Production Principles Final Project – Marvelous Marketing Misunderstanding – Zuzanna Stawowska, Chun Fung Poon

The initial idea for our project was to make something resembling a YouTube advertisement. The inspiration came from the fact that while we were looking for inspiration by watching YouTube videos we watched twice as many adds. The beginning of our story was that two people work on an ad, in the middle they have an argument and the story ends when one of them gives up and fires the other. The most important thing I learned in this project is that we severely underestimated the amount of time it takes to speak. Our initial script was so long just the lines of one of us took 27 seconds which was more then the total length of the project. Because of this we had to revise not just the wording but the plot of the animation.  We settled on two characters viewing an ad together, noticing their misunderstanding regarding the ads contents and ultimately realizing they are very behind on their work in the process.

The biggest part of our project was sound. We had to record the lines we assigned to each other as well as find a way to add a third voice for the ad itself. We decided to record each line separately so that when we added them to the animation we could freely adjust their timing or even the speed at which they are played. Other than that we added some sound effects such as the click of a mouse, or space bar, clang of metal, rustle of leaves or the sound of crumbling stone. Sound was very challenging to do together working online actually made things easier, while we were at school the noise from the equipment, other students or the environment made it hard to record so it was actually easier to do it from home.

The animation itself was done mostly using the skills from the motion graphics rotation. The project consists mostly of various items moving in and out of frame, what I found challenging was when we added handwritten words. Since we initially didn’t know how to achieve this we wanted to simply record ourselves writing and add it on top of what we made, but the discrepancy between the video quality and the quality of what we already had made it look like the animation pixelized all of the sudden. Because of that we had to figure out how to create handwriting using a mouse and the pen tool (that has nothing to do with an actual pen). Ultimately it did work and I hope to use this skill in the future.

If I were to do this project again I would like to be able to add background music to it, neither me nor my teammate know anything about music and we never played any instruments therefore we don’t really know how to go about composing even a short tune. For the future I would like to at least learn the basics. This project will be a good reference point for me as to how long things within the animation take. I have always had a hard time guessing the length of time, the distance or weight, because of this I vastly overestimated how much can fit into a 20 second video. Now I can use this project as a point of reference for future projects.