Futurestates
  • Futurestates: Season 3 Trailer

    This was a fun collaboration with ITVS for their Futurestates series. I designed the titles cards around the idea that predicting the future is like peering through a lens (microscope or telescope) where things are not quite in focus and we are unsure of what exactly we are looking at. The team at ITVS was great to work with and I'm glad I could be a part of a project that promotes independent filmmakers.

    www.futurestates.tv

    NOTE: I did not design the opening Futurestates logo animation.

    CREDITS: Benita Sills, Chris Turner, Brandon Sugiyama
  • PROCESS

    When I start project with a new client, I have a little ritual. It starts by waking early and walking to my favorite coffee shop, ordering a latte and sitting down to brainstorm.  I open two applications: my web browser and Text Edit.  I spend a few hours jotting down ideas, doing Google image searches, downloading and bookmarking reference images and video. I like Text Edit because it's straight forward and I don't think about formatting of any sort. I just type. Sometimes words or phrases and rarely complete sentences. The following is what I came up with on my first day working on the project.
  • The production schedule for this project was very short. We had budgeted a total of four working days for the title cards. In order to keep myself on schedule, I committed to one day for styleframes, one day for an initial motion test and lockup for all cards, then two days for final motion and revisions.

    This meant I had to design quickly, but I wanted to start with a solid concept. I took the jumbled mess of notes above and refined it to two approaches. I spent the remainder of the first day at a coworking space via my friends at Loosecubes and jumped into designing.

    Here's what I sent the team at ITVS along with the following frames:

    Treatment #1
    - Technological world meets with natural world. The text is metallic and mechanical looking, but set in a natural landscape. Hints of a digital overlay are superimposed on elements of the environment.
    Sporadic flashes of light.
    - The camera would swoop in quickly on the text, then do a slow push/pan/orbit. Keep the camera pitched at an angle, slight feel of uneasiness/floatiness.

    Treatment #2
    - Peering into the unknown, through a microscope/telescope. Use depth of field, camera focusses on one word, then the other. We are searching, peering into a world and trying to find meaning. Is what we are looking at small? Large? Near or far?
    - Camera would sweep in from left or right as if looking through a lens. Perhaps some quick flashes of barely distinguishable objects, flickering of a projector.
  • Once the team at ITVS had a chance to review the frames, we jumped on a group call.  After talking through both and discussing the topics in the upcoming season of Futurestates, we agreed that the second would work best (which was also my favorite!).

    The next step was to begin putting things in motion and designing the lockups for the remaining cards. ITVS provided the approved script and I spent the second day animating and designing.  Changes in the design were made to address some of the comments made during the call, which you can see in the the first motion test below.
  • During the next stage, ITVS sent me a rough cut of the trailer and I drop the cards into the edit. I was really surprised how well the tone and the content of the edit were working the cards! The editors at ITVS did a fantastic job and I'm very glad that there was plenty of open and direct communication early in the project. Email is so convenient, but that group call gave us more opportunities to talk through our ideas and our perspective approaches: mine as a motion graphic designer and theirs as editors.

    Once everyone had seen the rough cut with the cards, we had another call and continued into final production. One of the major changes we agreed upon was the layout of the text. While I had designed the styleframes and motion tests with the text off center and pushed to lower half of the screen (it looks more interesting, doesn't it?), once everything was in the edit it was clear that this layout was distracting with the cuts. It forced your eye to jump around the screen and made things harder to read. In the final edit, you'll see that the text is mostly centered.

    What's the design lesson here?

    Bruce Lee: "It's like a finger pointing at the moon.  Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all of the heavenly glory."

    Or something like that?
Description
Title card design and animation for the Season 3 trailer for Futurestates, a series of independent mini-features explores possible future scenarios through the prism of today’s global realities.
Fields
Motion Graphics
Date
2012