Martin O’Dea
One Hundred Bears
OUGD603
Brief Background: 100 Bears is an illustrated counting book for children, originally published in French as Jusqu’à 100 by Actes Sud in 2012. On my placement at Nobrow, I helped to typeset the translations for the English translation, to be republished by the Nobrow children’s imprint Flying Eye Books. I really enjoyed the process and loved the artwork and spot colours, so when I was set a live brief to create a teaser for an upcoming release, I chose 100 bears. Brief: Produce a trailer for an upcoming Nobrow/Flying Eye release. The main reason to be doing these is to be able to show the book in a way photography can’t and to make you want to read it and know more. A mix of live and stop motion video with perhaps some simple typography and minimal animation could work well. Audience: The trailer should help to bring the book to life and so is aimed primarily at children and parents, however Flying Eye titles often have a wider audience in design and illustration circles because of their striking artwork and quality of design and print. Tone: Educational (counting) Fun Colourful
Martin O’Dea
One Hundred Bears
OUGD603
Contextual references To get an idea of possible directions for the brief I looked at animations that focused on promoting books and magazines. I found that San Francisco based publisher Chronicle Books creates imaginative trailers to promote their releases, each with a different style and approach. I found that stop-motion was often used to promote books as they capture the physical object well and have a lo-fi charm that often suits independent book releases in particular . The qualities that I found through this research that the most effective trailers use subtle animation combined with strong and simple use of typography to sell the features make this a really effective trailer. There had to be an element of physicality to remind the viewer that it is a physical release and make them want to interact with it.
Martin O’Dea
One Hundred Bears
OUGD603
Concept and Development Through the trailer I wanted to highlight the colour and action of the book, as well as it’s educational qualities. As the book had not yet been published, I knew that I had to create the structure of the book digitally, otherwise it might not be clear to consumers that it was a published release. I embraced this limitation as a positive and selected artwork that would work best as animated pages (right). Next, I took all of the scenes that I had identified with potential and manipulated them in Photoshop to get a rough idea of how effective they would be as simple animations. (bottom right) After these scenes had been selected, I put them in numerical order to make sure that the counting would be truthful to the book. Next I removed pages, leaving just the best parts which I drew up in a storyboard (bottom).
Martin O’Dea
One Hundred Bears
OUGD603
Technique Experimentation I wanted to produce an animated book effect, where the illustrations themselves would be moving while the book flipped from one page to the next. To do this, I had to experiment with different methods to see if this would be possible. My first attempt using CC Page turn effect wasn’t very successful, producing a really flat effect. After researching into 3d layers in After Effects, I was able to use this feature to rotate the page about the spine. This gave a much more effective basis to develop from, with control over camera and lighting within the 3D space. In terms of animation style I found that using the illustrations on each page of the book and overlaying them, I could create a poppy, almost stop-motion like style which suited the illustration style well.
Martin O’Dea
One Hundred Bears
OUGD603
Animation and Feedback I finalised a draft of the animation (can be found on blog) which was sent back to Nobrow. In response to their feedback I made some changes for the final draft: - The book is slightly wonky and should use a straight on perspective. - Some of the pages were slightly a slightly different size to their adjacent page. - The music and animation stops abruptly, I’d like to fade out both. - Re-center the pages on the spine, as they drift further off as the animation progresses. - Produce a GIF with the animation to have one to use for social media. - Link the video back and credit myself at the end of the animation “video by… or animation by … “
Martin O’Dea
One Hundred Bears
OUGD603
Final Animation (can be found on CD) Coming back to the animation, I was able to implement all of the changes and create a final draft. I was much happier with this version, as it fixed a lot of the sloppy mistakes that I have overlooked when I first produced it. With fresh eyes I was able to notice when pages were off-center and fix the camera to make the book central in the frame. I could correct the mismatched page sizes by manually tweaking them and tightening up the timings. By tightening up the animation, it brought everything together and made the whole project look much more impressive and effective as a promotional trailer.
Martin O’Dea
One Hundred Bears
OUGD603