Exhibit Designers: Event Communications
Producer: Graham English and Co.
Production: Raygun Media Ltd.
Project: 3D texturing, animation, illustration, image manipulation
Created with: Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects
It has taken me some time to get around to posting this project – it was completed back in 2012 and it was my first major project involving motion graphics work. The first task was to create a series of maps to show the evolution of the dock yards in Belfast. I was supplied with a series of old maps at various dates in history and I had to firstly work out how they fitted together geographically – being old maps, the accuracy was understandably slightly out as well as the fact that the landscape changed so much over the period, it was sometimes difficult to work out which features fitted to where. They were linked into a sequence that evolved over time – with major changes highlighted and a series of playing cards used to show where some of the more famous ships were built. It is unfortunate the amount of time I spent adding in the detail of the surrounding town and landscape and yet it never actually appears in the final video – this happens a lot, you never really know what you will need.
Another element I was involved with was the sinking sequence itself. My job was to create the texture maps for the titanic itself. This sounds a lot easier than it was. The problem being that we had been briefed to produce the animation in a scraperboard style to emulate the static illustrations of David Rooney used elsewhere in the exhibition. The challenge is one of perspective. We had to devise a way to try to keep the line weights even from the front to back of the ship when it was viewed from different angles – so the line weight and space between lines would gradually increase the further away from the camera it was intended to be. This meant that when rendered, the lines appeared to be more even, despite the perspective. To achieve this, we had to create several different texture maps depending on the camera angle.
The final element I was involved with was to colour correct an image we had been supplied of the Titanic in its current resting place on the seabed. The image had been created using a mosaic of different photos and each one was slightly different in its colour output, which resulted in a patchwork image that did not look very appealing and was a little distracting. The image was then used to create a final fly-over sequence of the ship at rest on the seafloor.
For more detail on the full project, please feel free to visit Raygun Media’s website.