I was approached by co_ed studios to create a graphics package for the upcoming NBC special on Time's Person of the Year awards.
The visual concept was inspired by William Klein's Painted Contact Sheet series, where Klein paints over beautiful photos on cells with thick, saturated brushes. In order to bring this concept to life I researched the process and tools involved in creating and using contact sheets.
Contact sheets are generally used to pre-develop a set of film or negatives in order to sort through what photos will be enlarged, and which ones discarded. This results in a print with multiple negatives where the photographer can get a sense better sense of what photos he wants to work with:
A couple elements stood out in the process of creating these contact sheets like the use of loupes to magnify the small negatives or markers to cross out unwanted photos and circle photos to be enlarged.
I brought together these elements and created a few key frames that would later help build the usual elements of the graphics package (lower thirds, titles, frames) as well as the opening animation.
I used blurring and camera focusing to play with depth and scale when animating these. Here goes the opening to the piece!
