Workshop Activity: Week 6

This week’s activity involved creating a temporal and special composition involving a 20 second advertisement for a major retailer’s television campaign. It was emphasised in the activity’s outline that this advertisement was to be crazy and so I used a few different techniques to create this experience. When thinking of the word ‘crazy’, for some odd reason, the first thing, or person I should say, that came to mind was Charles Manson (a convicted serial killer and cult leader). So, to give the composition a ‘crazy’ feel, I used a well-known image of Charles Manson as a sort of mascot for it. When the name of the major retailer’s company is to appear on the screen at the beginning of the composition, it enters flying and spinning vigorously around the screen, before setting into the top corner of the screen for Charles Manson to appear. Charles Manson then appears on screen and belches out the retailer’s slogan, “It’s price MADDNESS!” The products the retailer has to offer than fly onto the screen, colliding with each other on the way, with their respective prices slamming onto the screen, effectively displaying to viewers the prices and how madly low they are. The composition then ends with Chares Manson reappearing and demanding that the viewer purchase the products.
I, once again, used this activity to experiment with some of the techniques Adobe After Effects has to offer. I focused on use of the Rotation effect and sifted through many of the effects available under the effects tab of the program. Though, in the end, I only used Ripple and Compound Blur effects in a couple of areas of the composition, I went through many of their neighbouring effects to see what can be done with different types of effects and which of them I found effective and easy to utilise. I do, however, feel that some of this advertisement is lacking in ‘craziness’. I believe this was due to my lack of knowledge on some of the effects available. The Shatter effect was which seemed as though it was a suiting effect to the activity, but I was unable to comprehend how exactly to utilise it and I believe my advertisement may have suffered somewhat due to this (and some other effects). Also, it had a lack of colour, and use of various bright colours is always a good accomplice to craziness, which I think I should have utilised. One other problem was some of the timing in the video. Some of the products are on screen longer than others. This makes the video seem a bit unbalanced, but is an easy problem to fix. Hopefully, in the future, I will be able to gain knowledge of the areas of After Effects unknown to me and aesthetic elements to create a better piece.



References:
All of these sources were gathered from www.creativecommons.org under Google settings.

Unknown Author. Unknown Date. Whale. Charles Manson. www.whale.to/b/manson.html cited 28th August, 2008.

Unknown Author. 2008. DIYTrade. Hair Dryer. http://www.diytrade.com/china/4/products/2652784/HAIR_DRYER.html cited 28th August, 2008.

Marelons. 2008. Toribash Forums. U Want Toaster Like This?. forum.toribash.com/showthread.php?t=44605 cited 28th August, 2008.

Unknown Author. Unknown Date. As Seen On TV. Ultimate Chopper Blender. http://www.seenontvproducts.net/ultimatechopperblender/index.html cited 28th August, 2008.