The start of this project coincided with the start of the winter olympics, so recently on BBC the below video has been playing alot. Initially I was a very big fan, and from the point of view of the aesthetics I still am. It was commissioned by the BBC to play between programs breaks at intervals and in between other programs to advertise and promote the fact that the winter olympics will be playing on the BBC.
So aesthetically and from the point of view of the animation its tremendous, the transitions between sports is brilliant. I also love the limited colour palette which certainly sets the winter scene and really helps to pick out the limited amount of red that they use. There are also a lot of cinematic scenes which work really well and give the video a very powerful and dramatic scene with some really fast paced action. When talking about how they created the video at Nexus studios they say "A team of artists at Nexus Studios worked to create the entirely 2D spot which was drawn and animated in a virtual environment using emerging VR cinematography software.” They don’t really go into much description of what this actually means, but I imagine it is just to get the right actions and to create the feel for each sport.
What is quite encouraging, is that although this is much more impressive and way more dynamic, it does still have similarities to my first animation that I did for 'Dare to be Different’. I think that the since doing that animation I have got so much better and could certainly doing something more in line with this. On top of that it is great to see what is considered the professional level and being able to see that on a big platform like BBC television. It also confirms my opinion that this type of medium is popular, not only just on social media.
There is a slight flaw from what I can see in this video and that is that how it is shown on the television isn’t quite matching up with the reason for it being made. So Nexus say that the idea was to show the fear and bravery that the athletes have and that each athlete has a particular demon that chases them. This makes sense when you see the whole video of about 2 and half mins, but the BBC show it all cut up in very short transitions that are confusing and a little bizarre. There doesn’t seem to be any reason for certain things that happen basically because it is being shown out of context. This is certainly something that I can bear in mind when I am making my trailer, how it is shown and what context the video is in make a whole lot of difference to how the video is understood. This makes me think thats there will be certain things I can do to make the trailer be easily understood.
Something else that has been useful in looking at this video is freezing it, then seeing how they have overlapping images which you can see below. The viewer won’t actually be able to distinguish these individual frames as they move to quickly, but from what I can see it helps to merge fast frames together, giving them a smooth motion rather than really jumpy. This is certainly something I will practice when I start doing primary research in this area. I have actually done this before when I did a rough fight scene and I remember it working really well then.
