Nescafe Azera // Photoshoot 2

Although the quality of photos that were taken during the first photoshoot were excellent, we weren't able to get a good picture that demonstrated the twist and dispense function. As there is no time left to book the photography studio before the YCN deadline, we had to set up outside the office, where the window lets in plenty of light. By laying down a white sheet of paper and making a small pile of coffee granules, we could imitate a shot of coffee being dispensed. Sam moved his hands between the two twist positions and I had to aim the camera so that Sam's right hand covered the pile before the twist and showed it after the twist. The effect was convincing enough, althoug it took us a lot of attempts to get it exactly how we wanted. Here were some of our attempts:

Here were the final edits from this photoshoot that we will include in our YCN submission boards.

Open Garage // Packaging

From our research in the first week, we found the two-bottle beer packaging to be an exciting format and one one that would work on the kind of distribution scale that open garage operates on. We had a clear focus on making the packaging functional, low-cost and easy to construct for future runs of beer.

Packaging prototype

Features - A one-piece mountboard construction, hand space and a belly band to secure the beers. 

We had the idea of putting nose and mouth stickers on the sides of the pack and facing bottles.

We experimented with using polypropylene which was a more attractive material, but found that it lacked the rigidity that was needed to 'pinch'  the bottles and prevent them from slipping in transit.

We wanted to keep the packaging decoration very stripped back, allowing the sticker illustrations on the belly band and the large brand stickers stand out. 

After printing:

Final Construction

Face made on side of bottle

We found that the labels we had printed for the back did not have a wide enough tab to stay stuck to the bottle and would have to be reprinted on Monday. We also found the transparent sticker paper allowed bubbles to form underneath it giving the product a poor quality of finish. 

We were really happy with the quality of the beer mats printed onto mountboard. The weight and texture is spot-on for what we were trying to achieve. We have been told about a machine at vernon street that can cut rounded corners which we will use next week to finish these off. 

Open Garage // Animation

To demonstrate the concept behind our construct-a-face beer label, we decided to produce a short animation. We felt that animation is great way to capture fun and connect the stickers to the brand in a way that photographs and video wouldn't be able to capture as well.

Part 1 - We show the bottle with just the initial eye stickers and have other accessories fly in and stick to the bottle. After a fun face is made, the bottle rotates to show the back label and disappears

Next the Open Garage Logo moves into frame, and after a pause loads of stickers fly in from off-screen and surround the logo. Everything fades to blue. 

Open Garage // Labels

Whilst Andy worked on producing the sticker packs for each of the bottles, I produced the back labels. After looking at some existing examples, we had decided that we needed a description of the brewery and the drink, information on alcohol content and volume as well as the relevant icons. We also needed to draw attention to the sticker pack which would be housed behind it. 

This label would be printed on transparent sticker paper and placed over the folder sticker book and secured to the bottle. A small round tab would be used hold it in place. 

Andy produced the print-ready sticker books, which condensed as many stickers into the small format of the beer label. 

To reinforce the brand, we designed beer mats using the design from 

individual sticker graphics. 

One Hundred Bears // Page compositions

Using the 400px x 481px size for the pages, I created separate compositions for each of the different pages:

Hands:

The hands were one of the most straightforward pieces to animate, and required little tweaking from my original test.

For the animation I did add numbers to the ends of the fingers as they count up. 

Butterflies:

Using the same arrangement from the page, I created numbers to pop up and count them to 10. As I had to make this page rotate from flat on the right hand side to flat on the left, the page was actually shown backwards when it enters the scene. This meant that I had to flip the composition to make it display the right way round.

Wrong

right

Clock tower:

by removing the big hand of the clock and adding it to a separate layer, I could animate it to tick and strike the hour. 

