Link: http://www.irishdesigndatabase.com

Some cards I’d like to spread around.

If you’re based in Ireland and you work in the creative industry by sure to register your interest so that you are notified once the database is open to submissions. Please note that there is no cost or fee for this service. It is a non-profit/non-commercial project.

Vodafone ’s advertisement campaign was launched a few weeks ago and depicts a rather beautified dublin, isolating their key audiences in a number of fast shots and catching glimpses of various occupations going about their all too happy lives, all the while the doors of Ireland are changing red and we are to be branded a big fat Vodafone customer. Quite a harmless ad, sort of eye catching but trailing into the midsts of being vaguely interesting while hitting the realms of a pride evoking Ballygowan spot or something. Untimely cheesy, probably the result of a lunch meeting where the only issue is a visual metaphor thats easy to mock up with minimal costs. It definitely shows, the only reason it’s memorable for me is due to a lazy glitch at the start where the invading red paint fails to render completely around the number twenty (0.12). At the end, the punch line hits with ‘…and show Eircom the door’.

The shaking hands of Eircom can be felt clutching at its national wallet under the unforgiving threat of a recessionary apocalypse. It seems that desperate times cause for desperate measures as Eircom rips off and completely slanders their ad campaign with unforgiving brutality. The ‘citizents of Ireland’ can been seen peeling off the red paint to reveal their orange Eircom georgian door, almost as if the uninvited biblical plague that terrorised our lands had left and we now have to remove the blood from our doors. Even the same streets and locations are shown in order strengthen the message. The caption reading, “Over 55,000 people have already switched back”.

Irish enterprises are finally starting to get their hands dirty over UK companies invading their markets. A similar tone to the McVities vrs Jacobs copycat malice that resulted in legal proceedings.

No more Mr nice guy.

A few months back I was trying to decide what Internet browser I should use. Both Safari and Mozilla Firefox were acting strange and crashed, I am not exactly sure what the problem was but during one their spats they created a fantastic image on my screen that described the moment perfectly. For whatever reason the two toolbars overlapped resulting in neither of them serving their original function but in the process they created something perfect. The only word left untouched was Help, it was perfect and this inspires me.

Sometime later I was taking a train from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, it was going to take about an hour so I took out my laptop and resumed work on a website I was developing. I was exhausted and kept falling in and out of sleep, I gave in to my heavy eyes and nodded of; unknown to me my finger had pushed down on the z key as I sleeping. This could not have been more appropriate and this inspires me.

As we are continually flooded with carefully photographed portfolios showcased on picture blogs, it is increasingly important that as designers we realise the relevance of seeking inspiration outside of the design world. Inspiration Blogs provide many a pretty picture but very little knowledge of the process, thoughts, opinions or ideals of such work. It is easy to loose sight of the process and effort of the designer, the concept can easily be lost or forgotten along the way. A showcase of featured portfolios is a great resource, but it is important to know and ask why these designs exist.

It is important to be curious and to always question the answers; next time you are in need of inspiration, turn of the computer and do something new or wholly unrelated to design. Make it your mission to stay away from inspiration blogs and try something different, investigate something you know absolutely nothing about. The beauty of not knowing is the the potential to learn.

On the 22nd of June my very welcoming internship in why not associates began. So far I’ve been here about 2 months and its always difficult to properly assess just how much I’ve learnt. When you think about how fast you assimilate into a working environment, the underlying learning amounts to infinity. Even while working on something and passively listening to a phone call or aware of a meeting your forming a collective of just how a company organises itself, the manners in which people communicate ideas and the freedom that each designer has to question a project decision or make a quick phone call to clients. Tea is offered intravenously and a game of fouzball never goes a miss. A particularly colourful yet nostalgic collection of soap boxes exists in one corner of the room, a reminder of just how far back this company goes.

From my experiences and conversations here I soon came to the realisation that the studio dynamic in why not is a huge rarity. Due to their reputation and long standing success the designers have quite a lot of freedom. Surprisingly enough, the freedom to be able to deal first hand with the client at all times, something that I assumed was always a given. Amongst other things, they’ve never had to promote themselves for work. So how did this come to be?

“David Ellis along with Andy Altmann and Howard Greenhalgh formed Why Not Associates on leaving the Royal College or Art in July 1987. The intention was to produce new and innovative work that would not have been possible working through established design companies.”

