Motion Design in Advertisements.

Throughout this personal development it has become clear that a section of the design industry that particularly appealed to me would be the area of creative advertisement. After previous studies of Creative Media Production at A Level, I had to hypothetically plan the course of advertisements and plot the finances and features that the set up would have to involve. The course of this design and development has further supported this idea that I wanted to further explore.
 I'd love to in future be part of a creative marketing scheme, in which I helped to design and develop an idea for a business and creatively output it with the skills I have collected through this course and other previous courses. The motion design aspect is in particular an additional element that would be successfully received if technical skills could develop to match creative ideas.
I personally love how animated elements within advertising can have any desired effect, with simple ideas being creatively involved into more complex and interactive ones. I love the effect and memorability particular adverts have because of this. Such adverts like this from 'Satsuma Loans' involves an aspect of comedy which gets the point across in a memorable way, and I've always found how inspiring such a concept has been over the years.An extremely memorable advert for me is the scheme of alternate bizarre circumstances representing something unrelated, a particular favourite with this scheme is Cadbury's chocolate advertisement. Cadbury began an advertising scheme years ago that would involve breaking away from traditional chocolate advertisements, and instead producing very abstract and odd forms of commercial advertising. A personal favourite of mine being the eyebrow Cadbury's advertisement, this involved two children sat about to have a school photograph taken, when music appears, and their eyebrows begin to move rather individually and abstractly to realistic movements. The girl wears a purple pinafore, slightly hinting to the Cadbury's trademark colour of purple, yet there are no chocolate bars featured throughout the entire advert.

Cadbury's advert received a mixed response, with viewers questioning throughout what the advert was for, and why they chose such an advertising campaign. For me, I found this campaign an extremely influential and memorable one, with everyone soon recognising and talking about the advertisement and recommending their peers viewing it. It was a breakthrough in terms of advertisements, with the company avoiding the product being included in the advertisement, and yet everyone began to recognise exactly which company it represented.
The chocolate bar only ever appears as a reveal at the end of the advertisement which I feel is a beautiful ending as it built up the tension beforehand to the product being named.

Again with the Cadbury's advert Motion Design (although now mixed with filmed footage) there was an aspect of comedy throughout, with such a random theme within the advertisement being shown, Cadbury's continued the campaign with similar advertisements, which alternatively was as deeply memorable as the first.

The aspect of purple is also and important use of colour for the advertising referencing. Purple is often recognised as the correct colour for Cadbury's with a lot of people being reminded of the chocolate when they come across the deep purple colour.

On the other hand, I find that adverts such as the EDF adverts, which also include an aspect of Motion Design, use simplistic stop motion elements to produce a theme of comedy and fun, additionally being a memorable form of advertising. Stop motion paired up with the song "Together in Electric Dreams" produces a comedic source of advertising. The character of a little blob that dances along to alternate forms of electricity is a memorable form of advertising and is used to develop the company's energy policies. The character included involves a cute theme, everyone I've seen view the advert sees the character as a cute character, in the way it looks and moves, and yet the animators have stripped away features such as not having a mouth, but still with an effective impact on the viewer who supplies their own emotion around the character.

The character named by EDF Energy as 'Zingy' is a cute little orange blob type character, which is produced with a mixed range of animation and real time filmed footage.

Additionally, a factor of advertising is used in relating objects everyday to animals such as a flock of birds. The advertising production team of the Ikea advert analysed the behaviour of birds in a flock in order to link such everyday objects like clothing to imitate their behavioural patterns and make them learn more of how such everyday objects would relate to such things as animals and their behavioural patterns.
Analysing the animals that they needed to be related to is an important part of the concept research that would have been involved in the production of the advertisement, such as Pixar when creating 'Finding Nemo' had a full exotic fish tank placed in the studio in order to implicate further research on how the animals behaved with each other, and how such surroundings interacted with the characters. Such research that allowed further evolution into the production, a similar process applied to this advertisement for Ikea.
The Director of this advertisement Dougal Wilson who is regarded as one of the top commercial producers, begins to explain the process of the advertisement for the YCN (You Can Now) Articles.

Interviewer: What process do you go through to turn an idea like this one into a polished ad?
Dougal Wilson:"Well the original idea isn’t mine — that obviously comes from the agency creative team — but I can elaborate on the basic thought. In this case, I just took the idea of a flock of flying T-shirts being like migratory birds who constantly have to move on. I plotted out a story, using all the reasons we could think of as to why they couldn’t stay where they landed. In the first location, it’s too cold, then they get shot at by a river, then they have to get out of the way of a big ferry, then they get chased by a child, then a dog, before finally finding a house with a nice wardrobe. This journey takes the viewer from a cold, remote place, eventually arriving in a built-up, inhabited environment. A lot of the inspiration came from wildlife documentaries. There's some amazing footage of geese that had been 'imprinted' since birth to follow a handler, and then trained to fly alongside a microlight aircraft, enabling them to be filmed very close up — as in the movie 'Winged Migration' for example. I thought it would be fun to contrast this kind of epic tone with our very mundane participants: the everyday T-shirts."

An additional favourite for the aspect of advertising, is the Ikea advert with the tagline 'There's No Bed Like Home' which elaborates on the cosy and appealing side of Ikea furniture and what would be included in their alternate products and how these things could be further displayed in their customer's minds. Again, the audience's attention is additionally transformed through the underlying aspect of humour in the advert.