For the final project, I began developing animated samples based off the still design boards I'd created that were reflecting the theme of what I wanted my intro to look like. Taking inspiration from Narcos, True Detective, I wanted to focus on double exposures and intertwining several images on top of each other. My main reasoning behind this was that I feel it conveys more of a story than just a plain image, so I took about researching the best way to do this; I also used free stock videos of smoke, ink and other objects that could be easily overlay-ed using the screen blending mode option. I wanted to use ink and smoke to reference back to the accident, and also to represent that this accident literally took over these peoples lives, as this was only meant to be a few days of repercussion - however they never managed to get back to their own city.
My first sample was taken directly from this design board:
I wanted the map to be the focal point of the double exposure originally, but after finally coming up with what I wanted the purpose of the documentary to be about, I opted to use images from Chernobyl of people, whether they be from new or at the time of the accident. I wanted this to become more of a "emotional" documentary about the lives of these people, and how they were over-run by this incident, as there's plenty of documentary on how the accident came about. I love the way the ink runs over the face of the child in the original sample, however, I also wanted to reflect the "radioactive" side of the incident, so opted for a different colour palette in the second sample.
For one of my first final samples, I changed the ink dripping to smoke, to see what the effect would look like differently and played around more with the colour tone. I chose to go with red, sort of inflicting a "warning" sign and red reflects the danger of the situation these people were in. Out of all samples, this is definitely my favourite one, I added a lot of grain to the footage to make it look as old as possible, and inverted the colours of the girl to give it more of a horror/fear look. Although this is my favourite one, I would definitely slow down the smoke next time as I feel it's too quick for an introduction, and would work on the "Directed by" text to animate it a bit more, which is something I was planning to do for the introduction anyway.
Overall, though, I definitely want to integrate Sample 3 into my work as this is clearly my strongest sample, and works best in my opinion at conveying what I want the accident to - I may play around with different colours and textures, and even go and take textures of my own to give it more of my own look about the work. I'm overall very happy with what I've come up with so far and it's inspired me to create many more samples to put together for my introduction.