In a 1992 edition of eye magazine, five years after their initial formation, Andy remarks, “one of the few graphic design companies that professes an attitude.”

Although such a company statement made today may sound redundant, that attitude at the time really must have hit the right note in what must have been a very dull shade of grey. We have to remember that 1987 was a different reality at the time, there was no such things as eye magazine or internet blogs bursting the seams with design students. Admittedly, I was barely starting to exist so im not going to pretend I knew what was going on, I can only speculate on information at hand. The profession of a graphic designer in the 80’s was something that was slightly undefined at the time and I’ve definitely learned that it didn’t have the same prestige it holds today.

“We wanted to produce work that would solve the clients problem while being self expressive.”

Why not really seems like a company dedicated to great image making, with the intention to be innovative and original. Their strengths seem to lie in their ability not to take things seriously and not to be too analytical. This aspect is definitely seen in the lower case alphabets that comes attached to their company image, almost retaining a sense of youth.“I think our work is funny”, says Andy. An attitude that seems to draw a lot of comparisons to the intuitive design process that they helped to define during the early 90’s, - “you shouldn’t have to account for every little mark you make”. I wondered weather that intuitive attitude counts for the success they hold today.

Working in why not has offered me an alternative points of view, an alternative but invaluable approach to the way a designer can work, the ability able to loosen up and think radically rather then conventionally. It almost seems like years of college and explaining ideas is actually more overstated then the reality of designing for clients. Its quite a rejuvenating reminder to the days before logic and relevance wins over. Obviously the difference here, this company is working for real clients and projects hold context. Things have to be constantly screened by the client and direction has to be approved.

It seems here that trying something unpredictable is adding more that rationalisation ever can. Ultimately a problem must be solved but when you thing about it logically, trying to constantly visually relate the material to a design concept won’t produce anything new and won’t offer much in the way of evolution. If you look at why not’s early work of the 90’s we can definitely see design elements that were abundant. Early software traits defining trends and so on, but when you realise the majority of their work was pushing new boundaries you see that it wasn’t their work fitting the mould, it was their work adding to the decade and others following suit. Obviously its impossible to be completely immune to the trends but by trying to innovate and take risks you are helping to move things forwards.

The unfortunate conundrum with being a design student is that you have to input concept to a project that can never be truly functional yet present it as though it is. The Dutch seem to place a lot of emphasis on rationality and concept trough a lot of their projects, the design school at Willem de Kooning had us form a lot of completely self generated projects so ultimately a very strong concept base is needed for the start of a completely invented project, every page is the structure of an overall message and grids and typography must further embellish your message. While this was largely frustrating and I had several rants about the ‘chicken vrs the egg’ design-content issue, but my time there was invaluable. Now its quite refreshing to hear a professional say, “try a full page bleed just for the sake, something just feels right about it”.

Today why not run a fairly tight ship with all aspects of their company, they employ regular freelancers and have a handful of full time staff and ‘motion guys’ all bringing in various styes and talents. Outsourced photographers and illustrators are more then just that, but lifelong friends that are reputable network’ees. Advertising work today for why not may not allow much differentiation but at the end of the day, these guys are running a business. Ultimately their attitudes have evolved much with the changing times but their view on what a design company can be and what jobs they can take is certainly helping to move the industry forward. Much in the tone of ‘why not?’.

“We certainly didnt want to work for anybody else”.

In 1987 Mark Greenhalgh (who went on to work in film) was approached out of his MA by an American company named Sebastian. Noticing his abilities they were looking for an editorial magazine. This laid way to the foundation of why not associates and how they set up. Something that I definitely admired, the ability to set up straight out of college (and successfully at that) is always impressive. Something that almost every design student has thought about but may have been daunted by the the task at hand or subdued into a more lucrative salary position.

Nowadays I wonder weather it feasible for students to get that lucky break. Today HudsonBec exists as a design duo starting straight from college but it seems the digital world of today has created an entirely different priority, the ability to network and promote online, an almost faceless entity that has designers existing virtually. Ultimately its something that needs attention in order to gain successful recognition. Not coincidentally, they are both the founders of the successful it’s that nice blog, proving that the internet is a must for promotion. The internet aside, does the raw naivety that exists with new graduates force the industry into newer and more creative directions? I wanted to get to grip with the realities of setting up straight after education, something that was becoming ever more tangible the more I looked at other companies. I was keen to ask David Ellis a few questions of my own.

