check storyboard

[Tracy981]

here is storyboard, its for an intro into a website, all in AE (granted this is a flash forum, u guys know design)

http://www.avidgraphics.net/storyboard.jpg

-first 4 panels, the light flickers (with sound) and fades in/out according to flicker and shows the grafitti on wall.
-wall image then breaks (like shatter glass)
-random images of the kid appears (color,b/w,etc) pics of him, neighborhood, etc
-all images form a mosaic
http://www.ayatoweb.com/ae_tips_e/ae50_e.html#
and form the 3rd left image (hence all these random images make this kid up)
-then the image burns using this effect
http://www.creativecow.net/articles/.../fire/burn.mov
-black screen and his name appears with a light/smoke effect
http://www.trapcode.com/movies/smoke.mov

this is all about 40-50 secs to a line to his song. its an intro into his website. wut do u think, does it make sense?

thanks Tracy

[mandissected]

Sounds really good but very long for an intro, you might end up losing visitors. Might be better playing once you have the viewers in the site.

[Tracy981]

yeah i agree but the length of this certain line is about 40secs so i have to create something that will be entertaining for that period of time.thanks for the feedback

anyone else??

[Tordeck]

Hummm.... It seems very disjointed. In a whole opinion I didn't like your style of it. I dont know.. maby its just me.

[Tracy981]

haha im sorry but that post made me laugh... u dont like my style?? wut is my style and what about the project that u dont like?? can u be more descriptive please....

[RUSHVision]

Tordeck - it's just you, dude. Nothing wrong with her style.

T-Girl ~
All I can comment on is what I perceive the final result to be, but everything looks great so far. Personally I'm seeing a story being told of a rapper's rise to 'power' through the fires of adversity, if you will. It's raw, edgy and hip if you ask me. I find the style to be well suited to the subject matter.

What you are going to be able to do about it is going to depend heavily on the preference of your client, but I tend to agree about a 40-second intro being a bit on the large side. I would think something that long would even be bit hefty for those of us on broadband. Is there any way to convince him to start up the 'intro' after you've loaded the site? One thing you could do is to call it a promo spot or something like that instead of an intro, which carries the implication that it should be presented at the beginning.

I would think it makes more sense to get people into the site then start entertaining them rather than making them wait through the loading and playing of an intro that they might not want to see. This way visitors get the satisfaction of immediate access to the site and the site itself becomes more lively instead of all the cool stuff happening only in the intro. You could think about making the display area for the intro a permanent part of the layout so once it's done playing you could use it to display other things like video clips, ads for his latest CD, whatever. Just some thoughts.

[Tracy981]

hey ther u guys were right about the length, i talked him into cutting the song down...so now im about 20 secs insteadof 50 i have a rough draft QT, tell me wut u think...Rush wut do u think of it so far? there are alignment and tweacking issues especialy with the song but u more or less get the idea of it...


hopefully this downloads right

file does contain explicit lyrics so fair warning

http://www.avidgraphics.net/whole_1.mov.zip

few questions....

the images that i use, do u guys think i need something more, like adding text to it or something. for some reason it looks plain to me, or maybe b/c ive been staring at it for so long what do u guys think??

[RUSHVision]

Ok, so let's get the most obvious thing out of the way first. Brace yourself...this thing is way too huge file size-wise to be used as an intro in my opinion. To ask people to wait for 9MB before they even enter the site is a bit above and beyond the call if you know what I mean.

I think I know what you are dealing with. This guy is a musician so he naturally wants music to be a part of the site. I'm sure he also wants his site to clock in at a ten-point-oh on the coolness scale. I'm just not convinced though, that an intro is the place to stick a 9MB bottleneck. Seriously, I would do something completely different and much smaller for an actual intro to the site then have this thing load up in the background once you actually get into the site. But like I said, I know you're working with what the client wants so if he really wants a 9MB intro then by all means give it to him. Ok, I've said my piece about that.

As for the piece itself, I do have a suggestion or two. I had started writing out these suggestions when I decided to just import your movie into Flash and show you what I meant. You can find it here.

A couple of things are 'bothering' me about what you have going on currently. One is that I think the transition between the image with the light and the epik logo and the flames needs a little something. Right now it seems that these two elements are somewhat disconnected. I added an orange glow sort of thing that, I think anyway, serves to tie them together a little better.

The rest of the sequence does seem to be a bit lacking in 'life' and 'pop', if you will. I added a few simple graphic elements in an effort to 'highlight' certain events and give the piece a little more impact. The first is just a white frame that 'whacks' in with that first drum beat. Later other elements pop in like the silhouette of epik and that post. Ideally you want these to match the drum beats, but I couldn't scrub the sound on the timeline in Flash while I was doing this so I just got them kinda close. You've already got that flickering going on so these elements just take that a step further, giving the piece a little more edge.

Something you could do to cut down on the file size is to crank down the quality of the .jpg output in the Publish Settings. All of these images are pretty small and they're not really being displayed long enough for them to need to be very high quality. By setting the quality down to 30% was just a little over 4MB. Still huge in my opinion for an intro, but better than 9MB.

