Post-Production: Titles and Credits

Today I worked on the titles for our animation. Building upon what I had designed in our sample texts, inspired by the blank on blank research videos, I opened up Adobe Flash and simply used my hand writing as the 'font' for the lines of text that would appear on screen. This reminded me of (and was partly inspired by) the opening titles that feature at the start and end of episodes of the Simpsons and the Rugrats.

Initially I started out with just a plain paper background with black text but I also experimented with inverting the colour of the paper to a greyish hue, in Photoshop. I found that I quite liked the aesthetic of the white text against a grey background and realised it was more visually interesting to punctuate the formal titles, (which included our company logo, title of the video and starting credits)

...from the actual pieces of text, (which included the contextual intro, questions for the children and the conclusion).

To keep consistent with the title logo for our video and to also avoid the screen becoming boring and over facing with monotonous white text, I highlighted the words "human rights" in primary colours and used the same incarnation of the word identity that we had used in the title. This, I found reinforced the two key topics that our animation covers, as well as highlights the two main articles that we have referenced from the UN charter for the rights of a child. With the main pieces of text completed. I had to improvise with a conclusion as I felt our video didn't wrap up properly. I am pleased with the words I have managed to come up with and the over all look of the text. I am pleased that our animation has a confident aesthetic that is consistent throughout the video.

We have also all brought together our final (or working pieces) of animation together, to make a rough draft for AnnaBeth to review and give feedback on. We have used our animatics as the basis for this draft to fill in the the gaps where the animation has not yet been completed. I have made a slight amendment to my animation by adding in various blink animations so that the children I have animated do not look as wide eyed and synthetic.

It was good to see the first signs of an outcome for our project and in my opinion I feel, although a very rough draft, our vision for what this animation was going to be has not been lost. My only concerns now are making sure the audio levels are all equalled, the staging for each shot becomes more symmetrical and that we complete the animation. We realise that there is the possibility some of Laura's clips will have to be cut from the final animation as she is the one who has struggled most with the production process. Lexi is most likely to not make the final cut as to be frank, he audio clips were the least engaging and quite boring. The other pressing matter for all of us is the amount of time we all have to prepare and edit the making of video. Tomorrow we are all meeting to plan out a shot list of the video and begin the editing of our work.