From the last crit it was interesting to note that the elements that my peers liked the best and the ones that were the most memorable were those by Donald Trump being pompous and making outlandish claims. I decided to proceed with these virals as another way in my raft of ideas around the topic to get the message out there the reason for creating them was four-fold.
1: I wanted to try and create some viral content as it was something that was new to me. I had been carrying out some research into virals and techniques I could employ.
2: I wanted to develop my skill-set. Creating the virals would mean I had to develop my skill set using animation, Adobe photoshop, premiere pro and most importantly after effects. I did use after effects on my piece for the last module and it is a very powerful tool and I wanted to continue to develop and extend my skill level in different ways and forms.
3: I genuinely feel that in todays connected social media obsessed generation it could be good way to communicate the global warming message to them.
4: I wanted to move away from the installation idea for a while as I was starting to lose interest in it but thought I could repurpose the research and assets I had been collecting/reappropriating.
I started off creating the viral/title sequence below. The first task was to find some interesting audio. Picking up where I left off on the installation test I went to Trump. Research has shown that America only have 5% of the world population but emit 25% of the worlds CO2 emissions. He is a fair target his policies pledges towards the oil giants have been extremely favourable and the same for big business and they both swelled the coffers in his presidential race.
He also drops quite a few clangers in his bullish often charmless way and this is what I needed first of all a good sound bite to use for the viral. In spite of 99% plus of scientists saying that global warming does exist Trump still refutes it. This ignorance and stupidity goes against also the groundswell of opinion that it needs addressing. It was easy to find such a soundbite of him refuting global warming so this went into the timeline.
From the research that I had done I found out that some of the major causes of global warming were.
- Coal fired power plants.
- Car emissions.
- Deforestation.
- Agriculture and especially animal farming.
Looking online I managed to through research find good examples of all of these that were either on green screen of easy to cut out in photoshop which is what I did next. I also made a plan for how these could be incorporated into the animation. I wanted to literally spell out the topic global warming over the voice over and then animate these. I made a rough pre-vis and also thought that as it is a world issue it would be good to put a spinning globe in too and that this could replace the O in Global.
Next it was into photoshop to prepare any images and then I put all of the assets into. I wanted the images to be blatant and very obvious and hard hitting so I made them just that. I also wanted to incorporate them into the lettering so in After Effects I scaled and layered them to be integral to the piece. as you can see below the bellowing chimney stack becomes the I a tree sprouts and then is animated being cut down in the L. On top of this a car drives into shot and I added some heavy fumes to this image and a little chemical spraying farm vehicle comes in from the right.
To top it of and polish it I decided to put a knocked back symbolic US flag in the background and obviously had the spinning globe too. That finished I wanted to add more impact to the animations so found sound for the car, chainsaw for the tree and farm vehicle noises and added them all.
GLOBAL WARMNING TITLES SFX 1 from Jon Saward on Vimeo.
I am happy with a lot of the elements of the piece and learnt a huge amount doing it really extending my After Effects skills. I feel the piece has polish but it does not feel like a viral. Yes it is clever and the imagery and audio is strong BUT it does not have that wow appeal and make you want to pass it on that a viral should have. To put it against my own research and checklist of what makes a good viral. It is pretty topical and timely, as well as short and sweet and I do not feel that it is inspiring, makes the audience want to get involved, grab the audience immediately or that it is all that upbeat. It is clever rather than funny and this is perhaps where it falls down. It does not need sound which is a winner and I feel the production values on it are high compared the other virals I have seen but does it need the polish.
Taking all of this reflection on board I decided to develop another viral. This time I was going to try and be more blunt, funnier and hit some of the key elements that I feel I missed on my first experiment.
This piece was longer but it involved similar techniques and processes to the first piece namely animation, Adobe photoshop, premiere pro and most importantly after effects. I found lots of good sound clips and edited them together again, I know this meant sound for the piece but I felt that this could work as long as their were graphics on the screen so I found loads of sound bites and cut them all together to make a longer speech. It was a longer piece so the first thing I did was transcribe this dialogue so I could work out images and also time the actions to the dialogue.
This time I wanted to make more use of kinetic typography and also imagery. On top of this I wanted to lampoon Trump as I felt that this was missing on the earlier viral I wanted to make a feature of him. I did a rough storyboard for the imagery and animated action I wanted to plan it out and then started the piece.
I had been researching into cut out animation and decided that this was the way forward as this was harsh, funny, easy and quite quick to do and had the cartoony feel I feel he deserved. I cleaned up the image in photoshop made crude animation frames and then dropped it into After Effects. This was the first element I put in and I wanted him to be a constant so I stuck him to one side of the frame and then animated the mouth movements to match the speech.
As I mentioned the techniques were very similar to before just with more use of kinetic typography and animation. What I wanted to do here was try and be funnier though. I loved the juxtaposition between the rhetoric Trump makes about protecting the environment and the actual actions he has taken which do the very opposite.
This subtext I decided to make clear on the screen with harsh images depicting his actions not his words. when he talks about clean air, water safety I wanted to show the opposite which is what he is causing. When he talks about protecting the environment show that he is cancelling the powers of the EPA. When he says that people have called him an environmentalist (I never found evidence of this anywhere) I wanted to show him up for what he is agave him a Pinocchio nose growing across the screen.
GLOBAL WARMINING LONG from Jon Saward on Vimeo.
I was much happier with this piece compared to the first one as it felt much more like a viral and had more impact. It is also highly topical and timely. It is not as short and sweet at the but I do not feel that it is a little inspiring and also make the audience want to get involved and pass it on. I do not feel it grabs the audience immediately so that could be worked on but it is upbeat and funny the way it goes beneath the Trump veneer and works contrapuntally to what is being said. It does need sound though to get the full impact and does not work anywhere near as well without it.
Again I feel the production values on it are high compared the other virals I have seen but again does it need the polish. I feel it is much cleverer and wittier then the first one and as such would have more impact. I also like the detail of the EPA logo changing and the Pinocchio nose growing
These two pieces were taken into the crit for feedback from my peers and I also got feedback from a close friend at Greenpeace. The feedback was similar to the points I have made myself. The audience definitely preferred the second one but said it lacked a little punch and I was working in a avery overcrowded field where there was almost a saturation of virals like this and that I needed to try to bring something newer to the table.
My friend at Greenpeace echoed this and added the Trump nose growing throughout would make it stronger and also to try and do a version without the audio for facebook where most people watch this content with no audio.
Moving Forward
- I may revisit the second viral to see if the changes suggested
- I am not sure that this medium is for me. I enjoy the fun of the pieces and extending my skills but I miss narrative and character.
- I screened the Amen Break in the crit too as many of the group had not seen it and tis solidified the above. They really, really liked it. It was the perfect marriage of skill, technique narrative and character with a great message behind it. I feel I need to return more to this style for the global warming piece or at least these themes.
- The piece was always and experiment and I enjoyed doing it technically BUT it did not have the heart and soul I like in my work.
- I will continue to experiment with new forms perhaps drama or even more installation work or even conceptual art to keep moving my practice forward.
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