OSTN: The making of

First off we began making the dancefloor in Flash. The grid was surprisingly tricky to make with individual morphing lights. By repeating four seperate box animations the grid was built up. At this point we considered the idea of animating each cell of the dance floor as if it were a tv screen. i.e. opening with static then flickering into the logo colours, possibly with images. However we decided this would become too complex and busy, drawing attention away from the dancers.

The background crowd was quite a simple idea of animating just two frames in time with the beat. We decided to pull the poses ourselves with a little help from Will, Dan and Ben. We then traced their outlines in flash. In hindsight it may have been interesting to illustrate the figures outselves, contributing abit of stye. We composited these elements into Adobe After Effects, which was I tool I had not really used before. I liked the versatility of the program and the lighting effects you could render. However I soon found out that you cannot render lights from nothing, so by creating coloured circles in flash I found a way to create some spotlights behind the crowd. This turned out quite well, as we could animate the movement of each light.

The final and most important stage of the project was capturing the dancers on the greenscreen, then filling them with a solid colour. We found it difficult to organise some people to dance in an embarrassing way, but we were lucky enough to recruit Sean in exchange for a soundtrack for his ident. Our direction of the dancing was quite laid back, in that we just nudged the style in a direction we wanted and kept the camera rolling. I think that this worked to our advantage, whereby any choreography may have caused an unatural appearance, even though we had a very good idea of the kind of thing we wanted. Implementing the live-action was surprisingly easy, we edited out the background, but found a few difficulties when the figures sometimes overlapped. We created masks in order to resolve this problem then added a slight glow.

The animation of the Logo was intended to swing in, then back abit, in order to give it some weight. I think this came off quite well, along with the shine at the end, which implies the network is full of energy.

Here is the final ident for anyone who has not seen it already: