I just ranted about this on my personal blog, and thought it would be of note here. The Animation class had a screening of their work a few weeks ago, before the semester ended, to showcase some final pieces. It involved a dozen or so students and promotional video spots (for Ag day, or a Blink 182 show etc.) and a typography demonstration. I had hoped there would have been a more vocal critique discussion for the event, but Dordt art majors kept it in polite silence for the most part - maybe they had seen them all before and had already discussed? I don't know. A lot of the spots could have gone to a local television station (it's to my understanding that some of them have) but several others, still, felt like web spots or the intro. to a site that you click to enter the actual site. Some were brief and simple and cute and others drew more of a narrative sense from the viewer. What I mean to say is that there was a good variety... but a lot of them, not all of them, ended their fifteen, thirty, sixty second spot when their animation was over and simply cut the audio out. When this happens on television, it reeks of choppy local Northwest Iowa broadcasting. It's more of a recurring annoyance with online ads because those don't run very smoothly from one video to the other (yet), but that doesn't excuse the animator, editor, producers for letting it happen. If you're putting a video segment together, you're guiding the viewer's eyes to see various motions and objects in a specific sequence - the other HALF of that experience is the audio. You'd be an obvious amateur if you threw as many rotations or morphs in your video as possible with no reason for its existence, or regard for its timing. The same goes for the audio - if you loop it carelessly or cut it out at a strange point, it's startling to the viewer and, instead of remembering the time and place for Ag day, they're stuck saying "Wait. What just happened to the music?" People stop dancing and they look around as if they just woke up.
There's my rant.
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yeah...most of us in that class had/have very limited knowledge/experience with aftereffects/animation in general, however that is no excuse! The biggest problem I had with 80% of the animators/animations was the lack of attention to detail. For example, you brought up the abrupt endings, and for me that just shows that the "artist" is not being considerate of the audience. It takes about 30 seconds to fade music/video in and out and it is one of the easiest things that you can do to make your animation better...and it is really annoying that 80% of the class did not do that. I could go on and on about all the other things but...I'm very drowsy.
ReplyDeleteYeah, at the very least - AT THE VERY LEAST - a fadeout with soften the audio cutting out. Some of the videos did this, the example I have in my head is the "Hi, I'm a PC." "I'm a mac." ads they have where they always end with the music matching up with the titles. Instead of fading the music away, they use every last note to drive home the point they're trying to make. It's professional. It's a very clean way to unify, and wrap up, the video spot and it clearly shows that it was well thought out from concept to production to editing.
ReplyDeleteand the spelling!! That bugged me the most..
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