Helping You Realize Your Vision: Graphics

Most likely you or your company has a logo / color / font that you use for all of your print and web materials. Or, if this isn’t your first video, you have a series of rules already set in place for film and video. Whichever the case, we know how important the guidelines are to you, and we would like to follow them as closely as we can. Once we get the branding guidelines in hand, we will have a better understanding of the look and feel your video will have. We will also understand what we can or cannot do with your logo.

After learning your branding guidelines up and down, the Art team will then move forward with a concept of how the graphics will look on screen. These will be just a few composited illustrations in order for you to understand what the “look and feel” of the video may be. For example, if you video is all about ocean freight services, the concept may include shipping crate textures, ropes, water, etc combined with your font and sample text. Once the concept is agreed on, the SolidLine Art team puts together what we call a ‘style sheet.’ What this does is further solidify the concept, putting the awesome new design into action. We give you composites of what your logo will look like, what any header text or listed text will look like in the video, what lower thirds or interview introductions will look like, and what any major animation sequences will look like. We break these down into six frames for you to proudly share with everyone in the office, giving you bragging rights on how great your video is coming along. Here is what the style sheet looks like.

Taking the concept which everyone agreed upon, we will do a test animation first. At this step, you will be able to see for the first time how all of your text, video, pictures, colors, logos, etc. will interact on screen. This stage is the most exciting for the art team, because you finally get to see the full potential of your video. This is the point at which you can say “That’s awesome keep going!” or “That’s terrible! Let’s rethink this.” If the graphics are not to your liking, we can go ahead and do another concept for you. That’s the beauty of this stage in the process. We haven’t really done that much work. It would be a whole other story if we completed the video and then had to go back and change the graphic concept. Yikes!

Here is the phase of your video that the SolidLine Art Department retreats to their dark cave, working through hunger and lack of sunlight in order to provide you with the graphics you need on time. It’s usually during this time that the rest of the SolidLine Media team is out filming the video portion of your video, so the Art Team is actually able to get some work done without those noisy video guys hanging around the office! If everything goes as planned, the graphics are ready to be edited with the rest of the video when they return. Once the rough cut is ready, we will send you a streaming link so you can watch in amazement as your video unfolds for the first time before your eyes. Now, don’t be bashful. This is the rough cut stage, which means there will be graphic mistakes. Most likely I will have misspelled something, but again, if something is not really what you expected, we can go back and figure out how to remedy the situation.