Cakes:

I separated the cakes into individual files and lined them up in photoshop with a white background to be imported into After effects:

I then added the numbers counting up the deserts

Medicine:

This turned out to be one of the most complex clips as I had to extract a full and empty spoon from the illustration and overlay them to be able to make it look like it had filled up. I had to remove the drop from it's original place and animate it moving towards the spoon in steps. This is the first time I have had to animate something to be purposely jumpy to fit the look of the other sections. This was possible by using the 'hold' option on the keyframes, so that it doesn't animate the points between A and B, but just switches between them. It took me a few attempts to get exactly what I wanted, but it lined up and looked convincing enough to use on the page.  

Sleeping:

I collected 4 different bears out of the 69 and combined them to make the shade cycle through its face. 

I added the numbers to count up to 69 in time. 

Neascafe Azera YCN // Photoshoot

Sam organised a photoshoot of the packaging, using coffee granules as a prop and cut carboard to mimic the mechanism that would be in the final product. I was really pleased with how these came out and think they do a great job of showing off both the product innovation and the simple packaging we have produced to support it.

It was a good plan to have produced so many mock-ups of the product as it meant that we could get some fantastic group shots and demonstrate how they would stack on the shelf. We cut a simple mock mechanism using two pieces of corrugated cardboard to simulate the speration of the coffee into segments. This photographed really well and is great at visually explaining our ideas, which will prove useful when we put submission boards together.

One Hundred Bears // Selecting the artwork

Now I had the format decided, I needed to identify which of the pages would make interesting animations. In doing, this I found that a lot of Magali Bardos' illustrations are repeated in similar form around the page, this is great for me as I can use photoshop to cover and uncover parts (for example the buttons on a bear's shirt) or combine multiple illustrations into one animation GIF or stop frame style (for example the counting hands). Here were some ideas for scenes from the book that had movement or action that could be translated into animated form:

Next, I took all of the scenes that I had identified with potential and manipulated them in photoshop to get a rough idea of how effective they would be. Here I was able to move all of the bear's buttons to separate layers. This technique would allow me to turn them on and off in After Effects and emphasise the counting more visually.

By cropping each of the hands and lining them up on top of each other, I could make a convincing count up and down. 

I did a quick test of this is AfterEffects and found that this actually worked really well. With these pieces in place, I needed to pick which to go ahead with and create a storyboard to establish sequence and pacing. 

I knew that I wanted the book to count upwards, which would mean using spreads and not just single pages or the numbers wouldn't match up. I will frame the scene to focus on one side of the page at a time. This ensures that the composition is never too cluttered, and the viewer knows exactly what to be looking at. 

In Photoshop, I created the cover and spine of the book. I calculated that 720p, this would format would let me scale each page to 400x481px. This was a simple graphic that I could manipulate in 3D space, using a simple darker strip where the spine would be and a subtle gradient at the top to emulate a curve:

In 3D:

storyboard

Having looked through the pages of the book, I have identified the following scenes to animate in sequence:

5 fingers counting + 6 bears in the forest 

10 butterflies + clock chimes 11 at night 

20 cakes + 21 rungs of the ladder

Fevers of 39 + 40 drops of medicine

69 sleeps + 70 days

This gives a nice summary of the book's contents without giving too much away. This should also fit well within the 30 second limit outlined in the brief. 

Getting the pages to match up as they turned proved to be a lot more of a challenge than I thought it would. The only method I could find that didn't cause the pages to break through each other was to end one composition as it hit 90 degrees straight and start the other at that exact moment. This change-over is unnoticable if the camera is exactly head-on. 

mismatching page crossover

Quick test with spine and animation:

I thought that it was important for this brief that I create my own soundtrack. This turned out really well in Specs and gave me much more control over the tone and timing of the animation. The animation style I have planned to use needs to pop from one frame to another in an almost stop-frame effect. This would be much easier with music to time it to. In Ableton Live, I created a simple synth-led arrangement that sounded like it was counting up. I can use this as a guide to animate to in After Effects counting out the beats as visual markers in the timeline.