So do you think the reality of setting up is less attainable for students nowadays?
“Well, I think anytime or decade is always really a good time, when we set up the design scene was still quite established but we wanted to try our hands at more contemporary design and push the limits on design with more conservative clients. Once you have a client then you really have a starting point to base everything off.”

Do you think the attitude of a company like why not is a model that is more copied nowadays?
“The were a few companies that were still very similar in their name and things like that but I don’t think its important to try and be overly original. You just have to do good work.”

How did you deal with the initial financial issues?
“I think its actually the best time to start on your own when your out of college, mainly because your used to not having any money. I knew a few people who had plans to start up after working for a few years but the problem with that, you became too attached to your salary. Our first clients that commissioned us to start a magazine offered us 2,000 each for each issue. For someone starting straight out of college, its was quite a lot of money.”

I also got a quick chance to speak to Andy,

Was the business side of things something that came natural or did it have to be learned?
“David and I both failed at business school! We just asked other designers. Moved around studios a lot and kept money tight for emergencies and things”

This was quite a refreshing take from the over indulgent synopsis’s of most articles covering their success, a very down to earth approach with a lot of realistic insights. Modest and unassuming. The most assuring and concluding piece of advice that I drew out of the conversations was just doing good work, not labouring over the work and certainly not trying to innovate with every detail.

From the success of why not we can really see how the initial clientele could affect the direction of a companies work. When starting out, it is possibly important to prioritize with the kind of work you want to end of doing. Doing a web design for a few companies is great work but it could not be the direction you want to advertise for other clients. Admittedly, they tell me they were very lucky when starting out; “the right place at the right time”. Perhaps nowadays we live in a different time and a different place with the all too familiar ‘r’ word lurking under every excuse. Competition is fierce and originality is almost unoriginal. I wasnt expecting what they told me next.

“The best things can happen out of a recession and we were certainly in a recession at the time.”

There is hope for us all yet.

Too many letterforms are obscured from their expected form which only leads to poor legibility. For instance, the descender of the lowercase ‘g’ currently sits on the baseline but by keeping it uppercase it becomes far more familiar and instantly recognisable as the letter ‘G’. There is no logical room for descenders, it makes it very difficult to read. Bare in mind the text is nearly constantly moving, it needs to be neat, clear and large, passengers need to know when to get off. I have tried to improve legibility by giving the letters more presence, big counters and simple strong lines to compliment the simplicity of an LED display. There is no room for flimsy letterforms, they need to be bold and accurate. They need to be sure of what they stand for.

Head over to the micro-site for more info and free download.

Got any thoughts or suggestions? Have you ever had trouble reading these displays? Let me know, we can discus type. You can follow me on Twitter, email me at contact@whiteinkblog.com or leave a reply comment and I’ll get back in touch as soon as I can. Look forward to hearing peoples opinions.

A short time ago I was cycling around Amsterdam when I spotted the offices of Surinam Airways and invariably their logo. I stopped the bike to take a closer look at its resemblance to the Lufthansa logo. A couple of weeks pass and I see another airline logo, this time it’s Air India; once again it had characteristics of the Lufthansa bird. After this I began to think more about familiarity within design, there are predefined rules and expectations for nearly every single piece of design out there. When these expectations aren’t fulfilled we can easily feel lost and uncertain. If we are going to change convention it needs to be replaced with something better. There is a very fine line between hitting the right visual note or succumbing to tiresome solutions or in some cases direct copying. I cannot stand plagiarism, it is totally inexcusable; however in this article I am discussing the influence of convention as opposed to stealing. Personally I find many of these airline bird logos to be highly generic and very forgettable. Design with the expectations of the end user in mind is crucial, if it is a box of cereal it needs to look like a box of cereal. On the contrary preconceived notions and ideals can easily play too much of a role in determining the final solution all the while forgetting about innovation and creativity.

