Creating Motion Graphics

Welcome to the Creating Motion Graphics blog on ProVideo Coalition! We’re very happy to be here, and look forward to using this new forum to share with our fellow motion graphics artists tips and trends that we think might be useful or intriguing. We will also be posting an archive of many of our past articles and columns which contain a wealth of advice and techniques. And on occasion, we will be posting our musings on the state of the industry (such as in the rest of this entry, past the “more” jump).

There are many variations on this common trap, but the general outline goes like this: Someone hears a report about how much money there is being made in a market segment, such as podcasts or movie trailers or renting out RED One cameras. They then theorize that if they could capture just some small percentage of that market - say, 1% - that they would be rich. And thus, a business plan is born! After all, who can’t capture at least 1% of a given market?!?

(At the end of an old article we recently posted to our Keyframes channel about creating graphics for the NBC AstroVision sign in Time Square, we mused about the ways networks are trying to take advantage of new media to connect better with their audiences and create more brand loyalty. Even thought it was originally written ten years ago, it still resonates today. I thought I would drag it out here for your weekend musing, in case you missed it over in CMG Keyframes.)

One of the original attractions of “multimedia” was the ability to provide additional details and background information about a subject without forcing interruptions in the linear unraveling of the central narrative (as I do here with my frequent parenthetical asides). Examples of this include allowing the user to click on hot words or photos in a CD-ROM application (do any of you still remember those?) or on a web page to take you to another page with tangential content, or attempts to present multiple media streams at once - such as text, photos, and sound - to give a wider gestalt to the story.

So where does established, linear, big media - i.e. broadcast television - fit into this picture? Although the economics are different, many of the same goals applied, even ten years ago: You have a linear central story (the program), but other details you could provide...even something as simple as outtakes from filming the program, or background on the stars. Fan magazines, newsgroups, web sites, and even TV Guide help fill this roll. NBC, in their own way, started doing the same back in the late 90s. For example, their “NBC2000” group was one of the first to put the alternate screen boxes at the end of television shows, sometimes containing outtakes or promos of other programs. With their AstroVision sign, they went further.

Initially, NBC tried “repurposing” their existing TV promos onto the sign. However, as many multimedia producers also found out back then, you can’t always take a message from one medium to another and expect it to hold up. In this case, the lack of sound, as well as the differences in attention span between someone at home and someone in Times Square (or Epcot Center, or sporting events, where they also play these promos), rendered the original promos less effective than they were on TV. In response, NBC started designing alternate content for the sign - such as trivia puzzles, word games, and factoids about their stars. Each one is then followed by a few seconds of the program the star appears on, along with the name of the show, television network, and night it plays. It ain’t exactly a hot link, but it does give you the pointer you need to follow up on a thread you might have found interesting. And if you’re already a fan, if gives you some additional background information to widen your experience of the show.

It wasn’t the “grand convergence” many preached about back in the 90s (or even today), but neither was it a bad idea - especially for the time. I know it is still popular to say the medium is the message, but perhaps some of us would be better served by focusing more on the message, and then figuring out how to use the mediums at our disposal to better disseminate it.

If you haven’t noticed, the “new” business model is to give away things on the Web, and find other ways to make money off of the (hopefully) resulting feeding frenzy. This isn’t a new concept; broadcast television is - or was, before cable and satellite and TiVo - free, with the content being advertiser-supported. Fast forward to today, and you’re reading web sites like this one for free. But it’s still a radical change in business plans for many. For example, many of us up here were recently magazine writers, used to getting a check in exchange for writing a new article, whether anyone read it or placed an ad next to it or not. Now we’re kicking out content for “free” hoping to be compensated through a combination of ad support and page views.

Chris Anderson - Editor in Chief at Wired Magazine since 2001, and author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More - recently gave at talk at the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) on this subject. Here is a short description of the talk:

The Web has become the land of the free. The idea that you can make money by giving something away is no longer radical - free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. Not only is technology giving companies greater flexibility in how broadly they can define their markets, but anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs.

PARC has made a video of the talk available - for free, of course. Click here to watch “FREE! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.”

It’s ironic that Giles Baker of Adobe just wrote about going tapeless, as we’re currently in the middle of a major spring cleaning of our studio where we are getting rid of our tape decks, among other things. Some are being sold on eBay (here’s our DVCPRO, BetaSP, and SVHS decks, in case you’re curious; the DLT drive and tapes go up in a few days), some are being donated (and we could use some suggestions on that below), and the rest are being trashed.

It’s the trashing part that’s proving difficult. 

I’ve been mulling over the “VideoCensus” released last month by Nielsen Online (you can view the PDF here). Among its goals was to compare the way video was watched over the web from network-backed sites to “consumer generated media” (CGM) sites such as YouTube. Here are some of the results, along with some speculation about what’s behind them, and how it may impact the work we do: