Final project review

During the course of Creative Media Production 1^st level we were given three assignments, which were: to develop a logo, leaflet and a promotional video for a multimedia company.

Logo

I started by doing research on different logos, to understand how should logo look like and what it should present. Also studied different multimedia companies logos and identities to wholly understand the essence of the assignment. The research was recorded to my sketchbook where I brought out some positive and some negative examples of found logos and annotated them.

Next step of creating my own companies identity and logo was to write it out on a mind map. That helped to see what a logo is made for and what should it contain and what aspects to take into consideration while creating one.

From there I moved on to scamps of my own logos. These were also drawn out to my sketchbook, taking in consideration the information I had conducted from research and mind map. Also added annotations next to them to clearly bring out what every element on the logo should represent and my thoughts about different colours schemes and font choices.

When I had chosen out some of the scamps that I liked I moved on to the final stage of development a vector format logo – adobe illustrator. I had chosen out three possible options for my logo and did four different version of each design. 

Finally I picked up the final logo that I found suiting the most with my company’s identity. I added also four different designs of their business cards what helped me to see how my logo would look like when resized to a smaller media. 

The final result that I have chosen I am quite pleased with. I think the name: Eject Media and the design of the logo suites to a multimedia company very well – because of the use of a widely known eject sign. I managed to use to sign to make an image of a film camera what is clearly relating to multimedia company´s field of activity. I choose at first to go with only black & white design but in the end managed to try out the logo with some different colours. This helped me to see different perspectives of my logo. 

  

For the future I would keep in mind to try out more different styles when creating a logo. This time I only went for a corporate look and did get stuck to it. Also would take more than option of the logos to final stage to give wider range to choose from. And in future would spend more time on doing research about different fonts and what is in fashion right now and which are left in the past. 

Leaflet

Second stage of the assignment given was to create leaflet to the same multimedia company that we had created identity and logo, using images that we had taken ourselves.

The progress of making a leaflet started out the same as with logo – with a research. I searched different kinds of examples of corporate leaflets. That helped me to understand what kind of a information should go on it and how I can build my design around it.

From there I moved on to mind map that helped me to see how to make my leaflet to work for my target audience. For example i thought about which kind of a photo to place in the front, what kind of a keywords I should use to catch attention and also the placement of a logo, information and examples of work. All the time I kept in mind that a leaflet should be a media what is giving out basic information so I didn’t want to overload it with different images and big blocks of text.

The previous helped to put together some scamps of my leaflets design and layout. From there I moved on to Adobe Photoshop program to create a final version of my leaflet. I choose Photoshop this time because we needed to use and edit some our own photos. I choose the photos related to my logo - eject sign and the field of activity and keywords of the company. In the end I also used a help of a Illustrator program to create some text design – because it gave me more options editing text and as it is vector based software it gave me more professional outcome of my design. 

As with logo the next time I would try out different styles than corporate. This time I went with clear and straightforward clean corporate outlook and colours. The next time I would like to try out more colour schemes and also present different types of my design. Leaflet I designed this time is two sided and because of the lack of room I left out the examples of work and descriptions of them. Next time I would try out a four sided version what gives more options to fully introduce the company that leaflet is promoting.

Promotional video

The final stage of assignment was to create a promotional video about our created multimedia company. At first we needed to create a storyboard what helped to put down the scenario of our videos.  After that we moved on to filming with professional equipment. As I was doing it the first time it gave me understanding of different technical terminology, filming angles and different things that are needed to keep in mind when filming – light, reflections, health and safety. After filming we used Final Cut Pro program to edit our videos and add special effects, images, writing and soundtracks to it.
When video was ready I asked some friends and classmates to comment my work to get different opinions of people who were familiar to technical background of it and who were not. Given comments brought out that the simplicity and the soundtrack were positive sides of my video. Also there were mentioned the logo design in positive way.
I used the black&white version of the logo to mach it to the overall colour scheme of video.  Also the used music was easily attachable with the video. I choose the music because of its variety of the pace to bring out some of the hand movements used in video. And seems like the simple touch of it made it clear to understand the purpose of it as well.

Eject Media Promotional video

What I would change next time:
I couldn´t imagine that filming from a point of view angle is so hard and needs really thinking through all the movements and the space the filming takes place. It took some time to get rid of the reflection from the computer screen on footage – that gave me understanding that the angle of light is very important. As I was using point of view angle I wished only my hands to appear on the footage and it was very hard to keep my other body out of the screen. More planning and thorough S.W.O.T would help next time. Overall I am pretty pleased with my results keeping in mind that it was my first attempt. I managed to follow my original story board and give the message through.

Eject Media - final cut!

Soo, here is my Final Cut!

Hoping to hear some feedback from you :)

Editing - cutting and adding

Started editing my footage on the 25th of February with the Final Cut Pro. I had never used the program before so it was an opportunity to learn something new.
My editing started with importing all my filmed footage into the Final Cut and then I cut out the pieces of the picture footage that I didn't needed there. Cause on filming you should always film a bit more than you really need - it all took a while. What made my editing part a bit easier was that on my footage there wasn't any sound so I didn't had to consider with that at first.

Next stage was adding titles to my footage. Because original footage didn't consist any sound I added few titles to give the information what the company does. I choose a typewriter effect and different speed for text appearance to make it sync with my hand movements on screen.

I also changed the speed of video at one point when I wanted to make my typing extra fast to go with background music.  

The last stage was adding background music, what was from a Swedish band called The Radio Dept. I choose the music because the pace went with the video and made it easy going.