Web Link - Double G Studios Show ReelGrant Gillbert was the next practitioner to come and give us a lectures. He works with motion graphics and has his own company, Double G Studios. He was a student at Stockport College 20 years doing a National Diploma in Graphic Design. He then went on to do a degree at UCE Birmingham, which he found to be more print based than moving image. All videos and animations discussed in this report can be found on his website, link at the top of the page.
His first big job was working on the Big Breakfast with Planet 24. He began his job like most in the industry, starting as a runner, making tea and learning the job through training. He then went onto Channel 4, creating title sequences and promos before going to a company in New York called Attic in 2000, which unfortunately closed down after the events of 9/11, so therefore he returned to the UK and set up his own freelance business, which he has worked on for the last 8 years. He enjoys working for himself as it provides him with more opportunities to meet other people which I can relate to because I enjoy working with others as you don't get trapped into thinking your own way, you learn from others and there experiences and learn to see things differently. The first statement that he made that had a big impact on me is how to promote freelance work. When ever thinking about a future career, I have always been put off by the idea of being a freelancer because it doesn't have a big name feel to it, but Grant found it important to have a company name as opposed to using his own name as it has a more professional feel to it. I completely agree with this as when I saw the name Double G Studios, I didn't expect a freelancer, which is the effect I can imagine client who view his website may take. Straight away it ignited a new interest for me, I wanted to learn more about how successful a freelancer could be in the industry.
Grant began his presentation with his show reel. What I have noticed is how powerful a show reel is to begin promoting work as Dvein did this also and it had the same effect. It's a good way to start a presentation as you get a feel for what you are about to see and gets you excited about what you are about to see. I kept seeing snippets of big client projects like Channel 4 and More 4, which gets me eager to want to know more about these projects came about.
One of the first pieces he showed was the channel 4 music promo. His inspiration came from old drawings he did when he was younger, involving silhouetted people wrapped in neon light tubes. This promotion always gives me a cozy Friday night at home feeling as I remember seeing this for the first time when I stayed in one night and just watched whatever was on TV. Backing up what I have learnt on this course is the important of storyboarding, because working to a budget, it was important to storyboard ideas first to make sure it would work. His storyboards are very detailed, using photoshopped images. Just like Dvein, I like seeing storyboards having this much attention taken to them, they are just as stylistic as the final piece itself. This project proved to me that even as freelance, you can still get big jobs.
The next project he discussed was the promotion campaign for more 4. The idea was based upon simple 3D designs. Keeping things simple is sometimes the most effect design technique. When working on the Rhythm in the city last year, I created a piece that involved a minimalistic 3D city as a visual narrative to my sounds of the city music composition. I knew other people were using film, so I wanted to be more original and scratch city elements down to the simplest of shapes, cubic shapes.
When creating this synaesthesia piece for the self directed project, I again wasn't to keep the visual look of the piece to basic words and colour, with the 3D to give it that extra spice. The main aim is to recreate the visual perception of colour I can experience, which I felt this piece achieves.
In the More 4 promotion, Grant uses the logo as an animation tool to give it a modern, masculine and adult feel. Grant had to through a long process to create different colour pallets for the channel, which the top producers finally decided that the best option was to use different hues of green on top of black. He then had to experiment with different ways of animating the shapes.
The best part of the promotion was creating an advertisement as if it was a porn channel. This was a humorous spin on the channel, and it received lots of complaints, the sign of a good campaign. A promotion that gets complaints means it gets noticed. What I was noticing from Grant is that his work style is to be fresh and innovative, creating new concepts that no one has seen before.
An important quote of Grant's, "use uni time to experiment, in the industry there are too many constraints." This quote had a big impact on me, made me realise that the self directed project and final major projects are such a great opportunity to express yourself in your own way, because the constraints of brief work will begin to tie your hand in the industry.
Grants next job was collaborating with Red Bee to pitch an idea for re-branding the BBC image. Channel 4 was more footloose and creative, whilst the BBC feels like you spend, you spend the tax-payers money. A handy piece of information he told us was how you can use research to search for patterns and identity that we instinctively recognize without realising. His first area of research was to look at past logos and campaigns and all idents, apart from the rhythm and movement idents used circles, which he found became the shape of the channel.
