Practical Investigation: Photoshop Trial

Practical Investigation to look into creating an animation for our production company using Adobe Photoshop:

To create the logo and then the animation, I used Adobe Photoshop CS6, it was very confusing at first and took me ages to work out but thanks to some useful tutorials, I managed to get the hang of it and actually quite enjoyed it.

This website basically told me how to make the original logo, using all of the tools available.

http://www.rocktheshotforum.com/2012/07/20/how-to-design-a-logo-in-adobe-photoshop/

This YouTube tutorial was also extremely helpful when learning how to turn it into an actual animation, even if I had a few problems following the different layout.



As this was my first go, I wanted it to be as simple as possible so I could get the hang of it and then hopefully I can gradually make it more and more complex as I learn my way around the program. The end result isn't as good as the real thing will be but it has given me an idea of how to make it successfully.

Logo:

I started off by making the background by choosing the gradient option with the colours red and black, I decided to make it diagonal so I could put the text in with different colours.
I then inserted the words 'KILLS' and 'PRODUCTIONS', choosing the 'Chiller' font as I felt it was quite creepy and would fit our genre well. I made the 'KILLS' slightly bigger and also put it in red, with the connotation of blood., so it would stand out against the black.

I ended up with the image below as the final result for my practise logo. I can already see how I can improve on this, making the background more interesting for example and maybe changing something with the words themselves.

Animation:

After watching the video above and attempting to dive straight in making it as interesting as possible before realising how difficult it would be, I decided to start off by simply moving the word 'KILLS' along to the right, even this in itself was quite confusing for me with no previous experience. 

First I had to duplicate the frame, making sure the timing setting was on no delay (0 sec.), I then moved the text box along to the right, trying to keep it in line with where it was before. 

I then had to add a 'tween' motion between the two selected layers, I decided to add 40 frames in the hope that it would be quite fast. 

As you can see from below it didn't really turn out that well, the movement was quite jumpy meaning I need to add more frames to make it more smoother.

I change the amount of frames in between the two layers to 100 to hopefully improve the speed and flow of the text. I also changed the end position so it looked more impressive, but as I'm moving the end destination further away I should have taken that into consideration when choosing the amount of frames to include. However I feel this isn't disastrous for a first attempt and I feel like I should be able to make it much better with time and practise.