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.

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.” So begins one of my favorite books, Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas by the late Hunter S. Thompson. We too drive from Los Angeles to Vegas every year for the NAB show, but the only drugs involved were various forms of back, body, and head aspirin in anticipation of the sensory onslaught, endless walking, and bags laden with brochures that define the NAB experience. And huge quantities of vitamins, attempting to stave off this year’s strain of the NAB Flu.

In an earlier blog post, we mentioned some of the more intriguing products we saw at NAB; in this one, I want to share some of the “flavor” of what the show was like. As a warning - before the amnesia sets in - to make sure no one repeats our mistakes.

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.”

(Note: Names have been concealed to protect the helpful from becoming inundated with support calls.)

This past Saturday, while setting up for our first presentation at Post|Production World at NAB, we were having trouble getting our MacBook Pro to recognize the projector. We put it asleep and woke it back up again, and got a kernel panic: that nasty darkened screen with the “must reboot” message. From that point on, no Adobe CS3 application would run on our computer - including the installer/uninstaller, which meant we couldn’t replace the apps we needed in order to do our demos. Oddly enough, Apple’s Safari wouldn’t run either. Repairing permissions, safe reboots, and creating new users didn’t help. Fortunately, we were able to copy our files off to another computer (with special thanks to Jeff Foster of Lynda.com for the timely loan of a very large memory dongle) so that the show could go on. But if you’ve had a similar catastrophic crash involving a Mac and Adobe CS3 applications, you might want to read on to see how at least this particular problem was resolved.