Lucky Token Productions

Hello again!  In a previous blog post, back when the project had just been assigned, I mentioned that I wanted to include a production company logo at the beginning of my film.  I found this to be a good way to engage the audience before any of the footage is even shown, and I also believed that it would give it a more professional feel.

Now, having yet to film my footage and feeling the need to catch up in other ways, I believed that this was a good time to get started on this.  When looking at the logos of some well-established production companies, I noticed that many of them had simple black-and-white designs.  I liked the simplicity of it, and I also considered how much easier this would be when compared to a fully rendered animation.  With this in mind, I got to work. 

Almost immediately, I came up with the name "Lucky Token Productions."  I wanted to incorporate some sort of animation into it, as I thought it would be an added touch of creativity as well as an effective method of drawing in the audience's attention.  My mind immediately went to a spinning coin, and subsequently, the name "Lucky Token" was born.  Now having a pretty broad idea of what I wanted, I opened Adobe Illustrator and messed around with different fonts.  

Visually, I thought that these five were the most appealing.  I chose bold, blockier fonts that had straight lines because they had a stronger, more dominant feel to them.  For a production company, I thought that it was fitting.  I ended up selecting Franklin Gothic for the final product.

With that done, I moved on to the animation.  First, I needed to come up with a design for the coin.  Again using Illustrator, I played around with the shape and text tools to create a cool sort of eye token.  Next, I painstakingly spent the following hour and a half rendering the coin from every view-point until I was left with 16 drawings that together made a spinning token.

Afterward, I spent the following hour and a half after that arranging all the coins in place and saving 16 different .pdf images (one for each frame).  It was tedious work, worsened only by the fact that when it came time to upload them into Premiere, I realized that the app doesn't accept 

.pdf images...  

Still, it was an easy enough fix, and I went back and saved every image as an Illustrator (.ai) file instead.  Now having uploaded this new batch of images into the editing software, I got to work on arranging them in order and cutting down the time they were on-screen to mere milliseconds.  This quick, short progression is what gives the illusion of movement.  However, I kept the clips kinda long as a stylistic choice.  While editing this all, I realized that the background looked much grayer than it did when I was editing it on Illustrator.  It did strike me as weird, but not enough to be suspicious.  Looking back, I should have realized that my computer was against me from the start... 

When I exported the final project and sent it to my phone to watch from a different device, I noticed that not only was the gray background not a visual illusion, but also that the quality was horrible.  To replace the odd-colored background with the original black one, I had to go back to Illustrator and save the 16 images again, this time as a .eps file.  Then, I went back to Premiere and re-edited everything using the new photos.  

Finally, after about 3 hours of work, I was left with this 2.13-second clip that everyone will likely forget about immediately after seeing it!  Regardless, it's a small personal victory for me.  I can't help but admire my perseverance (or is it stubbornness?) and attention to detail.  Hopefully, it wasn't all in vain... Anyways, here she is!  Presented to you in all her 2.13-second glory.  Enjoy.