It is important for a logo, particularly in the service industry to communicate the service of the company. Birds fly, as do planes, it’s an obvious connection which communicates exactly what it needs to. At what point does designing by convention or common rhetoric become a lazy or boring solution. Design conformity is something that I struggle with on every single project I work on, convention makes it very had to try something drastically new or different, we need and want to feel familiarity. Trying to change convention can easily result in confusion if we’re not careful. If The New York Times decided to change it’s title header type it would no longer be The New York Times. It’s possible to dramatically change things, so long as the change is for the better, but as usual change will met with resistance.

I recently attended a seminar on way-finding, we were introduced to fundamentals, theories and logical reasoning behind way-finding decisions. Way-finding diagrams rely a lot on the convention of urban-planning maps and educated guessing, a green patch on a map means grass, a blue patch translates to water and a gray block is read as buildings; these are not rules but rather elementary standards which define how we approach such a task. We feel comfortable when we see what we know, disregard these expected standards and you better have a superior alternative. We feel comfortable buying a blue carton with a white splash on it as we know it’s milk, even if we can’t read a word on it, mix up the colours and you’ve got a different product. Convention is useful and unavoidable, most of the time it exists because it works but it can nearly always be improved on. As designers this is where we come in, to improve what is already there. This leads me full circle back to the airline logos, they are conforming to the basic idea of a bird in flight but are failing to improving on the concept, all the logos begin to look the same without any clear distinction between each of them.

From a customer point-of-view some of these logos are so similar that in most cases they could be interchanged with one another, there is very little distinction between them. We see this in many areas of design, people who conform to preexisting standards for no reason other than feeling safe, afraid to take risks because they know what has worked, not thinking about advancing but rather freezing in a moment scared to break the mold. The thought of failing is too much to worry about so they settle on the safety of tried and tested design, this way of working will only lead to blind ignorance and tiresome solutions. On your next project try something very different, open up and see what happens. Take a risk.

The bing logo really oozes of basic lack of type optics. Look at how the n gets so narrow and thin at the apex. The g sits off the baseline with a half loop that doesn’t link up, not that it must, but in this case it looks too awkward. The counters are ludicrously huge and the descenders don’t rise near high enough to forgive such a huge x-height. Large x-heights are good for reading, but with a low cap you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

It will need more work but what I have done, I have done well when compared to the current state of affiars. I have paid attention to the letterforms and the space around them, the weight, contrast and the flow, something that wasn’t done the first time around. I’d advise the folks at Microsoft to get a typographer/foundry to design a custom face; or at least the four letters, or even use a typeface that already exists? Microsoft’s reluctance to pay for typeface licenses in the past render that unlikely. e.g. The Helvetica/Arial Story.

Here are some more images,

Integrated on the website without much obstruction or effort and it looks quite acceptable. Of course you could argue a total redesign of the site is needed but it is the logo I’m focusing on more than user interface.

Bing logotype at different sizes.

The logo is based on Chaparral Pro Semi bold Italic, above.

I would be exaggerating slightly to say I am content or even close to finished with this, however it is more of a suggestion of what I envision, a step in a better direction. It is in it’s early stages but already we can see an improvement. Over the coming weeks I hope to develop this further, rather than just making it acceptable or a step in the right direction I’d like to make it something more than that, something with character that is memorable. If anyone is interested in advising me on it or even offering feedback or constructive criticism I’m open for suggestions.

You can follow me on twitter for regular updates or if you’d like to get in touch, chat or network.
Follow Youssef Sarhan on Twitter, email me at contact@whiteinkblog.com or leave a reply comment.

Some of you may already know that I started working at EdenSpiekermann this week. As of January 2009, Eden Design & Communication, Amsterdam merged with SpiekermannPartners, Berlin to form EdenSpiekermann. They have a serious amount of experience with a staff of about 100 strong; be sure to check the brand new website www.edenspiekermann.com for loads more. I hope to write regularly on what I’m doing at ES, what I’m learning and anything else I think is worth sharing.

Okay, so last Monday was my first day, the usual meet and greet through the three floors. So many hands to shake, I felt like a broken record, but they were very welcoming and friendly. The average age is probably about the 30–40 mark. I’ve officially being studying design for just under 2 years but when you compare that to someone who has about 20 years experience, it’s a wake-up call. Nobody can claim to know it all, but with that much experience you’re doing well.

