Do you know how long 5 seconds of television can take?
Last time, I spoke about my journey into Motion Graphics and the sort of work I have completed since working in television. What people don’t tend to talk about is the length and time and animation can actually take to come to life.
Hello, my name is Holly and I am a Video Editor and Motion Graphics Designer, I have created some really random animations for television including putting bow ties on penguins for SKY to creating a Pokeball that catches a seal for BBC News.
On more than one occasion, I have worked over 100 hours in one week to achieve a deadline for a fast turnaround. Here are a few intense experiences I have had working on graphics for television. Each of them is rewarding but also a long process.
The Historical Creation
One show I had to do a lot of graphics for was for the Yesterday Channel and it had a lot of maps to animate. The production was historical and about Viking times so it was difficult to actually find maps from this time so they all had to be created from scratch.
There was one graphic that had to depict the coastline of Dublin to talk about the Battle of Clontarf and how it has changed over time. To achieve this five seconds of television, I had to create 34 separate maps from scratch to show the coast changing.
I used a recent map and the oldest map I could find and then jiggled the rest of the coastline in the middle maps to show the development. It took a lot of hours to create the 24 separate maps as they were all stylised.
The long journey to 5 seconds…
Another show, another map, this time it was an OS Map. Due to the fact that there was licensing issues around using an original, I had to actually hand draw it so that we had the full copyright on it.
The animation was of central England and I had to hand draw the whole OS map and then colour it in. It took about 7 hours to draw in the detail that we needed in Illustrator and then another 12 hours colouring it in to make sure it had the effect that we needed.
It was a long process to create only a few seconds of television but it was satisfying when I got to the end of the animation and it went out on broadcast.
The French Exchange
Recently, I have had to turn around a USA Television show so that all the graphics were transformed to French. This means changing the graphics to fit and sit comfortably in the clean covers that were provided by the original production company. This may seem like an easy job but the French language is a lot longer than English words so it means it can be quite a complex process.
This one particular show had a really complicated timeline animation to depict a chain of murders that had happened all across this particular State in America. The easiest way to do something like this is to camera track the clean covers and then it should be able to be a swift change. However this was not the case for this show.
No matter how hard I tried the tracker just did not work so it all had to be manually animated - frame by frame. There was about 30 seconds of television that had to be frame by frame animated, it took me about 60 hours to redo all of the original animations.
Whilst graphics can take a really long time to do, seeing them on television is such a weird and wonderful feeling. You created that - from scratch, from an idea that a Director or a journalist had and you brought their ideas to life! It may be a lot of hard work but it is worth it in the end.