Moving image
i.e. motion graphics, animation and video
motion graphics
Theories on Acceptance
duration: 5m 08s
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Theories on Acceptance
Animated talk for J Laurence Sarno
Why?
Marketing consultant J Laurence Sarno gave a talk at a ‘Drive’ networking session. Not only was it lovely but it also sounded so reminiscent of Baz Luhrmann’s Sunscreen that setting Laurence’s words to a soundtrack was irresistible.
In the meantime, Anne-Marie Miller of Carbon Orange ‘doodled’ his key thoughts and shared her graphic with the networking group and that suggested turning the whole thing into a motion graphic-based piece.
What?
I spent a day editing Laurence’s words into bite size chunks and playing with GarageBand to create a soundtrack to set them to. Then I edited Anne-Marie’s graphic into individual elements (the original is the last frame of the video) and added in new bits to create an animation to tie in with Laurence’s words.
Then and Now
duration: 22s
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Then and Now
Product capability demo for Porotech
Why?
Porotech are a start-up developing next generation technology for MicroLEDs. They needed an animation to demonstrate the principle of what you can do with their products (in my very basic terms – “cycle through all colours in the spectrum rather than only being able to switch red, green or blue on and off”). It was aimed at a highly technical audience and being run on their social media channels.
What?
I was given a tight brief on the specifics of the layout and what needed to happen, but I wanted to add a little more of a story so put in the ‘Now’ and ‘Then’ titles and also included an end screen.
Ooops!
duration: 06s
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Ooops!
404 page for Carbon Orange
Why?
You can have a lot of fun with 404 pages (the ones you get to if the page you were looking for no longer exists). This is the one I made for design agency Carbon Orange’s website.
What?
Carbon Orange use a graphic of a character standing on a circle, and my initial thought was to use that and have the character disappearing into a black hole. But then they suggested a squishing orange and I loved that idea. So that’s what we went with.
What we’ve learnt about …
duration: 2m04s
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What we’ve learnt about…
Exhibition animation for Redgate Software
Why?
Redgate Software were exhibiting at a recruitment fair and wanted to make a major splash. I came up with an overall campaign for them, including a series of animations to play over a course of three days. Here’s one of them.
What?
The turnaround on this was extraordinarily tight. Whilst I generally like to spend time thinking, storyboarding, tweaking and perfecting, this was a great example of what you can put together in four hours – because that was literally all the time I had.
animation
Introducing…
duration: 54s
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Introducing…
Company demo for Paragraf
Why?
Paragraf develop technology using graphene – a 1 atom thick form of carbon with some amazing properties.
I worked with their design agency, Carbon Orange, on redeveloping their website. As part of the project they needed an animation for the site’s homepage and for standalone use at trade shows – something that would get people excited about both what they were currently developing, and what could be developed in future.
What?
The brief was initially pretty broad so we started with a brain storming session where I asked them to take me through how graphene could be used. What emerged were benefits covering everything from the environment to healthcare to space exploration. Solar panels, car batteries, sepsis-detecting scanners and stars formed the basis of an animation – all built up using hexagons (the shape of graphene). The timing was then tweaked slightly to work with a standalone version set to music.
Battery Mapping
duration: 2m50s
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Battery Mapping
Product demonstration for Paragraf
Why?
Another Paragraf project – this one to demonstrate how their kit can be used to test whether and where batteries are failing.
What?
I storyboarded out the animation first to ensure the messaging was correct whilst Carbon Orange created illustrations of the kit set up. Then I developed it to show currents passing through a battery whilst a screen shows erosion of the battery cells over time.
The Monkey Who Wanted To Be A Bear
duration: 05m50s
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The Monkey Who Wanted To Be A Bear
Just for fun
Why?
The Monkey Who Wanted To Be A Bear is a short story written by my husband, Matt Hilbert. It’s a daft little tale about a monkey who, er, wants to be a bear. For no reason other than – as the story explains – bears are cool. Matt gave me the story a few years ago as a purely creative project to work on, thinking it would be fun for me to illustrate it. When lockdown hit, I picked it up and turned it into an animation instead.
What?
