Talis Public Poster

Right, so one of my modules this year will be Graphic Processes.  The first assignment for the module deals with Art & Text, so I decided to look into typography.  The eventual idea was to create a type of futuristic information board for a city called Talis.  The board is essentially more like a mechanical poster with screens and stuff.  Initially, I wanted more graphic elements, so I also had a look at some futurism artwork, seeing that the whole idea is based on a type of technological utopia.  I also had a look at some World War I & II propaganda posters, as utopian ideals can often be enforced through propaganda.  Anyhow, this is what I ended up with:


For 720p & downloads, please head over to Vimeo.

Because it's a portrait poster, a lot of detail is lost in the video, but you can get an idea of how the different text animations work as a whole. For more detail, here's a higher quality still:

Talis Public Poster

The text was created in Photoshop, where I added some effects like stroke for the bottom public section and outer glow for all the sections' text to create an illuminated appearance.  For some reason the outer glow setting for the bottom Japanese & English notification text went haywire, and I couldn't figure out why.  Anyhow, the text was then animated in After Effects.  After the animation phase, I sent a still from After Effects to Maya as reference for modelling a polygon frame.  Once the frame was completed I exported it back into After Effects for the final scan line screen effect and the labels on the frame.

For two of the fonts (Media & labels) I went to Dafont.com for some free fonts, the rest were all based on more specific fonts that I actually wanted to use - some imitations, some original.  The original typefaces are Futura (Health) and Kozuka Gothic Pro (Public Opinion).  The Talis Gov. font is an imitation of New Alphabet by Wim Crouwel (1967) and the Tech&Mech font is based on Carla Bombere Warde's Bombere (1973).

Crouwel's New Alphabet.

Some of the actual messages aren't too clear, but they read:

Talis Gov.:

• Say no to naturalism
• Trust in Talis
• Read your manual

Tech&Mech:

• Update 29.371_#5c//113 released
• The war machine needs your outdated civilmech
• Our soldiers need technicians, our soldiers need you

Public Opinion:

• Japanese: 故障中　このサービスは一時的にご利用いただけません。
• English: Out of order. This service is temporarily out of order.

Regarding the After Effects animation, I used the offset effect for the continuous scrolling for the Talis Gov. and Tech&Mech sections; I adjusted and manually keyframed the opacity settings before adding a loop for the Health section's three ALERTs; the Media area was just good ol' manual keyframing and looping.  The 3D rotation for the Public Opinion section was supposed to be done in Maya, but I had loads of issues with texturing, so I ended up doing it in After Effects by activating the 3D layer option and simply rotating around the Y-axis and hopping between opacity on & off to swith between the two languages.  I'm not too much of an After Effects user, and I plan on mainly using it for compositing eventually, thus whenever I try to do stuff in After Effects I always find myself running to CreativeCOW - it's a brilliant site for all things VFX.  Just wish I can get Maya sorted already.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I'm having a hard time with all things related to Maya texturing at the moment, so I'm spending a bit of time on that now.  I know I'm planning on doing animation, but at the same time I feel that Maya is such an amazing tool, and I should simply push through and learn as much as possible if I'm to become a worthy animated filmmaker one day.  Back on topic, the modelling went alright, and initially I started to texture the frame, but then I discovered mental ray can't render PSD texture files directly - they need to be placed in a PSD node blah-blah-blah.  I haven't touched render nodes & the hypershade all that much and was running out of time, so I decided to simply add a Phong material and render the thing as some super cheesy CG metal frame. Come to think of it now, why the hell did I use Phong and not Blinn? Guess it was late at night or something...

And I guess that's about it for this post.  I'm currently working on my starting project for Visual Arts, which is the initial design of the city I'm trying to create... will have something about that in a week or two.

Small thought for today: when typing public, type public; when typing public, don't type pubic.

nethernode, signing off...