Digital News: Graphics & Introduction Progress

What Are We Going To Do For Our Graphics?

Now that I've created our logo base, I will now be investigating what to do in terms of graphics, taking in the tutorials which I researched. The graphics I've created below may not be used for our news channel as I am only experimenting to see what I want the graphics to look visually and to learn more about the software.

So firstly, I begun by uploading the logo onto After Effects, opening it with a white background at 1920 x 1080, at 30fps. 

Creating a new composition

My logo opened on a new composition

After uploading, I begun by firstly making the slogan move in a way that each letter zooms out one by one the appears on screen, as if it is spelling out the slogan. So to do this, I had to open an animation with the 'scale' tool, followed by switching the movement tool from characters to 'words'. This enables you to allow each letter become animated one by one.

I then created an animation and selected the 'scale' tool, as this
enables you to move and resize your text.

Here I changed the settings to 'word' to enable each letter to
be animated individually. 

Once this is complete, I then used the drop down box 'range selection' where I changed the start percentage to 0, then added a key frame. This removes the slogan on screen as the animation hasn't begun yet as I've made this to be the starting point. I then created another key frame around 3 seconds later on the time scale, however this time I changed the start percentage to 100%, allowing the animation to show fully. This therefore leads to the text to come up on screen letter by letter for the amount of time which I set it as.

Playing the animation, you can see the slogan appear letter by letter

The next step now is to make the university hat spin and land back on the letter S. This should be done once the SVTV has reached its maximum size as well as the slogan beginning to appear. The spin shouldn't be too long and shouldn't spin too much otherwise it may look rubbish.

To allow this to happen, I firstly had to create key frames which enable the hat to move up the from the S, and the back down to land on it. Once this is completed, I then added key frames at the same frames however this time for the rotation tool. I set the rotation to spin 6 times as it becomes positioned up, and 6 times as it positions down. The times where it goes up and down are also equal to keep it balanced and to make sure that they travel at the same speed.

Now that I have  finished the animations for the graphics, I then went through the animation to make sure that they are all in sync with each other. This includes:

   - Making sure that the hat begins to spin in the air once SVTV has reached it's maximum time
   - That the hat spins whilst the slogan is being typed out, giving the graphics more action
   - That the name and slogan both become smaller or disappear off screen at the exact same time
   - That the hat is positioned at the exact same space before and after it spins.

Below is our graphics which I created. It only lasts around 5 seconds however the introduction will also include a montage of clips from our footage to help set the scene for the news round (which I will be talking about next)

We may also add an additional sound effect of the pencil writing, as previously mentioned.

What Else Will we be Seeing for our Introduction? (Montage)

Now that we have completed our graphics and logo, we also plan to have extra visuals for our introduction, otherwise our logo graphics alone may seem reasonably bland for an opening. This is where I came up with the idea to have a montage opening, which other news channels tend to do. 

For example, below you can see that Channel 4 have their top stories rolled as a montage. This is a similar idea as what I plan to do, however our montage will be before we open with our top stories. The montage should include:

   - Clips of our reporters (Dave and Natasha) reporting

   - Footage from shopping from the GoPro

   - Clips of the interview with Charlotte for our snapchat story, and even a clip of their selfie

   - Footage of the meals we cooked, showing them being cooked in action

However for this, instead of making the montage template myself I decided to save some time and to look online instead. However I couldn't find many templates which I could use - most of them did suit the news scene as well as most of them would cost to buy.

Therefore, I decided to stick with the preset templates which you can find on final cut pro. I simply used the 'switch out' and 'switch left' text presets which when put together makes these clips move in and out of each other, thus creating a mini montage. This works quite efficiently as it runs smoothly and is also very simple, which helps to add to the simplistic tone of our news channel.