So BBC wants to celebrate it's 75th anniversary and is asking from Westminster students to take the lead and make a TV advert that is targeting young, fresh audience, using absolutely anything including their knowledge and creativity.
I've been quite interested in the project as it is a challenge for me to make a 50 sec promotional advert, that would both show my skills around promotional illustration and my knowledge around the moving image.
What makes the project quite complicated is the fact that we've been asked to show the history of BBC without creating a documentary video; Meaning old, plain, black and white videos of unfamiliar events and faces that have absolutely no influence to the young audience whatsoever.
So my first thought, is make a plan of the history; I've researched and picked up the most highlighted moments of BBC from it's very beginning until the 20th century and this is what I came up with.
I've been looking at different ways of making animation but I always find myself particularly drawn to the 'stop motion' technique. Many adverts that use stop motion for promotional reasons seem to be very successful and in particular seem to attract younger audience.
Some of the recent stop motion adverts/ experimental videos that I've been looking at.
http://www.smashingapps.com/2009/06/15/21-stunning-examples-of-creatively-done-stop-motion-animations.html
This website is full of the most amazing and clever stop motion techniques that don't really require any high tech knowledge.
In William Kentridge "Compassions, he seems to be using a quite interesting technique for referring to the 'past' using black and white audiovisual videos put together in a strange circular way. Always worth considering.
looking back at some of the 'masters of stop motion', The Quay Brothers and Jan Svankmajer seem to have different but equally appealing techniques, either using delicate paper figures or detailed plasticine personas. I love how truthful those stories look and what great effect they have on audience.
Looking at some of the modern stop motion techniques, you can tell there is a lot of creativity floating around and it is a fact that you can do stop motion by using almost anything.
MTV in the 80's used a lot of animation that revolved around powerful imagery and revolutionary music. Some of the 80's adverts are using great stop motion techniques without much digital touches, making them look more real and fun to watch.
Movies like the 'Science of Sleep' are combining both film and stop motion animation, travelling through realities and dreams; They manage to capture the essence of dream world by using paper and plastic props, puppets and pretty much any lifeless object.
Two of my favourite animations are from a band called 'Future Sound of London" and by a guy called Andreas Hykade. Both of the animations use different techniques but both play with sound and movement, something I found quite revolutionary and interesting.
In the first film there's a serious amount of Collage, Green Screen techniques, PHOTOSHOP and all of the 80's traditional techniques of cutting and putting together in a rather naive way. Some of the figures I find very interesting as they walk around with different faces and body parts. It has a certain revolution and craziness about it, something that we don't see on video clips anymore.
In the second video, Andreas Hykade is using FLASH at it's best with some crazy animation figures that almost put you in a trance state.
Considering the animation part I thought I make some drawings of various 'BBC people' including John Reith founding father of BBC, broadcasters, royal and celebrity guests, documentary presenters etc
