My Experience in PROVOKATEUR

 

Hello all.

This is an update of what I’ve been doing recently. I have just finished my placement in PROVOKATEUR started 3 weeks ago helping in an animation project.

I think I was a bit lucky getting this placement. Right after receiving Sarah’s email about this project, I checked their website and quickly went through some information about the studio and came to know this would be a very hand drawing based project. I actually didn’t send them my portfolio I previously did, instead, I gathered some of my recent drawings, sketches, doodles, whatever, and put them together into a pdf with my CV and sent it to Darren Perry, the senior designer in PROVOKATEUR who was in charge of this project. Then the next day I surprisingly received a reply asking me to start in the next week. I guessed part of the reason was that the project has been started and they hope to find someone to draw as soon as possible. Though I was offered the placement, I still asked whether I could come to their studio and have a quick chat and maybe have a look at my portfolio, if they don’t mind. It was quite good, seemed like an interview, and I got some useful suggestions and good feedback from them. Well, anyway here I go! I was so excited getting my first placement!

The project was about creating an animation for Christian Aid’s campaign of fighting malaria in poor countries by asking people to donate 3 pounds for a mosquito net. Darren came up with the idea and storyboard in which he made 30 key frames for the animation. Rosie, the other intern in the studio, and me helped visualizing and developing the whole animation by drawing each single frames in between the key frames. As the animation involves many movements mixing types and images, we used the Illustrator to create the frames first by which we make sure things are going correctly, and after that we printed out then traced them on light box with a scribbling drawing style. It was 12 frames per second for a 30 second animation, so it was massively a lot of pieces of drawings after we finished them all! We scanned them and retouched the images before putting them together by Darren and animator Kieren in Premier and After Effects. As the drawings were very scribbling, some parts of the animation didn’t go very smoothly and we needed to redo some of the frames. However it was very fun seeing those scribbling drawings become an animation.

After all, the outcome of the animation was surprisingly good! They are all pleased with the work, and so does the client. And I just can’t wait Christian Aid putting it up on their website.

During the time of the placement I was also asked to think about some ideas for a booklet design. Though at the end the client was just looking for something very basic and didn’t use my idea, I learned how to write print spec. That is about illustrating your designs, writing size, materials, colors, print finishing etc to the printer for price quote and print production.

So basically that’s all! It was really a great experience working in PROVOKATEUR. They call themselves an ethical communication studio. They are brilliant people doing great works. And especially I like one of the typographic designs hang on the wall: Work Hard and Be Nice to People. I think probably that is what best describes them?

Evan.