Taking Pannafino's suggestions into consideration, I started to run through some ideas of what kinds of things appear in the fantasy genre. Since I was (unfortunately) hooked on the burn reveal, what better to incorporate than a sort of flamethrower. The logo shoots out a fireball to reference either a dragon or some kind of cannon. I added a few adjustments after taking the evening to think about what needed to be done. Included are the beta version and final version of the logo design.
To reiterate,Arkane Studios is a game design company who made Dishonored, Dishonored 2, and most recently Prey. The Dishonored franchise is pretty much my most favorite game series ever (which is strange because I'm not typically a fan of first-person stuff). Typically when you start up a game, the logos of all involved companies cycle through before the title screen, so that's where this would be.
There was more in class work time and before that we got with a small group to give some feedback on each other's animations. My feedback wasn't all that great, but then again I didn't have much to show (I had the same problem as a few other students with my files being incompatible with the version of AE on the lab computers). I spent the class recreating what I had worked on over the weekend and then got some decent feedback from Pannafino. What I had looked "generic" (perfect word for it really) and he suggested to add elements to sort of give a "whimsical" feel since Arkane does fantasy/sci fi games. I did some thinking about that and managed to put together a storyboard (out of class but still) about what I'm going to attempt to do. It will be a very intensive day of design after I get some sleep.
I've been going through some stuff so yes, I'm behind on the blog but I haven't been completely neglecting the project. Because the days have kind of blended together at this point I'm just making one post for everything I missed.
For those of us who are into fantasy and RPG, the word arcane brings forth the thoughts of magic, and most typically people think of fireballs. So therefore I thought it would be great to have a fireball coming in and burning the logo into the screen or whatever, but that was apparently an unattractive and complicated design. So decided to sort of keep the idea but remove the fireball part and just go with the burning aspect. Again, probably far complex and maybe even completely cheesy but I'm too far into this now to go back to the drawing board. Oh well. Here are the original storyboards that were drawn up.
So here was my first rough draft of animation that turned out to be utter garbage. I've got an idea to make it better so we'll see.
Due to still being a novice at the program and just not being able to figure out how to do some of the things I proposed, the final product isn't exactly the same as the storyboard, but I think it is just as effective. I think the pacing could have been a bit better, but I think everything is fairly visible and able to be read.
Critique:
I got compliments on my use of typefaces and the contrast between them and the background.
The general consensus was that I had too many different transitions/animations and it was a bit over the top.
The transitions and animations as well as the words should be used in the "recall" and "foreshadowing."
There were good transitions coming onto the screen, but hardly any of the text exiting.
I listen to music on Pandora a lot (which I'm told is kind of archaic in the internet radio scene, I guess everyone uses Spotify. Oh well), and every so often it does me the favor of playing a song I hadn't heard before. The quote I chose was the chorus on such a song. It is by the band American Authors called "Pocket full of Gold." It's really catchy and upbeat, but for readability purposes I had to make sure to slow everything down. Following is the storyboard I put together.
In class, symbolic storyboards were discussed and we began our next project: Motion Message. Music has been very influential in my life, as I suppose it has been with most people, so I knew I had to do some lyrics from a song. Within the past year or two I've been expanding my musical tastes from just straight up 'rock' to include more folksy feeling pieces. The song "Pocket full of Gold" by American Authors had me falling in love with it from the very first time I heard it, and it played on the way into class that morning so I knew I had to use it in this project.
This screenshot shows the beginning of my storyboard and the lyrics I'll be using on the left-hand side.
