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 Introduction
My name is PJ Richardson, I am a broadcast designer from Los Angeles, CA. 3 years ago I moved here from Baltimore, MD where I graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art, to start working at Fuel, a broadcast design boutique which was later acquired by Razorfish. After a few years of getting my feet wet in motion work for Fuel, I was rather abruptly introduced to the world of freelance, making my rounds in the Los Angeles motion circles for the likes of Brand New School, Imaginary Forces, Blind, Heavy, Digital Kitchen, Fuel, (rather oddly) and the Picture Mill to name a few. I eventually settled back into a full time position at Stardust with a couple of guys I originally teamed up with at Fuel before it was acquired.
My process, be it for freelance, or for stardust remains about the same. I usually sketch things out on paper, ideas, shapes, patterns or doodles, bring them into the computer, either scanned or drawn in illustrator, then depending on the scope of the project, either into aftereffects or through cinema4d and then after effects. Projects can range anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks from start to finish depending on the complexity of the idea, client feedback, or simply my general creative energy I have to put into the project.
At home, I work off a G4 Dual 500 w/ 768 ram, with a 19 ViewSonic monitor and a titanium 867 mhz laptop (which I'd like to point out renders unusually well). My setup at work is a g4 dual 1.25 with 1g ram and a 20 inch cinema display monitor, all of which setups I run osX. My core set of programs I use are illustrator first and foremost, photoshop, aftereffects, cinema4d, occasionally flash, and final cut pro. I am really big on collecting images as reference, either through the internet (which I don't have at home but is actually a blessing) digital photos I take, and magazine tear sheets. I often too draw stuff by hand and scan it in to either use for final or lay the groundwork for digital work I create on top.
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Introduction
Project: Fuse ID
Agency: Heavy Industries
Designer: PJ Richardson:: Laundry
Animator: PJ Richardson
The Poo movie
Awhile back I was asked by Heavy to create a series of :10 second animations for Much Music. They were specifically station IDs which basically in some creative form, are drawn out network logo animations. There was no concept provided, just that it has to be 'cool' whatever that is, and humorous if at all possible. The only other specification was a provided logo needed to be slapped on the end along with provided audio (most of which was created by Chazz Windus, he's a genius.)
So when I started this specific animation, I had a tremendous amount of other work going on, so sheepishly I took a crack at 2 animations before I got to the final one. Both were really sort of visual sketches to sort of find my angle, concept or whatever you want to call it, but neither of which I was entirely happy with. I found the both lacked not as much aesthetically, although I was not happy on that level either, but more conceptually. I find with a good idea, everything else tends to fall into place.
So finally after these 2 were politely denied, I racked my brain as to what would make me laugh if I saw it on T.V. and that when it hit me. Poo. A movie, about poo! I should also mention that while this piece was going on, my close friend Bradley was also working on a similar animation for the same project, which he verbally described to me as an ad to sell crop circles. We had this friendly competition going where once done, we'd show our work to a few of our peers who as judges would decide the better of the two, the loser having to treat the winner to a shopping spree at our esteemed and highly regarded local health food store, Nature Mart. So I figure, why not sell poo? really try to bring the idea that we are both selling something close together so that when judged, we would get the age old, " they're both good for completely separate and different reasons". Pifffffffffffffffffffff
v01
v02
So I have veered off a bit, but yes, finally a concept. Now with my idea in hand, I visually started to hone in on a very japanese, bubble gum, commercial packaging style, I was really attracted to the colors, pop-i-ness, happiness and general energy created in japanese design, and had yet to take a crack at recreating such an aesthetic. For reference, I hunted down japanese anime DVD covers, candy packaging references, went through some japanese culture books for inspiration, along with a trip to Giant Robot in west LA for a little inspiration. Some of the people that really inspired me for this were Kozyndan, United Bread, and Itsuo Ito.
So my next step after getting all this visual vocabulary and momentum built up in my head was to create a style sheet. I basically spent to afternoons on my laptop creating a giant sheet of graphic elements in illustrator, random backgrounds, characters, type treatments both in japanese and english (please don't be offended if my characters accidentally make a reference to billygoats or someone's mom, I created typographic characters I thought were fun but know NO japanese). After making tons of elements, I honed it down to about 6 scenes, all in layers in illustrator, basically broken down into foreground background, and mid ground. One or two scenes had random propaganda typography advertising my lovely new product 'poo-poo!' while other scenes were environments with funny little arbitrary characters.
So once I had these scenes laid out, I brought them into aftereffects, where previously prepared was an audio track that I was to use. I imported each scene seperated into its own illustrator file per scene, into after effects as its own composition. I then animated each scene, usually some sort of a fluid animated background, with either type or illustration looping on top if it. Once I had my 5 or so scenes animated in after effects, I then composited each aftereffects composition into a full :10 composition. With each one moving, I used a variety of transitions, like the bulls eye composition where I scale about 10 of the same shape, offset their time by about 8 frames, and then re-color each layer with the hue and saturation filter, creating a vibrant rainbow like echo effect. I then used the last shape as an alpha channel to reveal the next scene below it. I experimented with a series of shapes that were much along the same execution from section to section.
When done, I rendered it all out with audio to check timings, showed it to a few friends, whom all were very supportive, but something just wasn't right. For no reason at all or for every reason imaginable, the piece just wasn't there. In analyzing it over and over in my head, I felt I just was not pushing the idea hard enough nor honing in on my concept as clearly as I could. So back to the drawing board sort of.