Monday was pretty chilled, when I came in was given my own desk, a new 24″ iMac and a bright room to share along with about 15 other designers. The wooden floors, massive desks, high ceilings makes working comfortable. There’s no feeling of hierarchy or fat-cats sitting in their offices telling the pixel-pushers what tricks to perform. Everyone is working together, to improve as a unit, as a collective; in college you don’t get that as much but I think that comes with time & experience. Students aren’t the best at taking criticism or even opinion, it offends them. Sometimes it’s the system you have to thank for this, promoting ‘competitive atmospheres’, it may sound like a good approach but in practice it’s not (from a students point of view), it’s detrimental to developing a genuine love for what you do. You should naturally have ambition, and not because you’re going to win something. There is a serious difference between doing your best and trying to be the best, they sound similar but yield polar results. Having everyone in competition creates resent, traditionally to win a competition you need to be better then the rest and everyone else needs to be worse than you; so by definition in a competitive atmosphere everyone is hoping that everyone elses work is worse than theirs. Why help someone if it means they are going to beat you? Time and time again students get upset because someone gave an opinion on their work that wasn’t positive, a critique. Not everyone is going to like what you do, it’s a good thing they don’t, instead of getting upset ask why they said what they said, regardless of how they phrased it. I wonder how students would react to Gordon Ramsey as design maestro.

I digress.

The project I’m working on is from the CBS, which is the Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek, in english, Statistics Netherlands. They have a lot of data that needs to be presented as clear as possible. The project required us to come up with a new colour scheme that could be used in any of their graphs, forms and charts. They also required that the newly designed charts could be re-created in Excel. By the time I arrived the final colour scheme was decided upon but the implementation was still in progress. Here’s an example of a chart that needed to be reconsidered, it’s totally illegible on the left, CBS actually uses that, the right is the after. It may seem boring but what stands out for me is it’s relevance, this sort of work is essential to good design practice and awareness, it opens your eyes to reality a little more and reminds you that not all projects are like college projects. Here’s a side-by-side, before & after.

So many of the elements were unnecessary, they caused confusion and didn’t follow convention. For a statistical information like this it’s very important to keep in mind what is familiar to the reader. For instance there are 18 rows and 8 columns of numbers, most are double digits. They aren’t all related so that should be shown, it’s hard to tell if the top two rows of numbers relate to the 8th and 9th rows. By adding in some thinner rules I’ve sub-divided the chart. The thicker (6pt) rules divide page in half into two major categories at the top and bottom of the page, the thinner hairline rules (.5pt) sub-dive the two categories into more visually manageable statistics. Amongst what is already taught in college I would like to see an introduction of these ideas.

After a pretty relaxing first few days in Amsterdam I’m flying back to Ireland for the weekend for a friends birthday. I’m be back on Monday. If you’d like some further reading on my rant about students, I would suggest you read Dear Designer, You Suck. If you’d like to read more on design theory and practice or If you appreciate anything I’ve written regarding the above layout then you need to read Vignellis’ Canon, print it off, read it, then read it again, then keep it by your desk when you work. That’s the best advice I can give on it.

You can follow me on twitter for regular updates or if you’d like to get in touch, chat or network.

Follow Youssef Sarhan on Twitter

For now, Auf wiedersehen, no, wait… vaarwel!

After seeing a recent article about graphic design hero T-shirts with matching iconography, I couldn’t help but feel a certain cliche ringing in my ear. Although the t-shirts themselves are sorta cool and I would semi-reluctantly wear one (as a personal hatred of trends) I couldn’t help but feel these t-shirts literally embodied the current status of students solely being able to list off the all too familiar cast of Design Watchmen without any real context or information about what these designers really stand for. Is it a credit to the life of Milton Glaser to just “heart NY”?

As a student I sometimes find myself massacred by a world of over stimulated design inspiration and reliance on trends and hero designers. This over stimulation I find quite damaging with developments of a personal voice and style. Over fixation on the designer hero model can sometimes be quite irrelevant and sometimes just plain trendy. It is only when we study the concepts and applications of a piece of known design can we find any relevance. It is only a designers approach and work flow that we should find relevant, not the graphical end product.

