marketing, web development, graphic design blog

By Danny Piercy

Last week we were approached by personal injury solicitors Lamb & Co based in Wirral. The company commissioned us to produce a piece of animation, showing their support for Liverpool FC in the Carling Cup. The animated piece is to be displayed on the Liverpool Media Wall located right opposite Liverpool Lime Street train station – meaning thousands of people will feast their eyes upon it each day. The Liverpool Media Wall is Europe’s largest commercial LED screen, measuring a mohassive 30 meters wide and 7 meters tall (almost as big as the TV in my lounge).

Lamb & Co came to us on a Thursday and they needed the project to be completed for Friday, to go  live the following Monday. This meant us having to shuffle around some of our other projects to make sure we had the time to finish this, whilst making sure we didn’t fall behind with any of our other work.

The majority of the work was done in Adobe After Effects, producing the animation and laying out the advert. The first thing I noticed when starting this project was the insane resolution of the screen, it was super wiiiiiiide screen. This meant that the layout couldn’t follow the conventional style used on TV, Web and Print. The advert was to last 10 seconds, too; whilst this doesn’t sound like a lot, 10 seconds of animation can take a while to do, as the animation has to be done frame by frame – if you take into consideration there are 25 frames per second in the average video, that’s a lot of animation!

There was quite a lot to fit into the 10 seconds, so I had to be careful with how I animated it, paying close attention to the complexity and timing. Obviously with this work being displayed on the big screen, people won’t be up close to it and will probably be looking at it is they’re walking by. Therefore complex and intricate animating wasn’t justified on this project as it wouldn’t be clear and could potentially look messy. At the same time I also had to make sure that it was engaging and would grab people’s attention and hold it for the duration of the advert.

The advert had stationary information on the right hand side that would display the contact information and relevant company information. The left side of the advert was where all the action takes place. As the ‘Lamb & Co’ logo is a sheep, the main animation involved a team of red sheep (obviously Liverpool, duh!) passing the ball to each other and then scoring a goal. At which point the crowd cheer ‘raising the baaaa for all things personal injury’. See what we did there… get it? They’re sheep, they say baaa, that thing along the top of the goal is also the baaaaar… it’s a pun. Funny, eh?

The animation will be on a loop amongst other adverts from companies such as Blackberry, Sky and Stella Artois and will get a total of 1,440 plays a day, that’s 10,080 plays in the week. Our work will  be up from 20^th February until the 26^th February 2012. Don’t hang aBAAAAAAt, go check it out!

Expect pictures and video in the next few days!

Tags: After Effects, Lime Street, Lverpool Media Wall, motion graphics

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2012 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Graphic Design, Video Production. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.