OVERVIEW

Year: 2017
My Role: Video Editor, Motion Graphics, Compositor, SFX

PROJECT OBJECTIVES

The project was to create a promotional video for ECHOage taking about their service, celebrating their 10 years and giving the audience a preview of the interface of the website. The video had to match ECHOage’s kid friendly brand while keeping in mind their target audience, parents. This video has used a number of compositing and animation techniques to create.

TEAM

Gladstone Media
Melissa Kumaresan

01.

STORYBOARD & PLANNING

Before I put graphic designs into motion, I start by scribbling and planning ideas on paper first. This allows me to visualize the animation quickly and make changes to it on the spot. Storyboard of the logo animation on the left and the animation result below.

MOTION TRACKING

Once the graphics were animated to their respective scenes, the movement of the camera is tracked.

What is Motion Tracking?
Motion tracking, in its simplest form, is the process of tracking the movement of an object within a piece of footage. Once you've collected this track data from the selected point, you then apply it to another element or object. The results of applying this data are that your element or object now matches the movement of your footage. Essentially you can composite something into a scene that was never there.

Source: School of Motion

CHALLENGE

Multiple compositing techniques were used on this scene but the main challenge here was creating a seamless transition from the laptop into the full screen of the website. This scene was done in 2 layers (the website screen and live footage). The trick was to place the website screen animation on top of the laptop screen. The screen was masked to match edges of the laptop screen so it does not look flat.

When it came to the camera zoom, an illusion had to be created. The live footage in the back had to be scaled up to mimic a zoom while making sure the website screen was scaling along with it too. And in order to achieve that, the website screen was tracked to the scaling of the live footage.

CHALLENGE

This scene was a lot of fun to work on! But it had some challenges. The first one being was tracking the camera motion pan movement so that the banner, text and balloon outline graphics stick to the scene.

The second challenge was to make it seamless between the wide shot and the close up shot. I had to make sure that the graphics were tracked and scaled to size in the close up shot to match its size in the wide shot.

CHALLENGE

This scene was probably the most challenging scene in the whole video. The goal was not only to track the animated screen on to the iPad, but to also rotoscope the hands (the pointing finger and the hands holding the iPad) in order to make it almost realistic.

What made this difficult to execute was due to the scene being shaky, the lighting being quite dark as it is an over the shoulder shot and there were not enough tracking points placed in the footage when production took place.

Learnings & Takeaways

This project was quite the challenge as I was responsible for editing the raw footage, animating the graphics given to me by the in-house Designer at Gladstone Media (thanks Emma!) and the overall compositing and completion of the video. Putting aside the responsibilities, I had worked with techniques that I was not fully comfortable with at the time. Compositing techniques such as motion tracking and rotoscoping. There was a lot of trial and error and some scenes had to be completely redesigned or removed altogether. I also learned how to solve problems and work with raw footage that could have used more tracking points during production. The footage was edited in Premiere Pro and animated and composited in After Effects. So to sum it all up, this project was a whole new learning experience that I am thankful for. Thank you Gladstone Media for the experience!