For me design exists in tangent to a painting or the world of fine art. The function of a piece of design is somewhat selfless. A concept has been developed and it is the task of the designer to communicate and maintain relevance. A great piece of design can only anchor that relevance when viewed in its original context and one should look at all the considerations that have been finely tuned in order to reach his/her conclusion. By simply looking though catalogs and books we are doing no justice to these designers nor to ourselves. We have failed to gain conceptual relevance and by flicking though visually inspiring imagery we have also failed to take a moment to contemplate the fine tunings and under-workings.

Ultimately it is argued that everyone has their own perception of reality, thus everyone’s perception and take on communication is slightly different. Therefore, it should be the task and goal of every designer to establish a series of principles and ethics on what communication means to them. “How should a piece of design work?”, “What do I want to say with this?”, “That’s great but its just not my thing”. When we study a famous designer, we shouldn’t be concentrating on the end result that is a piece of design, but rather trying to piece together their perception of what design and communication is to them. By understanding this we can gain a much deeper insight into our own work.

Execution is only the end result, but what seems to hold true to all famous designers in the past is their stubborn nature and persistent editing and self criticism. Their persistence to a certain vision and their refined approach. They have ultimate conviction in what they believe is the right solution. These are some principles that give birth to style. Strangely, it is only when we realise this do we see that principles are not a necessity to designing, but they are necessity for blocking out the visual clutter that can confuse and dazzle. They help refine your editing and they block out the unnecessary. The infinite styles and considerations for design is overwhelming. The ironic thing is: obtaining a true style means establishing your principles and ethics first.

Personally, I hate the thrown-about nature of a name like Paul Rand can get in the design community. He was a great designer, but he’s not the only designer that has ever lived. Sometimes I cringe when I hear the name shortlisted, only because I feel there’s more to be learned on a day to day basis above one single hero model. I don’t believe in famous designers. To me, a designer should be as malleable as a gymnast, constantly bending and adapting to new forms of variety and research. Reliance and infatuation on fame can put an objective blank between the viewer and any designers work, making it twice as difficult for us to objectively critic anything. Fortunately for our generation, the arrival of the Internet has revived a level playing field. Nowadays the Olly Moss’s of the world need only upload photos on flickr to gain worldwide recognition.

In saying all this, I have absolutely no problem in stating that Paul Rand is one of my favorite designers. However I’m not a huge fan of his work. You might find that contradicting but it completely rhymes everything I have been saying so far. If we say design is a lifestyle, shouldn’t the designer be the focal point and his work secondary? From what I could see in the personality of Paul Rand, it was evident that he exuded a confidence of principles. Years of dislikes and discards have molded his style into absolute principle and perfection. Something that can only be respected and admired. Definitely something that can teach you a lot about yourself.

This video below really sums it all up, by moving away from visuals and focusing on the personality. Although it is Steve Jobs on Rand, I think its quite inspiring to hear someone from a non-design background discussing design with such accuracy and revelation.

Direct link to SHIFT.chroma Animation

Last weekend I was worked on a short motion graphics piece. The idea was to record myself in front of a greenscreen and then incorporate an element of visual effects. As the recording and editing progressed I become more interested in abstracting the video to become a new medium, a sort of particular environment that I could explore. This intruiged me so I continued down this road. In this atricle I hope to share some of my own thoughts and techniques when it comes to working with after effects, etc. You’ll see that even with some rudimentary materials you can create some pretty impressive and vibrant visuals.

Ok so to give you a break down of what was involved it was something like this.

Film Greenscreen Content >> Capture/Cut/Key in Final Cut >> Particle Visuals, AE Camera Control, Sound FX & Music >> Final Ram Export

Thats the rough workflow, of course there were some forward-backward process as you can imagine. This isn’t going to be a tutorial but rather how you might approach working on something similar, I’ll go through each of the stages and fill you in on what worked and what didn’t.

