I had already carried out other graphic, multimedia and audiovisual projects for them before. But this one presentation is one I love the most because of the difficulties implied in meeting the final objectives: 1-To show a very brief review of the 160 awarded workers, without it being a boring page after page reading nor a senseless slide show. 2-To make a visually very atractive, creative and unique presentation keeping up the conservative graphic profile the company already has. 3- To make it and program it in a ways that wouldn’t be a nonstop movie but rather a “surfable” application so the announcer of the ceremony could go along with it while speaking by microphone to the audience. 4- From the time the job was assigned to the time the ceremony was going to take place there were only 5 weeks. 5 -The photographs of the people to be shown in the multimedia presentation were going to be provided by my client (we designer's know that's always bad news).
I also encounter an internal problem with my crew of assistants for I had them all busy at the time in other projects. So, I was going to have to do this multimedia presentation all by myself inpite of the lesser time I got left and inspite of the unreasonable amount of work that it meant:
-photographic enhancement of over 480 images;
-motion an visual effects separately for every single one of those 480 images;
-design an animation of the whole interface;
-a 40 second intro 3D animation;
-the rendering of a whole virtual scenery for the intro;
-the animation for the “mascot” of the presentation (the clown) that was going to be always present as if showing the winners;
-the animation of 14 different menus shown as balls floating on the air;
-especial effects of lights, shadows, sparkles, smoke, etc for every single one of those 168 balls;
-the design and motion of over 200 different windows;
-the redrawing and motion effects for 5 different logotypes;
-the editing of all the texts provided by my client and the perfect fit to each one of the winners mentioned on the presentation;
-the sound editing for the soundtrack and sound effects; the programming of each interpolation from one menu to the other;
-the programming of the whole thing so it’d work as my client wanted; and plus, all the visual elements mentioned above had to be syncronized by actionscript.
-And besides all that... I still had to be creative and see how to make it fun for the viewers. I strongly believe I do love my work.
I came out with this idea of having an intro with a little mistic touch: (see first images of this article) the name of the company inscribed on some spheres (the same spheres that were part of some kind of motto of D&S), but all portrayed in a virtual ambience, with lots of depth of field as if relating the spirit of the company to something infinite and sublime, all done by CG. And then the spheres would come closer to the screen and converted into the negative space of the interface so for the presentation of the menus to start.
It was like merging a 3d world into a 2D flat slide that looked more like the graphic design of the books and stationary that D&S usually has (blue & white). I did this because I had to bring the overall image of the presentation to match the conservative graphic profile of the company, and I didn’t really want for the people of the audience to think they were watching something more like a science fiction movie instead of a business presentation. I few seconds of dreamingly 3d ambience at the beginning would do it (see first images of this article).
I also used a blue clown I saw on the printed material that came along with this ceremony and decided to bring him lo life, by making him jump, or do different acrobacies previous to show each menu.
I also thought it was going to be a good idea for the interface not to look too much like a flat design graphic all the time, so I gave certain photographic effects as gaussian blurring, reflactal rays, etc everytime a window would open.
Once it was finished I was quite satisfied with the results। The goal was met. Since i never really got a free रेलेसेद signed by the 168 people awarded (therewas no need to, for this was only presentation done for D&S for internal purposes) I won’t show the parts of the presentation that contained motion images of them. But all of these images shown in this case study correspond to different scenes of the final product.
