The Wonderful World Of Motion Graphics and Animation
As well as being a Video Editor, I am also a Motion Graphics Designer - I actually started my career through my creative side so let’s talk about that today!
Hello, my name is Holly and I am a Video Editor and Motion Graphics Designer, one of my first jobs in the media was creating showreels for the heads of film companies to show how well their films were doing around the world. It was in an office that is now owned by Ant and Dec, where their production company runs out of!
I have always loved animation, I spent hours in my childhood drawing and copying cartoon characters so much that I can draw a lot of the Simpson characters from memory these days and tend to doodle Homer Simpson a lot.
I got welcomed to creating animations at University when I fell in love with the process. Unfortunately, the first programme I fell in love with (and was sure it was going to be my future career) was Adobe Flash. I spent so much time learning it for it to end up being a non-existent programme by the time I ended up in the final year of my degree.
Luckily, there was one other programme I ended up liking - After Effects. Even though I learnt the basics at University. I taught myself a lot of the skills through YouTube or when I was on the job. As sometimes you just had to wait until given a task to then work out the best way to animate and create it.
My first animation job was for Simon Cowell’s company SYCO Entertainment. It was creating presentations to do with new show ideas and the West End Musical I Can’t Sing. It was a short stint bringing ideas to life in PowerPoint and After Effects and I loved it, it also gave me an idea of just a hint of what I could do in television.
My second job in animation was actually for a Media Monitoring company. It was a bit of a weird angle to get into television but I did not want to go into television through the Runner route (due to reasons mentioned in a previous post) so this was one of my first steps into getting into television. In this job I would make animated showreels that would get presented to heads of departments in America for companies such as 20th Century Fox and Disney to portray how well their films have done around the world and the media coverage it gained. It was a fun job and I learnt so much from it in my nine months there. It is weird as that building is now owned by Ant and Dec and they run their production company from there.
After I left this company I got my first long term job in television working for SKY in Motion Graphic Design. Since then I have worked on everything from creating branding for documentaries,creating graphics for live broadcast, pitch documents for development, promotional material for events such as MIPCOM to creating French versions of graphics for Discovery.
The wonders of being able to do Motion Graphics as well as Video Editing is that you can look at an edit in a whole different perspective. I used to love it at BBC News when journalists used to come into the graphics room and ask for advice how to specifically film a news package so we could do something creative and unique.
Throughout the years, I have worked in television, I have been fortunate to keep up my Motion Graphics skills and I am constantly learning. I have taught myself Cinema 4D, Blender and Unity along the way as well to develop my skills and I have even used them in broadcast projects as well.
Being able to delve into two different skills sets means I can always keep my job feeling fresh and fun which I am so lucky that I can.