Designing Stride Animation

The Content Creators

The members who make up Stride are; Danni Foley, Rhys Wadmore, Samuel Johnson and Thomas Mayfield. We are coming together to fulfil the criteria of the Narrative and Character brief, one of our first hurdles was incorporating our ideas and designs together and come to choices on both together.

Danni Foley - http://dannifoleycaa.blogspot.co.uk

Rhys Wadmore - http://rwadmore.blogspot.co.uk

Samuel Johnson - http://Samjaycaa.blogspot.co.uk

Thomas Mayfield -http://thomasmayfielducarochester.blogspot.co.uk

The Initial Designs

Danni's Initial Drawing - We began brainstorming a group designation, trying to please everyone  in the group with the overall look of the blog. Danni suggested the idea of 'Stride' and the image of a stag as they fitted together which we all settled on the idea of. We began designing a logo in detail to represent our brand. we came up with the initial design of using a Stag as our logo, we picked up that a geometric look to our designs would be acceptable.

Danni then supplied us with some initial compositions using a geometry technique. Two examples, one with a fill with a dark colour palette and another as a line image. We choose not to apply colour at this point until we were happy with our logo, font and thereafter set up our blog. Once that is chosen we can do some final colour compositions. The font chosen was chose due to its clean appearance and professionalism, Avenir Next (Ultra Light). We experimented with a range of text to incorporate into the logo of the company.

Thomas applied a hatched design to the font to experiment and put the idea forward but we agreed that we should keep our font clean and sharp.

Logo Colour Compositions

Thomas created a range of colour compositions for the logo. Using the four seasons as his focus point he produced themed colour gradients for the design. We came to a subtle agreement that the winter composition gained the best results, so we began using light blues into our designs.

Header Compositions

Rhys elaborated on some header designs that Danni initially verbally suggested. The idea to add a geometric pattern somewhere within the border was to add emphasis to the look of the stag and also to make the banner look a lot more full. Rhys had the idea of placing a tree to the right that represented Yggdrasil the tree of life, the idea of the message being that it is striding toward the best of life. Rhys supplied a few different variations but ultimately we decided the geometric paper patterns in the background wasn't working.

Danni elaborated on her idea of placing a limited amount geometry along with the stag on the banner rather than to cloud the background with geometry. Danni reverted to black and white for this basic first design, once the design is finalised she would then work the colour into the banner and make it look professional, clean and sharp.

Animating the Logo

Thomas took the logo into Maya with the intent of possibly animating the stag into a running cycle. We could then possibly use the small clip at the start of our future animation.