For this School of Motion assignment I was tasked with creating a full set of boards for a 30 spot for Premium Beat.
I chose a footage based approach with animated elements that show the ways that finding the perfect song enhances the users life. The emphasis is on the user and the experience of finding the perfect song. I wanted to use animated design elements to represent the perfect song in different ways. Sometimes it appears as a pulse, as waves, or even an EKG readout. The elements were created to compliment the VO narration, visually representing the ideas that are being spoken and giving the impression of the words. Also they serve to liven the design and visualize the emotions of the people with rich colors and aesthetically pleasing compositions.
The Sketch
Mood Board
People wearing headphones, podcasters, and youtubers. People creating. Used adobe stock for many of these ideas.
Lessons Learned
With design, I feel that the bulk of the work is the preparation–mindmapping, writing out concepts and themes, pulling references, and mood boarding. Additionally, a bulk of the time that a project takes is the hours of NOT thinking about it (and even sleeping on it!) before coming back to it, little by little.
So much needs to go on in the background and in the unconscious mind before pencil touches paper… or before Photoshop is even opened. Each day is doing a little bit at a time and a lot of it is failing, failing, failing. All this before really creating anything that I thought looked even remotely interesting. One must really study the script and try and embody the audience.
The rest is just persistent trial and error. Several times I started in one direction and then scrapped the whole thing and went in another. It’s a terrible feeling when you’ve already put in so much work and it’s been many hours and you realize that you’re not as close to finishing it as you thought. But the design always ends up better for it in the end.
This was a fun project and a crucial learning experience!
