful.

To see more of Peter Crandall’s work please visit www.renderitup.com

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 9th, 2012 at 07:00. It is filed under Analysis, Consulting, Digital Cinema, Education, Marketing, Photography, Technology, Visuals and tagged with branding, graphic design, marketing, motion graphics, opening title sequence. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.