The story of how I created the fan video. Part 1

[Tetravocado 2]

The story of how I created the fan video. Part 1

Hi all, I am a motion designer from Ukraine. (A motion designer is someone who "brings a picture to life"). Three weeks ago I started creating a fan video for Evernote. Evernote is a web service for creating and storing notes.

A couple of years ago I was looking for something like notepad, but with more features in which I could take notes and save screenshots, but without having to look at a panel of 100 buttons as in Word document. I've had experience creating videos before. But the script was prescribed in advance. This time I decided to do entirely my own work. Also for the first time I started to make videos completely in 3D. In addition I set a goal to combine real video with graphics

I started with a total information gathering:
I wrote out all the features I liked;
Polled about fifty people on various websites and social networks to get a complete picture of all the major benefits of the program;
Found a brand book (this is a document that describes what colors you can use for the selected product, what the logo looks like, how to work with it, etc.);
Picked out the music that the copyright allows you to use for free. After cut to the planned length of 20-25 seconds);
Analyzed hundreds of cool fan-videos and advertisements on similar subjects, for inspiration and drawing ideas;
Picked the right videos to integrate the graphics.

I planned to spend a couple of evenings, but it ended up being a whole week of hard work. At the beginning I identified the main points and decided that just show them beautifully, but in fact it turned out that one is not compatible with the other. By the way, the creation of a scene that is 2-3 seconds long can take a whole day's work, and then many hours of rendering (recalculating the computer a beautiful picture). In the end, after many hours of thinking and planning every second was thrown out. Half of the ideas were completely rethought in terms of how to show them visually to the viewer. It all looks something like this: PIC

Next, I put together a rough version of the video, working through all the animations. The most important and difficult trick is seamlessness, that is, the transition from scene to scene should be imperceptible. It is not difficult to animate a scene well, it is difficult that each scene in the sequence was uniform with the overall video sequence, and not knocked out in the perception of the viewer. After such a work you understand why full-length cartoons such as Disney's cost millions of dollars.

For a rough idea. This is what the animation looks like inside any commercial, cartoon or anything that moves on the screen(All graphics were prescribed by hand) PIC

Work with animation is on the primitive copies of objects. Which, after the detailed animation work are replaced by the full-fledged. Now every scene looks like this PIC

At the moment I am working on integrating the graphics into the video. It's different here, depending on the task I will cut different parts of the video and insert them into specially prepared graphics or the graphics will be inserted into the video. Later I will have an even more time consuming stage. The texturing phase. It's kind of like coloring, only times more complicated. This is the magic, which will turn a gray monochrome picture (as in the example above) into a beautiful frame. After that, there will be a very long computer run-through. And after that the final refinement.

Pardon my English.

If you are interested in the process of creating videos then I will be happy to tell you. A little later I plan to write part 2

[gazumped 11,656]

Hi.  You've clearly put a lot of thought and effort into this.  I don't know whether this forum is the right place to show it off though - most users here are actively doing other things - teaching, law, finance, science - using Evernote (as you found) as a handy note-taking device and a natural memory extension.  There are musicians,  and I'm sure there must be film makers,  but I've never seen a previous post about graphics videos. 

If you have a look on YouTube there's a lot of Evernote content there,  including the company's own marketing.  You might find it more useful to post your thoughts and experiences on a web magazine like Medium where you'll certainly get more feedback!

[PinkElephant 8,088]

Looking quite professional, my congratulations for your effort and structured approach. I am keen to learn about part 2 !

[GObuda 0]

Congratulations! Looks great!

[SWSMY 0]

Привіт з України! 👍

[MaryCutler 0]

A very good story so far. But can I help me how can I get back my lost design or templates?

[DTLow 5,736]

44 minutes ago, MaryCutler said:

But can I help me how can I get back my lost design or templates?

Seems like a different topic    
My solution is to recover "lost" info from data backups   
I have personal backups and Evernote has automatic Note History backups

[gazumped 11,656]

2 hours ago, MaryCutler said:

A very good story so far. But can I help me how can I get back my lost design or templates?

...and: Desktop? Mobile? Web? Android / iOS / Mac/ Windows? How did you 'lose' your stuff?

[MaryCutler 0]

3 hours ago, DTLow said:

Seems like a different topic    
My solution is to recover "lost" info from data backups   
I have personal backups and Evernote has automatic Note History backups

Yeah, it's bit off topic. Btw: I have known about Evernote back up. Thanks for your confirmation. Actually, I was looking for suggestion what to do if someone stole your content or templates. I recently read a pdf online  https://masterbundles.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/what-to-do-if-someone-stole-your-content-or-design.pdf from this article I learned what to do and how to get back. 

[gazumped 11,656]

40 minutes ago, MaryCutler said:

I was looking for suggestion what to do if someone stole your content or templates.

Does your query have anything at all to do with Evernote??