The house was an absolute mess whilst I was making this. Characters and props are made out of cardboard, balsa wood, bits of sponge, old paint, literal bugs, scraps of hessian, old t-shirts, painted transparent plastic… Each frame is an individual photograph taken within a two hour window when the light was best, cleaned up in Photoshop then stitched together in After Effects with typography animated over the top.
The voice is me doing my best ‘listen with Mother’, livened up with some sound effects I either found or created in GarageBand. The voiceover does need re-recording in an actual studio. But that’s a for a future time…
We put it out for feedback and got a lot of requests for the rest of the story. But as you can image, it took hundreds of hours, so watch this space. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy what we have so far.
duration: 58s
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Snakes and Ladders
Introductory animation for Mongoose Gray
Why?
Mongoose Gray is a recruitment company with a point of pride of operating with absolute integrity. The name came from the fact that mongooses kill snakes. This animation was created as a header banner as part of an overall branding and website project.
What?
This was a glorious pacing-the-floor-whilst-brainstorming-with-myself project. Mongooses … snakes … snakes and ladders. .. career ladders … board games … moving pieces … moving places. As you might gather, I found it really fun to do.
video
Lanterns
duration: 04m50s
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Lanterns
Music video for Julie anne McCambridge
Why?
The videos I’d made to date for Julie anne barely feature her. With this one, it felt important that we redress that. The song itself is unashamedly Christmassy. The intention here was to really keep the video all about her, but of course make it unashamedly Christmassy too.
What?
The track struck me as a duet between Julie anne’s vocals and the saxophone. I wanted to help draw the ear to what was happening musically and so gave key musical motifs their own visual, working off the line in the song “I’d like lights and snowflakes”. As it builds up, the video becomes increasingly Disney-esque, playing off what (often) our childhood selves want Christmas to be.
Lazy Angel
duration: 04m48s
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Lazy Angel
Music video for Julie anne McCambridge
Why?
Lazy Angel is a wonderfully human and humorous track and I wanted to try and really underline that in making a video for it.
What?
There’s a great expression about how we all have feet of clay. I liked the idea that this angel is so flawed it’s not just his feet that are clay. Having made him, his very crumpled suit and battered sunglasses, I added a beer an and a deckchair, and took him around my local area (and local pub), filming him in different places to illustrate the story.
See You
duration: 04m06s
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See You
Music video for Julie anne McCambridge
Why?
The first time I heard ‘See You’ I was struck by how visual the lyrics are. At that point Julie anne hadn’t gone into a studio to record the full track, so I started working on concepts based around an acoustic recording, handwritten lyrics and the story behind the song. The video evolved as the track went through stages of production.
What?
Julie anne had explained that the song was written about various trips she’d taken to get over a particularly nasty break up. The ‘new golden city’ was Dubrovnik, the spires referred to Prague. Because the song IS so visual, I thought it’d be kind of lovely to quite literally illustrate it with handmade cut outs. I filmed it on my kitchen table (a kitchen sink drama you could call it) with my hands left in shots and a few errors kept in. We also put together a campaign package to help market the song.
Happiness
duration: 04m07s
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Happiness
Music video for Julie anne McCambridge
Why?
I’ve worked with singer songwriter Julie anne McCambridge since 2017, making videos that attempt to add another dimension to the stories she tells in her songs.
‘Happiness’ was our first collaboration.
What?
The album the track comes from is called “Nature Makes Amazing Shapes” and I’d originally wanted to paint Julie anne’s face to blend into nature. But we were on a limited time frame. Rain put a stop to that idea and we had to come up with a new one.
The opening line to the song is “I hope you hurry up, happiness”. That led to thinking about fingers drumming on a table, and the drumming evolved into dancing, which also fitted with the unusual percussion featured in the track. We reintroduced the painting idea, using hand painting instead, borrowing from the practice of painting hands with henna before a wedding. (Huge thanks to illustrator Anastasiya Rudaya for the painting part). Julie anne had a brainwave about sign language. We picked the american version (because that’s one handed) and put in a sequence where she signs “hell is in your head”.
What emerged was something very much “female gaze” – sensual, frustrated, funny, and at one point deliberately out of synch.
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