His first idea was to have crowds of people to carry cards, which when they were altogether with cards up in the air, showed the BBC logo, creating a sense of community and, "coming together." This was such an incredible idea, it was such a shame that he couldn't go ahead with it. It was great to see his mock images for the idea. Grant has made me see the importance of Mock Up images as a way of generating a feel for a concept.
I was very inspired by the level of detail and focus he goes into in his work. For example, text isn't just genitally brushed over, font is such an long process for this development. He needed to get the typography for the number of that particular BBC channel to be perfect. I took note of the company called Font Smith as it is what he uses for type work of an important nature. Could be useful for me in the future. The best thing about a channel promotion is that it expands into other areas than just moving image such as posters, bus images and websites. Channel campaign could be a consideration for final major project. If I was to go through the processes that Grant went though for this project, I would have a file of great research on that channel, mock image storyboards, idents and print based promotions for final major project. My main difference would be that it is a 3D element I would want for my campaign.
This BBC project took 10 months, and cost 1.2 million pounds, partly due to this hippo ident that Framestore, the company that creates some of the the graphics in the Harry Potter films, had produced 3D hippos for. (Funny side point that hippos don't swim under water.) This caused newspaper articles criticizing the promotions due to so much of the public money going towards creating the idents.
What Grant didn't discuss was the Big Brother Promotions, which was in his show reel. I'm not a big fan of the show, but still have enjoyed watching the idents, promos and title sequence each year. Big Brother is a summer show, and thinking about it always reminds me of the summer, and that relaxing feeling you get on a summer night when the hot weather of the day begins to cool. The logo doesn't reflect this though, it has a rather shocking and unnerving effect by the sharp red and fractured pieces.
Team work is a big factor in my career decisions after this course. I enjoy working with others, its what makes me enjoy going to work and college, but in the industry, team work is always a good thing. His final discussion was about his worst project to work on, which he said was the BBC. A project with too many people is always going to be a stressful task. BBC was also to cautious about public opinion and restrictive, the best project was More 4 as he had more freedom to work with. This doesn't put me off the idea of working with a team, just makes me aware that there would be complications in certain aspects.
Grants lecture was so informative, and really gave good insight into what to expect in the industry and the breakdown of a good project. As stated at the start of this report, I wanted to learn more about how freelance business works, and I wasn't disappointed. My initial thought that freelancers only get jobs from local business was completely wrong, if you promote yourself the right way, you can end up working on big name projects. It also doesn't mean your solely on your own unlike studio work, in fact it provides a opportunities to work with new teams of people on new projects, which is something I would love to do as I like working with others.
Grant began his presentation with his show reel. What I have noticed is how powerful a show reel is to begin promoting work as Dvein did this also and it had the same effect. It's a good way to start a presentation as you get a feel for what you are about to see and gets you excited about what you are about to see. I kept seeing snippets of big client projects like Channel 4 and More 4, which gets me eager to want to know more about these projects came about.
One of the first pieces he showed was the channel 4 music promo. His inspiration came from old drawings he did when he was younger, involving silhouetted people wrapped in neon light tubes. This promotion always gives me a cozy Friday night at home feeling as I remember seeing this for the first time when I stayed in one night and just watched whatever was on TV. Backing up what I have learnt on this course is the important of storyboarding, because working to a budget, it was important to storyboard ideas first to make sure it would work. His storyboards are very detailed, using photoshopped images. Just like Dvein, I like seeing storyboards having this much attention taken to them, they are just as stylistic as the final piece itself. This project proved to me that even as freelance, you can still get big jobs.
The next project he discussed was the promotion campaign for more 4. The idea was based upon simple 3D designs. Keeping things simple is sometimes the most effect design technique. When working on the Rhythm in the city last year, I created a piece that involved a minimalistic 3D city as a visual narrative to my sounds of the city music composition. I knew other people were using film, so I wanted to be more original and scratch city elements down to the simplest of shapes, cubic shapes.