[Tracy981]

hey rush, thanks for the feedback. sorry it took me so long to get back to you. i did talk him into cutting the song down. now the song is only 24 sec total. now im having a huge HUGE problem that i cant seem to figure out. when i import in Flash MX 2004 and set the bandwidth high, effects like u did, jpg quality, low, the quicktime is so pixelated, all i see are huge HUGE squares. so i tried every combo and still the same thing. and the swf is about 12mb and then i tried importing in Flash MX, added the effects like u did and now i get 12-13mb.

i tried importing in both Flash MX & 2004 with sep video and sept audio. audio is only maybe 192kb in mp3 format and i even compressed that even more but i still get 12mb+ . i took the AE file and brought it in Quicktime pro to compress, used soresen3, med/low quality and i even tried using the original rendering from AE with low settings

im so lost and confused b/c i tried every combo
and i still get a HUGE HUGE swf

any idea on wut im doing wrong or how to fix this?

[RUSHVision]

Hmm...well, for one thing I'm using FlashMX, not MX2004. I would suggest doing what I did, which was to import the published .SWF back into Flash and then publish again. I did it because I had to, not having access to all the source files, but now that I think about it, it would seem that this process ends up compressing the file in a different way than when you first publish it. If my thinking is correct then the first publishing is using specific video compression techniques while the second publishing is compressing what ends up being converted bitmaps for each frame.

So I would give that a shot...re-importing...and it was in the Publish Settings (Shift+F12) on the Flash tab that I set the jpeg quality to 30.

[Tracy981]

hey rush, im gonna try wut u said but i was able to redo all the effects that i did in flash in AE so instead of importing in flash, i did them in AE. check it out....i added sound and the qualities u suggested on adding...

http://www.avidgraphics.net/whole_2.mov.zip

this file is only 5mb as a whole, sound, pics, effects..... is that a reasonable size for a qt movie over the net?? and also, would it be best to offer the viewing of the qt on the splash page ( so i would have a enter button and a sep see intro button OR just have the intro automatically lead into the site and then give the option of a skip??

[Tracy981]

well, i actually fixed it i researched streaming and was able to stream the video, i had to convert it to a FLV file. check it out... http://www.epik.com/emovie.swf

what do u think Rush? i was able to compress but still have good quality but streaming!!

[RUSHVision]

I'd say this is almost there. Lol...I know, you're probably sick of watching and listening to that thing, aren't you?

Let me say first that my theory about importing the movie into Flash again and using the jpeg quality setting in the publish settings was incorrect. It seems all the compression happens upon import.
________________________________

Everything looks good, but I think the timing of the accent elements could use some adjusting. For one thing, it looks like the timing of the images in relation to the music is different on this one. A result of the shorter time span I assume.

I think the flickering effect that is going on at the beginning is a nice compliment to the music at that point. The music is going kind of slow and the timing of the flickering background works at this point. If you have the while elements popping in here it doesn't really seem to connect to the music. I would say have the first one of those appear in time with the very first drum beat.

Ok, I would actually have two of them there, but first let me digress a little bit and talk about the white elements in general. I think you should use two different opacities...one that is tied to the sharper snap of that snare drum being whacked and one that is tied to the softer base thump. I would make the snare shapes almost fully opaque white and use a more transparent version of the same to compliment the base thump. This will create a softer visual effect to accompany the lower tone and place more emphasis on the sharper one.

So where I would have the white elements pop in is at the point where he starts talking for the third time. He says something I can't quite make out then 'steel city's finest'...then it cuts to that picture looking at him from below and he says 'yo' and the first drum beat kicks in. On the 'yo' I would have the white accent at the 'base beat' transparency and then use the 'snare beat' transparency on the silhouette to coincide with the drum beat that immediately follows.

So in general I would keep the energy of the visuals low at the beginning to match the music then only have the those white bits start popping in when the beats pick up...and when they do, I would make sure they coincide closely with the actual drum beats.
________________________________

As for the file size and placement, that's a tough one. People on dialup will probably never see it unless they are very patient by nature or have a specific interest in viewing the clip. I can't remember exactly how long it took to download 5MB when I was on dialup, but I know that I had to want it pretty bad to wait for something of that size to load. Now that I'm on broadband 5MB is not nearly the mountainous download that it used to be, but I wouldn't yet call it negligible, either.

All things considered, I would probably opt to just have it start playing automatically with an option to skip. This way the default action is for it to be shown which will make the client happy and those who don't want to wait can choose to enter the site directly.

[RUSHVision]

Looks like you posted while I was writing the above response.

I like the streaming. I was wondering if you could get it to do that, but I haven't done much video work and like I said I don't have MX2004 so I'm not really up on the .FLV format.

Yes, the streaming rocks, but I thought I would let you know that even on my broadband connection it still hung for a few seconds right at the 'steel city's finest' part. Not a big deal and quite acceptable, I just thought I would let you know.

So I would still recommend what I suggested above, but it looks like this puppy is just about ready to be packed up and shipped out the door. Nice work, T-Girl!

[Tracy981]

hehe thanks Rush. you made excellent points and i do agree with u on all of it and the fact that im sick of lookin at it but since this is being done for FREE, i dont think i have motivation to do anymore right now, but i will probably do the all the stuff u suggested for my own portfolio piece but now im taking a break.

guess what?... i got a job im growing up. im gonna be working at a studio that makes websites for car dealerships across the country. their website is called www.bzproductions.com what do u think? u think i'll make it? if not u can tell me

[RUSHVision]

Man, if you are doing it for free then by all means call it done.

That's great news about your new job, T-Girl! And no, I don't think you'll have any problem fitting in there. From what I can see they are lucky to have someone of your skill and ability. They are probably getting you for a steal right now, too. I'd say this is a great place for you to gain experience. Good luck with this new endeavor!

[Tracy981]

thanks Rush, thanks for all the help and crits, talk with you soon

[RUSHVision]

Always a pleasure, T-Girl!