The Intro...

Unfortunately due to illness I haven't been able to do too much work over the weekend. However in order to ease myself back into animating, I thought I would get the title sequence done.

Initially I did the stop motion animation on this sequence, then sent it to David so that he could put the facial expressions on the characters, this is the combination of the two:



He purposefully left still images on each character as a gap to fit the name and occupation on; this turned out to be a good idea since it made it easier to cut the text in and out of the shot appropriately.

I decided completing this in Adobe Premiere would be the best way to develop my skills since I haven't used this software much and I can put into practice what my tutor taught the class about putting together a title sequence.

The editing box

After importing the sequence above, all I had to do was create new title layers and put each character's name into position. There are a number of fonts available for all users, but I chose 'TektonPro White 34', because it has a soft black outline which makes the text stand out and suit the image well.

Since each character we recorded is in the centre of the shot, it was difficult to determine where the text should go, because putting it all to one side close together made the text-less side look quite empty.

An example of the text on one side

I am happy with the final shot since the text doesn't take too much away from the rest of the image, but still portrays the information and is evenly spread across the shot.

The final shot

I tried to use the same font size and similar layout for each character's introduction, the only other two I had to play around with more were 'Aubrey' and 'Symphony'. At first with Aubrey I kept the text in the same position as with the orange; however the text covers up part of the face which I don't think works very well.

It would have looked better if the text was closer to the edges but this would take it out of the 'text safe' zone of the frame, so I compromised with the positioning. However I still feel that the final shot works well, despite it looking slightly different from the others.

The final shot

Since there isn't enough space in the intro for a still shot of the strawberry, I decided to put some text on at the very end as she starts singing. Initially I wanted to put the text right next to her, like I did with the other characters, but something still didn't look right. If I had kept it where she was originally I would have had to keep the text smaller than on the other frames, so after trying some variations I thought the text in the top left corner looks better, since it's not overlapping any of the characters and it still makes sense as to who it's describing.

The final shot

Once I had put all of the text in I exported it as a test to send to Grace and David for feedback:

I'm happy with the overall video; I included the "introducing..." text on the curtain as a way to introduce the band on stage (with the band name in the background) and the close ups of each character following, which I think works well because it's not too hard to read and builds up an atmosphere.

I showed it to a couple of classmates who were with me at the time I had finished this and they both said it works well, so hopefully more people agree!