When creating this synaesthesia piece for the self directed project, I again wasn't to keep the visual look of the piece to basic words and colour, with the 3D to give it that extra spice. The main aim is to recreate the visual perception of colour I can experience, which I felt this piece achieves.
In the More 4 promotion, Grant uses the logo as an animation tool to give it a modern, masculine and adult feel. Grant had to through a long process to create different colour pallets for the channel, which the top producers finally decided that the best option was to use different hues of green on top of black. He then had to experiment with different ways of animating the shapes.
The best part of the promotion was creating an advertisement as if it was a porn channel. This was a humorous spin on the channel, and it received lots of complaints, the sign of a good campaign. A promotion that gets complaints means it gets noticed. What I was noticing from Grant is that his work style is to be fresh and innovative, creating new concepts that no one has seen before.
An important quote of Grant's, "use uni time to experiment, in the industry there are too many constraints." This quote had a big impact on me, made me realise that the self directed project and final major projects are such a great opportunity to express yourself in your own way, because the constraints of brief work will begin to tie your hand in the industry.
Grants next job was collaborating with Red Bee to pitch an idea for re-branding the BBC image. Channel 4 was more footloose and creative, whilst the BBC feels like you spend, you spend the tax-payers money. A handy piece of information he told us was how you can use research to search for patterns and identity that we instinctively recognize without realising. His first area of research was to look at past logos and campaigns and all idents, apart from the rhythm and movement idents used circles, which he found became the shape of the channel.
His first idea was to have crowds of people to carry cards, which when they were altogether with cards up in the air, showed the BBC logo, creating a sense of community and, "coming together." This was such an incredible idea, it was such a shame that he couldn't go ahead with it. It was great to see his mock images for the idea. Grant has made me see the importance of Mock Up images as a way of generating a feel for a concept.
I was very inspired by the level of detail and focus he goes into in his work. For example, text isn't just genitally brushed over, font is such an long process for this development. He needed to get the typography for the number of that particular BBC channel to be perfect. I took note of the company called Font Smith as it is what he uses for type work of an important nature. Could be useful for me in the future. The best thing about a channel promotion is that it expands into other areas than just moving image such as posters, bus images and websites. Channel campaign could be a consideration for final major project. If I was to go through the processes that Grant went though for this project, I would have a file of great research on that channel, mock image storyboards, idents and print based promotions for final major project. My main difference would be that it is a 3D element I would want for my campaign.
This BBC project took 10 months, and cost 1.2 million pounds, partly due to this hippo ident that Framestore, the company that creates some of the the graphics in the Harry Potter films, had produced 3D hippos for. (Funny side point that hippos don't swim under water.) This caused newspaper articles criticizing the promotions due to so much of the public money going towards creating the idents.
What Grant didn't discuss was the Big Brother Promotions, which was in his show reel. I'm not a big fan of the show, but still have enjoyed watching the idents, promos and title sequence each year. Big Brother is a summer show, and thinking about it always reminds me of the summer, and that relaxing feeling you get on a summer night when the hot weather of the day begins to cool. The logo doesn't reflect this though, it has a rather shocking and unnerving effect by the sharp red and fractured pieces.
Team work is a big factor in my career decisions after this course. I enjoy working with others, its what makes me enjoy going to work and college, but in the industry, team work is always a good thing. His final discussion was about his worst project to work on, which he said was the BBC. A project with too many people is always going to be a stressful task. BBC was also to cautious about public opinion and restrictive, the best project was More 4 as he had more freedom to work with. This doesn't put me off the idea of working with a team, just makes me aware that there would be complications in certain aspects.
Grants lecture was so informative, and really gave good insight into what to expect in the industry and the breakdown of a good project. As stated at the start of this report, I wanted to learn more about how freelance business works, and I wasn't disappointed. My initial thought that freelancers only get jobs from local business was completely wrong, if you promote yourself the right way, you can end up working on big name projects. It also doesn't mean your solely on your own unlike studio work, in fact it provides a opportunities to work with new teams of people on new projects, which is something I would love to do as I like working with others.
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