foam

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For the way finding project in Amsterdam, I teamed up with Benz and we started off by getting lost until the Foam gallery found us and we found our bearings. As a starting point, the bicycles and trams that attempted to run us over while we stared at our maps and the welcoming and fractured font of the Foam logo became the trigger for visual experiments depicting our section of the city...

Storyboards for a short animation were fueled by coffee and drawn in cafe's. We made quick test animations by layering pages of the storyboards and making them transparent by using candlelight in a dark cafe'. Motion was a very important aspect of the city; everywhere bicycles zoomed past and as we were on foot we were very aware of the constant flow of people on foot and on two or four wheels. In the storyboard designs, the sliced 'a' of the foam logo is featured in the typography that represented each of the street names of our slice of the city; Vijzelstraat, Kerkstraat, Keizersgracht, Reguliersbreestraat and Rembrandtplein. The curve of the red 'a' detaches from the rest of the letters, slides across the screen and parks in the bottom left corner. The letters stack up in the bottom left corner, the next 'a' in the sequence moves behind the first like the parked bicycles seen in the photo above.



The group meeting to discuss our initial ideas was productive as the feedback that we got in response to our rough designs focused on the sounds of the city; the trams, the clicking traffic lights and the bicycle bells that were another quirk of Amsterdam that needed to be included. A small digital camera was used to record the sounds of the city, more storyboards were sketched out and work started on the digital art needed for the animation. Font was altered using Adobe Illustrator and imported into After Effects to be further manipulated. The sliding 'a' letters were placed onto a new layer to become animated wheels.

The animation developed as Benz reacted to the soundtrack and began to improvise, moving away from the storyboards to produce an animation that complimented the sounds of the busy city streets. The animation was done quickly and instinctively and captured the chaos of the city, becoming more textured and chaotic in response to the soundtrack. Collaborating with Benz was a valuable experience as we complimented one another; he responded to sounds of the city and edited to match the rhythm of the soundtrack and I responded to visuals; incorporating the curves of bicycles wheels and street signs and the horizontal lines of the architecture into the storyboard design. The short deadline allowed us to produce a simple animation that was instinctive and reflected our response to the city.

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Digital animation by Benz:




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Benz's blog: http://suttana.wordpress.com/

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Below is my own experiment in quickly producing a digital animation as a response to the Amsterdam way finding project animation. This animation also deviates from my initial storyboards as I responded to the flexibility of the digital medium, allowing the animation to develop naturally. Created using Adobe Illustrator and After Effects.