It’s a nice look if you need to create some peeling gilded text on the base of an old statue. It’s also great for a faux antique gravestone or building ruin. And the type is still fully editable so, I dunno, evil posessed statues can come to life and write things? Some archaeologist could unearth something demonic? Okay, I admit it. I actually have utterly no idea what to use this for, but it’s pretty cool looking so I thought I’d post it anyway. And all you have to do is change the typeface and it looks like an artifact from a completely different era, so it might actually have some practical application after all.

The basic setup is a mix of BCC Reptilian, Fractal Noise, Bevel Alpha, two instances of Roughen Edges and a lot of hue-sat tweaking. There’s also a Gaussian Blur adjustment layer with a Fractal Noise solid as its luma matte. And then there’s a vignette. Because there’s always a vignette.

If anyone’s interested it I can make this into a preset or upload the project file.

STEP ONE: INITIAL CONCEPT

One thing I’ve learned from working in documentary is how important it is to have all the facts BEFORE you begin, and getting everyone on the same page early on will save time, tears, and money. First, and most important rule for both sides: be honest. I used to think that the hardest clients to work for are people with absolutely no idea what they want. In fact, the most difficult clients are the ones who either claim to have no idea what they want, but secretly have something very specific in mind, or the ones who demand something with great specificity, but actually have no clue what they’re asking for and afraid to show it. If you really don’t know what you want from a designer, SAY SO. We won’t judge you! If you don’t know anything about graphic design and have never hired a pro before, SAY SO. We’re happy to walk you through the process. And if you don’t understand technical jargon we use, don’t be scared to ask what we mean. And that goes both ways — if you’re a designer and you don’t understand a brief, SAY SO. If something is far easier or harder than a client realizes, SAY SO. (And don’t be scared to mention things you think they may have left out, for that matter, or a creative alternative they might not have considered.) Ask for a fair rate and explain your charges — do you charge by the day or hour, build in rounds of changes with additional ones extra or just have a flat final figure? Get a contract.

TRUE STORY: The single most horrifying phrase I have ever heard came four months into a freelance animation project, less than a week before final broadcast delivery date: “…can we do this in 3D?” I nearly fell over. And no one was happy with the final results on either side.

That said, where do you start? Get the technical details out of the way. A designer needs to know the scale of the project immediately — are we talking posters, a website, animation, just a logo? All of the above? Does the client need various design elements to use later on their own, or will they come back to you anytime they need anything else? Is it for print? If so, are you printing in full color, black and white, spot color? It’s okay to ask what your options are — and there may be alternatives that will give you everything you need faster and/or for less money. How big is the biggest thing you’re making? It’s fine if you grab your program’s inch-high headshots off of facebook, but if you want posters with photos on them, you’d better be able to get your source materials in high resolution. If it’s an animated project, what are your delivery specs? Are you working in 1080p HD but want to ensure your lower thirds are still readable on YouTube? Will your broadcast graphics need to be able to be converted into DVD covers and labels? And one last very important and often-overlooked question: do you have the rights to all the materials you want to use?

Next, what’s the turnaround time? How does that fit into the designer’s schedule? Is there a hard or flexible deadline? Is it possible to finish by then? For Kevin’s opera, there’s no chance of making posters becoming The Neverending Project — they have to be done and printed before the performance date. But talking out the design requirements led to us both realizing that it wasn’t just posters — there are programs and feedback forms to design, and the logo has to work everywhere from facebook to the cover of the score, so I need to give him a few extra variations on it (for instance, a solid black version that will photocopy well). And those logo designs have to happen sooner, so he can begin his publicity campaign as quickly as possible.

Once you have that settled, you can talk style. Piles of adjectives are good, as are references to existing designs you think have a similar look and feel to what you’re going for. Think color, tone, texture. How much text is there? Once I’ve talked through this stuff, I actually like to condense the conversation into a little summary to make sure we’re on the same page. Here’s what I said to Kevin:

You need to create a visual “look” to go with this performance. On a broad level, you want it to convey that this is a creative new approach to looking at a classical piece, and that it’s serious work but accessible and fun. And you want to look like *you’re* for serious as well, and that the music is central to the production. Finding the balance between all those elements is the biggest challenge.

