Design Hero Project 04: Video
Using the work you’ve done on your poster and booklet, create a short video
with your design hero as the subject.
Part 1: Audio
I spent a good number of hours digging through the internet to find footage of Alvin Lustig, with no success. I ended up reading somewhere that despite his prolific career, Alvin Lustig is famous for having made no appearances on video or television, except for one small cameo in a very short independent art film. However, a simple search of his name on Youtube actually brings up several videos about him, nearly all of them being his wife, Elaine Lustig-Cohen, talking about his work in retrospect. Alvin Lustig and Elaine Lustig-Cohen had a really successful professional partnership, with Alvin sort of passing on the responsibility of work in his firm onto her after his passing. Elaine went on to have a really successful design career, and she credits a lot of what she learned about design early on in her career to Alvin.
This is the video where I took about 80% of my voiceover clips from. In the video, Elaine tells a really sweet story about how she met Alvin, how she began working as an assistant in his studio and how she continued working after he passed. I’ve always been really drawn to their life story early on in my research, so I think telling the story from the perspective of the person who was closest to Alvin would be really interesting, aside from the fact that I also have no other option.
Music
Picking a backing track is always the most exciting part of the planning process for me. I listen to a lot of soundtrack from films so that’s always where I start from. I began with picking songs that might have an interesting beat for me to time my animations around, but I felt like it wasn’t really fitting for the subject matter. In the end, I settled on this really beautiful but bittersweet arrangement from one of my favourite films, Eternal Sunshine for a Spotless Mind. It has no lyrics but it’s a song that really makes you think about love, and I think that my chosen voiceover is at its core, a love story.
Putting it all Together
A lot of my classmates are struggling with finding good audio and voiceover tracks to use, and I feel really lucky that this process only took me a few days.
Part 2: Storyboarding
I had a really strong initial reaction to the audio track I put together, and the first 30 seconds of the storyboard came to me really quickly. I never got around to finishing the last 30 seconds of my storyboard, but I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to do so I decided to just move ahead with the animation. One last extra thing I did before going into after effects was making simple hand drawn animations of my storyboard so I could get a better sense of what my transitions would look like.
Style Frames
Making style frames was partly done to help figure out the overall visual aesthetic of my video as well as to start making assets that I would animate later . These were really fun albeit a bit tedious to make. I am mostly just really excited to start making real animations. I was doing a lot of research into other motion design work around this time, and I was really drawn to the visual style of Ariel Costa, who does these really cool mixed media, mostly photo collage style animations.
Animating (Finally!)
This was around the point where I started losing steam. Trying to figure out how to rig and make a walk cycle for my figure was really difficult and time consuming, and the final product was no where near what I wanted. It was at this point where I was starting to second guess the visual direction I was taking with the video. Although collage style animations are cool, the amount of image files you have to work with and manipulate is enormous, and I am not known for my file management. I was able to animate the first few seconds where Elaine meets Alvin for the first time, which was around 10 seconds.
I decided to take a short pause from the chaos of the collage work and started working on my more illustrative elements. I enjoyed working on this a lot more than anything else I had done before. After seeing everyone else’s stuff in crit, I was feeling frustrated and impatient with what I had so far, and made the final decision to scrap everything I had at this point and start over with a new storyboard.
These were all the different style iterations I was exploring while I was making my pivot. I’m honestly not happy with any of them (SPOILER: I end up using none of these). I have decided to settle with the last one for the time being so I can work on something else.
Making Lots of Progress!
Starting over was definitely the right move. I’m really getting settled into the workflow of working between procreate and afterEffects, and I really should’ve played to my strengths since the beginning.
Because everyone is at different stages of the process, I haven’t had a great chance to get feedback during this project. Usually when I am not feeling great about what I have and just want to pump out as much work as possible, I try to just avoid feedback until I have something that’s ready to show.
During peer critique, I got a lot of really great positive and critical feedback for my video. I found that people disagreed on a lot of things, but I’ll write it down here anyways.
- Illustrations are really nice, can tell I spend a lot of time on it. (I did T_T)
- Some people were more drawn to my vector style illustrations towards the end.
- Text towards the beginning felt a little chunky
- There was a moment in the beginning where it felt like the camera was on Elaine’s face a bit too long
- Provide some context about who is speaking!
- Nice moment at the end.
- A few lulls in the animation, because I’m not finished yet.
The Final Stretch
Aside from figuring out what to do with the final five seconds that I had been neglecting since the original storyboarding process, there were a lot of tiny little things that I wanted to redo.
- Typography: Establishing a cohesive typographic system. Right now, I switch between squiggly hand drawn type, a sans serif, and a serif. I got mixed responses from the class when I asked which style people liked best. I decided to go with the squiggly hand drawn type, which will take considerably more time than the other options
- Color: Making sure all the different tones were consistent
- Colouring in animated line art
- Making some small technical fixes having to do with different resolutions, frame rates, etc
- Possibly adding a grain filter??
A change that I was really happy with was making this scene black and white. I think it makes the book covers stand out more and goes well with the style of the second half of the video. I spent so much time initially trying to figure out the colours and ended up taking it out entirely!
Finally colouring in a texturing this sketch. This clip has come a long way!
Final Video
And finally, the final video! I made a very very last minute decision to switch to a serif style type system, because I didn’t like how my hand writing looked. This was such a fun project to work on, but definitely one of the hardest so far. I’ve never had the chance to really experiment and express myself through this medium before, and it was a lot of trail-and-error in figuring out my personal style and workflow. Out of all the projects I’ve done, this one definitely had the most rewarding outcome.