The revision
What I felt like I needed to do with this piece was to hone into the consumerism aspect of it. I was finding with the short amount of time (about 8 seconds of animation in actually, because you need to hold on the logo for at least 2) that trying to effectively communicate a clear message was bit challenging so I switched gears a bit to rather poke fun with silly ideas and icons.
My first idea was to create poo juice, so in illustrator, I created the flat cover of a layout of a poo juice design. There is the logo which is a rainbow, the japanese umbrella company in the form of japanese characters that have no real meaning, and then of course the title, 'poo poo juice' below. I added a surgeon generals warning for dorks, dwarves and angry ex-girlfriends not to drink unless chased with lighter fluid and a backrub. Next to that and particularly illegible was a series of type treatments for each of the assorted flavors, strawberry, orange and grape respectively. Once this layout was complete, I used the skew tool in illustrator to get my layouts to an angle I liked. I then option dragged them to copy and move up to a place I felt would create a nice 3d effect. Once I found that position, I unified the entire duplicate of my layout then ungrouped them. Using command-u on a mac, with my cursor-snap now on, I hand drew the difference between the juice box, and flavor type with its counterpart in back, creating the illusion of 3d. Once done and to where I liked it, I dressed each element up with some gradients to emphasize the 3d even more, then grouped each element and seperated it into layers to later animate in after effects.
The factory
So I have now created the product, but I felt this still wasn't pushing my idea as far as I would like. I thought about it and decided I needed to show the poo-poo product process. For this next scene I created a poo-poo processing plant and factory.
My first step was in illustrator, to create two circles, space them apart, and copy them (command-c, you see why I did this in a second.) I then with my white arrow in illustrator selected the inner most point of each circle and deleting them, thus creating two have circles. i then connected the open points both on top and bottom using command j. I then selected this full object and with the stroke window, upped it from 1 point to 4 points, then in object/path/outline stroke created an object. What I then did is hit command-f and pasted my first to circles in place. I selected one, and scaled it down to where it started to look like a gear, then upped the stroke size and converted to outlines again. With the second circle, I double clicked on the scale tool in the menu bar so it gives me the exact readout of my previous scale and executed the exact same scale on the second circle, upped the stroke to the same stroke weight and outlined the stroke. What I am left with now is a rough looking image of a conveyor belt.
My next step was to go into cinema4d. From this 3d app I opened my illustrator file which then opened it in cinema4d as paths. I then went to object/nurbs/extrude nurbs. The default is to extrude 20 points along the z axis, so I set that to 200. I then copied this extrusion operation in the object window. I then dragged my first path which was the conveyor belt into the extrusion operation in the object window, which then creates a dimensional object in the perspective view. I then hit command-v and create copies of the extrusion operation 2 more times for the remaining to gears. Once done I now roughly have the 3d object of a conveyor belt. Using pre made objects in cinema, I made rough shapes of gears, repeated the conveyor belt at different angles and with manipulated versions of the cube object created walls and boxes. Once I had a rough version of a factory made, I created a camera, then in the attributes window, switched its projection setting from perspective, which is a manually controlled camera angle to isometric. This creates a very well isometric and even camera angle. Now that this was done, I assigned different basic colors of texture to each object, gears, walls, conveyors and boxes to distinguish one from the other. Also at this point, each set of objects be it rows of gears, walls, boxes and conveyor belt are separated into separate groups. This will prove handy in a minute.
So now that everything is separated, colorized and at the right camera setting, I go into render settings/effects and the upper corner to post effects and activate 'cel rendering'. What this is going to do is create a flat 2d look in the render and in this case also add outlines. My one flaw with cinema is that you have no control over the line weight that I am aware of, which makes it tricky when going to broadcast. So now time to render. and voila looks about right.
ex. 01
Now I test it a few different ways but its about right. So now time to animate. First, the gears. What would be nice is to have them move up and down like heavy machinery. So shift-f3 pulls up my time line. I drag my gear group into the timeline, then click on the red circle on the bottom right of my workspace view to create a key frame. I then drag the timeline marker just to the lift sideways until it says 10 meaning on the tenth frame and move my gear object upwards with the move tool. once its about where i like it, i again click on the red record button to create another key frame. Now in my timeline window, I know the only movement is on the y axis, so in the timeline i select the key frame from the y position, copy it and paste it at frame 15. I now have the up and down motion. I then select the time bar of position y, then in the timeline window go to sequences/adjust which cuts the y position bar off at right after the last key frame set. What this means is that after the key frame i just cut off its existence in the file. Now with the position y time bar still selected, i got to the attributes window of my main interface and set the loop to 5 so now my key frame animation repeats 5 times. I now have 75 frame animation to work with!
so now in much the same fashion I animate the rest of the scene, the remaining gears with the same loop and some of the boxes without the loop because it makes no sense. What I then do is render out each group of elements as its own animation with an alpha channel. And save them for later.
Compositing the factory
Now back in after effects, I import all my 3d animations in to ae, and in one composition I add all my 3d animations. Because I rendered with an alpha, the part of the animation that is not the object is transparent, so i am recreating my scene that i had made in 3d. Now the point of doing this is this. Once its all set up in ae, and the animation plays for a second or two, I then set position key frames in ae, then 15 frames later drag all my layers of animations so that the move off screen along the isometric axis i have established aesthetically. What this creates is a rather cool transition, albeit slightly tedious into my juice flavor scene.
The rest of the animation is much along the same lines as earlier described. I use a series of scales of illustrator elements to reveal the final illustrator drawing of the poo logo.
In the end, I am not sure how effective my message came out, whether it was 'cool' or funny, but like most of my projects, I just like to have fun with it, and not take myself too seriously. There are things I could tinker with incessantly but for the most part I am happy where this animation got to.
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