Visually, you’re thinking things that suggest “nighttime” and “forest” would be a good place to start. Flexibility is also key — you need something that works in both B&W and color, so strong simple shapes are probably smart — you want to be able to make readable photocopies, if need be, and going the vector route will give you scalability. You also definitely need a logo delivered separately so you can use it in other places. If you want to create a consistent look for everything, you probably also want a few related elements that you can repurpose on their own (if, for instance, the poster was trees on a night sky, you’d also want the trees separately so you could make a B&W version that doesn’t use your entire ink cartridge), as well as a couple color swatches and a typeface or two to use for all non-logo text.

After we concluded we were on the same page, we decided I should start by sketching out a range of possible logo designs. His homework was to figure out the rough copy for the poster.

Stay tuned for part 2!

Here’s a still from the raw footage (DVCPROHD 1080i60):

And here’s the after shot, with only four very basic After Effects filters applied (click to embiggen):

I used Leave Color to keep just the blues and desaturate the rest of the image, then boosted the saturation a bit to make the remaining color really pop. After that it was just your basic Levels and a high-contrast instance of Curves.

Oh, and one extra layer on top as a vignette — a black solid with a rounded rectangle mask (double-click the mask tool to get one that fills the layer) set to subtract and heavily feathered. That’s all!

Leave Color has simple parameters but dramatic results, and is especially good as a quick trick if you need to draw a viewer’s eye to a key element of a scene. All you have to do is decide which color you want to keep. For example, say you have a shot of a bunch of people at a party, with one woman in a bright red dress. Choose that red with the eyedropper, then slide “Amount to Decolor” to 100%. Only the color of the dress will remain, and she instantly becomes the center of attention.

Sin City and Pleasantville (interesting combination of titles when you think about it…) are both good examples of how visually arresting color highlights can be on a black and white scene.

Sometimes it takes a couple tries to get it right.

We have a fairly substantial library of short educational films that we’d like to repurpose into a television series. They’re a bit unconventional, as civics films go — informative, but with an edge — and I think they’re actually entertaining enough to attract a wide audience. But before we recut for TV, we have to convince someone to air them.

FIRST ROUGH VERSION

I must admit, I’m not terribly proud of this one. It looks like a social studies textbook for kids, not something befitting a show with a witty, grown-up approach to civics. There are a few elements I like, though — particularly the emphasis on the “glorious mess of freedom” line and using the Constitution as a graphic. I can also see some vague hope for the use of star shapes, even though they aren’t really working here. On the whole, though, it manages to come across as both cartoonish and too formal. Birra is a cute typeface, and it reads well both large and small, but it’s completely wrong here — as are the super-bright colors.

FIRST REVISION

We decided the proposal needed to feel more adult, more fun, and a great deal edgier — we want people to get the idea that these aren’t your typical educational films. Democracy is messy, after all!

We also decided to switch to a formal cover and facing pages interior (the original was intended to be single sheets). I kept the red-blue scheme (hard not to), but toned it down a LOT. No more cheery happy yellow Constitution.

I also roughed things up a great deal, and used Rosewood for the display text to give it a more uneven look.

The cover may have a lot more drama, but it’s the interior pages that really have an edge to them — definitely no more kids show. Leading, alignment and type sizing are uneven, and instead of formal text over smooth squares it now looks as if someone’s spilled correction fluid on the Constitution and printed over it.

Even the very-simply-designed episode descriptions have been given a bit of texture. The stars look like they’ve been stamped onto the page, which makes them much more interesting.

Overall, I really like this look. The colors feel right and I think it actually fits both the show and its intended audience. The sense of humor and realistic approach the shows take both come through. But have I gone too far in the other direction?

FINAL VERSION

I get my feedback: that second version was edgy, yes, but it’s not terribly elegant. My boss thinks the font choices evoke the old west, which is inappropriate for the focus of the series. So we decide to tone things down a bit.

The cover stays roughly the same, but we’ve switched to a much more formal typeface, giving it a cleaner feel that matches the smoothness of the imagery.

The opening lines are allowed to push the margins, giving them a little more prominence, but the “mess of freedom” pull quote has been reduced in scale so as not to draw attention away from them. It no longer juts out at random, either — even though the leading and scaling are uneven, it fits within the body copy, keeping it in context. The spattery background has gone back to being a giant square again, giving the page the more formal appearance of the front cover and allowing us to seem, well, a bit kinder to our national documents.

The episode pages remain virtually the same, yet a simple font change actually gives them quite a different look. Everything seems more tied together now, too.

