Unit 64 Motion Graphics and Compositing

ArtToday

What is Motion Graphics?

Motion graphics are vector objects/images that are moving on the screen, it’s a genre of animation on its own as you can do many things with it. The following are examples of motion graphics; DVD interfaces, title and credit sequences, animated captions, stings, idents, interactive menus, and web banners.

What is Compositing?

Compositing is the act of combining two or more images and elements together to create the final image. Like for example putting the colour blue and red together, it'll create purple as the final product.


The Uses of Motion graphics
DVD interfaces are the menus you see when you have Blu Ray or a DVD playing in a DVD/Blu ray player. The reason why we have motion graphics in our DVD interfaces is that without them they would be quite boring and not aesthetically pleasing.
The purpose of a DVD menu is to have the user be able to navigate to what they want to see, whether its a movie or just the behind the scenes. Whatever the DVD menu is showing, whether it's a video or just some special effects they're not long, maybe from 20 seconds to a minute since DVDs couldn't afford to handle a lot of frames per second at the time before blue-rays were created.

Motion graphics are used in title and credit sequences because before and after every show or movie there would be text moving down the screen or fading in and out. The title sequence will give the viewers a brief intro about what the series will be about with people's names who are associated with the show fading in and out. credit sequences are there to tell show the viewers who worked and help to produce the project. 

Animated captions are displayed at certain times in a movie or TV show and are like subtitles, but they emphasize a word or sentence. some movies or TV shows use animated captions to evoke an emotional feeling in the viewer or they use it to get their message across to the people watching. another example of animated captions could be like in the video below where the lyrics are timed perfectly to the song so you could sing along to the song.

Stings or logo stings are little animations of the logo at the end of an advertisement. It's the company's identity so it needs to be aesthetically pleasing and eye-catching so people would remember their company. for example, as seen in the gif below for the kids choice awards, they know their target audience is kids so they used quite a lot of colours.

It could be as simple as a logo coming into frame from above or as complex as making it making the logo bounce around on a spot. Stings are usually short because it's just let people know what company this advertisement is from.

Idents are identification for TV programs and movies, it's a logo that people who view it will associate their program or channel with. For example, this Disney channel ident just has the company's name but it's in a style of font that everyone would recognize its Disney even if it didn't say, Disney.

Interactive menus are in certain areas of a website or DVD that help direct the user to what they want to see and where they want to go. it also makes the website and DVD cleaner and organized as the user knows where they can go to. Also, for example, interactive menus are used a lot in phones as there are various apps that when you click an icon or swipe in a direction you'd be directed to somewhere where you can choose options that could help you.

Web banners are advertisements on websites with short animations on it so it can attract people, once the banner has been clicked they will be directed to the website that created the banner. They'll have to also be using colours effectively in order to attract people as well, appearance is important for a web banner.

Characteristics

Graphics are just pictures or images that have been illustrated to create a bigger piece. For example, creating a park as the background then drawing a bench and placing it into the park, in the end, you'll have some graphics image. Also, if there's more than one image of the same thing but alter some objects or people each time and you'll have created the illusion of moving pictures. graphics can be as realistic as possible or something abstract like in the pictures below. 

Movement is when an object or living being is seen going to point A from point B, meaning it's going somewhere else that isn't where it started. for example, squashing and stretching was a popular type of movement on the PS2, games like Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter where whenever they attacked something their body would stretch out although it wasn't realistic, it looked good.

Visual effects are applied to videos and pictures to give the object or person something cool or to make it look more realistic. It can also make things easier and safer, for example, someone using fire. It dangerous to play around with fire but with the use of visual effects fire doesn't have to be used in real life. as seen in the picture below visual effects can also be applied to insert a place in the background since they're not really there or its a place that doesnt exist.

Technology considerations

The frame rate is the number of images that are used in one second. For movies, the standard frame rate is 24 frames and that amount can increase to any amount the company wants. In games, 30 frames per second isn't a very smooth game but it's the least number of frames a game should have, to run smooth games 60 frames per second is needed. As seen from the images below, the more pictures in a second the more fluent and smooth the animation will be, it won't be rough or unrealistic.

Since 1927 the frame rate that every movie follows till this day is 24 frames per second, the reason why films are 24 frames a second and still stays this way is because it looks natural. It looks more natural because there's motion blur at 24 frames per second since we see motion blur ourselves its natural and if you go higher than 24 frames per second there won't be any motion blur. For example, the movie hobbit was in 60 frames per secondand a lot of people didn't like it as it didn't feel natural.

Video file formats are what we save our videos in and they are created in 2 parts, one being the "codec" and the other is "container". the codec compresses and decompresses the file while the container stores the information like the audio and the video itself. the video file formats we see every day are; MP4, AVI, MOV, and FLV (used for flash). Before creating a game or movie they'll need to decide what is the most appropriate video file format for their project.

Screen ratios are the height and width of the image, game developers and movie productions must always choose the aspect ratio that is perfect for their project as this will be shown to the world when it's done. The standard aspect ratio for HD channels is 16:9 while for Imax quality at a cinema the aspect ratio is 19:10.

Resolution is the quality of the image or video, the lower the resolution the lower quality will be seen from the image. If there are more pixels in the image then the quality of the image will also be more detailed and clearer, the fewer pixels will result in a pixelated, and unclear image.

There are 2 ways to compress a video file, one of them is lossy compression while the other is lossless compression. Lossy compression compresses the file, but it loses some of the data in order to make the file size smaller resulting that the image or video will decrease in quality. Lossless compression compresses the file but not as much as lossy compression, but that's because the quality of the image or video is the same, none of the data is lost.

By Carlos De Freitas



References:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interactive_media
• https://jakelaurieunit64.wordpress.com/2013/01/10/understand-the-current-uses-of-motion-graphics-and-compositing-video/
• https://prezi.com/1_-z9gof4awk/different-uses-of-motion-graphics-and-compositing-video/
• https://www.lifewire.com/what-are-motion-graphics-4056786
• https://www.slideshare.net/mobile/Raymedia/dvd-menu-presentation
• https://birdeye.co/blog/what-logo-sting
• http://aframe.com/blog/2013/07/a-beginners-guide-to-frame-rates
• https://www.google.com/amp/s/wolfcrow.com/what-is-compositing
• https://www.motionelements.com/blog/articles/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-5-most-common-video-file-formats
• https://www.rtings.com/tv/learn/what-is-the-aspect-ratio-4-3-16-9-21-9
• https://microscope-microscope.org/microscope-info/image-resolution/