Final Vice ident

This is my final Vice ident. The soundtrack is "Harry Roy and his Mayfair Hotel Orchestra - Bugle Call Rag", which I was able to find for free at archive.org.

I'm pleased with how the animation looks, and after wrestling with the sound effects, I feel I struck a good chord with the way they sound and are integrated into the animation. I think that I've been able to paint a humorously ironic picture of the series, given that the title "Rule Britannia" refers to the empiric times, yet the series focuses on the decay of British society today.

I think doing this brief has pushed my skills in animation in terms of working smartly and efficiently. Instead of hand drawing most of it, I discovered Photoshop's simplistic key frame functions which I could use to export image sequences into After Effects for more detailed editing. Most of the animation was made up of single image elements which I moved around with key frames to good effect, such as the backgrounds.

This brief also proved to be quite heavy on sound editing - I found lots of stock sound effects online, but had to edit every one quite significantly in order to get it to sound just right for the animation. I used both Audacity and Adobe Audition to pitch bend, stretch and chop up tiny clips of audio. Little things like extending the cymbal splash at the end of the music by a few milliseconds to end less abruptly made a huge difference.

I've really surprised myself at the skills I've put to use and developed with this brief, definitely learned a lot. Also I feel like my relatively quick turn over for this brief is a sign of improvements to my workflow and professional skills.