Film Greenscreen Content

Ok, so I had pretty limited access to facilities, it was about 3am so no recording studios would let me in. Armed with a pretty decent budget HD camera, tripod, one lamp, a .7x wide converter, some tape (you’ll see why) and of course a few square meters of green cloth. I set it up like so:

I had the camera and the lamp in pretty much the same place, at 300w the lamp was too bright and was going to cast a strong shadow behind the subject so I pointed it up against the white ceiling so that it would bounce and defuse the light onto peter, that way you’d avoid a as much shadow on the green screen. Bare in mind peteys (he let me call him that) pants are green, so they would be tricky to key out, you might have to masked it out frame by frame (rotoscoping), he refused to wear anything different as you can imagine. Try to wear clothes that contrasts green, nothing from the green spectrum is what you’re aiming for. You want the greenscreen to be as evenly lit as possible. Ideally I would have had a lamp on either side lighting from behind and making the greenscreen bright for an easy key. There was also an ugly florescent light – you don’t really want these, if you can avoid it – directly behind and above me which actually helped soften the lighting in general. That came in handy in post when I was keying the footage. As you can see the camera is about at hip height. I’d also recommend getting the most vibrant green you can find, the green I found was a little muted. Ideally you’re looking for something that’s pretty easy to key like this. As the lighting wasn’t perfect I had to rotoscope some of the frames, you want to avoid that if possible. Say you need to rotoscope 3 seconds and you’re shooting 25fps, that’s 75 frames. Depending on the complexity of the movement that could eat up a plenty of time. Try do everything you can before post so that in post it’s a smooth process.

I turned the camera on it’s side for the full body recording, for two reasons, first off, so that I could fit in the whole shot; and secondly when you’re recording a full body shot on a greenscreen it makes much more sense to turn the camera so that the shot is vertical, this way you maximize the resolution. The action of the scene is now taking up pretty much all the frame.

I said earlier I had tape and a .7 wide converter, yeah, about that… erm, I taped the converter onto the front of the camera, and surprisingly it worked a charm, it was crucial for full-body shots. I had no other way of doing it, the room wasn’t big enough to move the camera back far enough. As I didn’t need the image to be totally sharp this was ok, however if you want a really sharp image, dont tape your lens on. I think thats obvious; anyway, here’s what it looked like.

Cut/Key Capture in Final Cut

After a recording I captured the MiniDV in Final Cut. I didn’t need the key to be perfect., I just needed to get rid of the main bulk and isolate me to some extent. Here’s a quick breakdown of the process.

Raw footage was keyed then converted to B&W using Gradient Ramp in After effects. I had the particles respond to lights and darks so I crushed the blacks & whites together creating a strong contrast.

Particle Visuals/AE Camera Control, Sound FX & Music

After the footage was processed then came the main task, the one which required the most thought and was essentially the hardest of them all. I used Trapcode Form, an extremely powerful plug-in from Red Giant Software for After Effects. There are tens of thousands, quite possibly millions of different combinations for how this plug-in can look. It’s easy to navigate but I think I’ve only scraped the surface. It was my first time using this plug in, be sure to check out their site for more info plus you can download the trail for free which is a great way to learn it.

The way I had the plug-in set up was to convert the video into a 3 particle deep system. Consisting of the colours red,green,blue. I could have made it 2000, 243 or 68 deep, any number, it’s totally up to you. However this will effect loading times. This is also applicable to all the setting, if ever you’ve used after effects you’ll know that there is a huge range of possibility, a fantastic piece of software. Anyway by linking the particles to only display the lights of separate precomp (the b&w video footage of me talking) I now had a pseudo-3d animated environment that I could maneuver the after effects camera around. While After Effects may look 3d it’s considered to be 2.5d so it has some of the appearance of 3d(X, Y & Z axes) but it isn’t 3d in the same why 3DMax, Maya, Blender or C4D are. I was able to expand the particles to add some more depth to the video, like when I zoom into the face and you can sort of see my side profile even tho the shot was static and didn’t move. For example you could achieve a similar effect with a photograph, actually for some of the parts I did use stills from the footage.

Here are some shots of the flowchart from After Effects; how each layer and comp relate to one another. This is just a small portion of it.

Final Ram Export

Here is the result. Watch in HD if you can!

When I was done I added it to the Render Que and exported it. Full HD so it came out pretty sweet. I’ll also note that I was working in 32BPC, not the 8BPC default, this really worked nicely to bump out the glow.

Here are a few screen-caps. Click them for full-res, the work pretty nicely as widescreen wallpapers.

So there you have it, that’s the rough workflow. If there’s one tip I can give you to take away from this, it would have to be; try do everything you can on set to make the work in post as easy and clean as possible. I think this can be applied to plenty of other mediums, photography etc. You want a solid beginning to work with and then everything you do after that will be a breeze.