Milk Still Matters

*N.B.* This blog has been wrote as a rough note of my thoughts.

I remember last year (I will add the link asap) writing about a stop motion Cravendale milk advert that caught my attention

Cravendale have done it again



The most striking elements of this advert are there brilliant sound design, and the simplistic approach of the animation

I watched this advert for a second time with out any sound, and discovered that it is actually the sound that it telling the story (try watching the advert with out any sound. It does not flow and makes little sense.)

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Being interested in social media I furthered my investigation in to this advert by doing an immediate search on YouTube

I quickly found that the channels "MilkMatters", "CravenDale" and "CravenDaleMilk" were all ready being used by people who appeared not to be from the official Cravendale milk company

It would appear that the Official YouTube Channel for Cravendale milk is http://www.youtube.com/cravendaleUK All though for the casual Internet user it may not be apparent that this is their Official YouTube Channel

If I was doing some consultancy work with Cravendale I would advise them their channel needs to have some of their branding on it so people are easily able to instantly recognize it belongs to them

I have been teaching myself to make YouTube backgrounds in Photoshop so I will possible try to mock a Cravendale YouTube background to demonstrate this.

They should also use their YouTube channel to drive traffic to all the other places that they exist on the web. Providing links in their YouTube profile would be the most simple way to do this.

I notice in this video they have provided a link in the description to drive traffic to a related game on their website

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To further my ideas on using social media to promote Cravendale milk if you have read my blog recently you will know I am using DailyBooth I would recommend CravenDale to start using DailyBooth, posting a picture of a milk based drink or product each day. The blub under the picture would be the recipe for the drink or product. They could then encourage people to post a picture comment after they have followed the recipe

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Animation Development

I not have the roughly lip-synced version of my Animation for the Feel Good Breif



It still needs tidying up a little and the lip syncing still needs some attention but I just wanted to put this online as I like how the fruit characters have developed since I last posted.


Evaluation

Just to evaluate a little bit, one problem I found when lip syncing was the my untrained audio actors dropped certain letters and did not fully pronounce of annunciate words. This lead to some trouble making the animation look as convincing as possible e.g the word "can't" the letter T is not pronounced harsh enough and the word "round" the letter D is pronounced too soft.

In future projects where the spoken word plays such an important role I will pay more attention to the pronunciation. A draft audio will be recorded first. I will listen back to it and see where the actors are dropping letters or not prounouncing things in a way that will let me animate to what they are saying. By creating a rough audio draft and analysing it before going on to create a finial piece it should allow me to achieve a more realistic degree of animation

Animations

My animation brief is now finished below are two simple animations i created while undertaking the brief






I feel i have really benefited from learning how to model and animate in Maya. In my own time I am hoping i will have chance to go on and improve myself as a 3d designer and animator.

Animation Storyboard

This is the storyboard for the animation I am creating

Milk Matters?

Everyone loves an advert that gets them talking. At the weekend i saw this

I have no idea how this communicates to people that Cravendale milk is superior to other milk and that therefore they should buy it, in fact i have no idea what it is trying to communicate at all, other than "Cravendale isn't just any milk its filtered to make it purer" but i already knew that!

All though i don't think the communication of the advert is clear, i really like the "wackiness" the piece and i think the stop motion animation some how compliments this very well, and it is the sound effects that have been added to the video that make the animation believable.