So there you have it. A bit of how this sort of thing comes about. The usual process seems to be “initial idea -> strong push in another direction -> find a happy medium.” There’s a delicate balance one needs to strike, and I think the final version of this proposal pulls it off for the most part. Had I more time, I might churn through my font collection (which has grown unmanageably huge) and see if I could find a typeface that was just a teensy bit more fun than Futura. But this design definitely says “engaging, intelligent US history show for grown-ups,” and that’s what matters.

Both the branch and the birds came from individual Etsy sellers. The dark woodgrain portion is from http://www.shanickers.com/ and is repositionable; the red-orange birds are from sweeetnothing.etsy.com and, while not movable, are removable and won’t damage my walls — super important since I’m not allowed to paint.

They’re very easy to apply — not much to it beyond peel and stick!

Oh, and here’s the geeky bit: I actually plotted out where I wanted to put the decals in Photoshop before I applied them. I set up a really simple scale (something like one inch = one foot) and turned on the grid, which made it quite easy to get a fairly accurate rendering:

Now, if I could just get my curtains up…

It’s not remotely difficult to do — just select everything but a thin feathery strip of the image and run the lens blur filter. Everything in that one visual plane should be sharp, but nothing else should be. (Paint back in some of the lost detail with the history brush if necessary.) Add a bit of grain to the blurred areas, crank the saturation to a 1950’s Technicolor level and you’re pretty much good to go.

This technique works best with photos shot from a high-ish angle, and will give particularly good results with fairly regular subject matter such as buildings and careful landscaping. Also, England. I think it’s the combination of UK architecture and the very green grass there, but the country just seems to lend itself to being converted into tiny model villages.

Berwick-Upon-Tweed, shot from the train from York to Edinburgh:

York, sans scaffold-covered Minster:

A very mini Mini:

And, last but not least, something from the other side of the pond: the lovely Jersey City parking lot.

I was hoping to work with After Effects’ extremely fun Puppet Tool, but the results I got while experimenting were just a little too squishy for this project. (Anyone know some tricks for getting convincing, not-too-exaggerated motion out of it? Even liberal use of the starch tool seemed unhelpful, and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out a way to make elbows and knees bend properly.) So for the moment it’s back to IK rigging — and a lot of carefully placed anchor points.

I’m much more satisfied with the results, particularly now that I have a keyframable checkbox parameter that switches the bend direction of the joints. In plain English, I can make someone’s elbows bend both ways — e.g. a character can go from having their hands on their hips to picking something up off the table next to them with very little trouble.

Creating the jurors themselves was a lot of fun — the characters need to function more as archetypes than individuals. The result: a wide range of ages and races and a complete lack of faces.

I now present… my little jury guys (and girls!):

Warning: Do Not Eat.

He’s sort of my large, square mascot. Expect him to make the occasional appearance in future tutorials.

This particular graphic came about while experimenting with mosaic effects. Aside from the photo of Hector, everything’s Photoshop-generated, and this file’s rapidly approaching 30 layers. I even managed to use several filters that normally fall well within the “Tacky Awful Effects” category: Patchwork, Clouds and Motion Blur. Lesson of the day: all in moderation, all in moderation.

So I had some fun with Cosmpolitan:

My first Photoshop Phriday. And I got in! I’m very excited.

Check out the rest of the magazines, though — there are ten pages of covers posted, and lots of great ones.

Well, I’m our animator/graphic designer, so pretty much any visuals — print or motion — that need to be created go through me. I don’t really do character animation; my work is more titles and graphics to explain things — elements to add to the overall ‘look’ of a live-action film rather than the films themselves. I also design most of our project proposals, which is cool because I get to find out what’s in the pipeline.

One of the main things I’ve been working on lately is a set of videos for the Annenberg Foundation’s Constitution Project, a series of educational films designed to make US politics and history relevant to high school civics students. (You can watch them free online at annenbergclassroom.org, but you’ll need to register.) They’re pretty fun viewing and I’ve had a lot of creative freedom with my sequences for them.

Here are some stills from The Making of a Law, coming soon to a school near you! The graphics scheme for this one was based on vintage pop-up books (it begins with a mock fairy tale of the legislative process), so everything has a flat papery look to it. Thanks to my snazzy new blog plugin you can scroll through them image-gallery-style.