Narrative Graphics Attempts

Narrative graphics are the black screen's usually accompanied by text which are shown throughout a trailer in order to enhance the storyline and allow the narrative to become clearer. Such examples of this come from Redemption, previously named Hummingbird, stating "Time to heal" and "A second chance" on two separate occasions. In conjunction with the shots shown, this tells us where the narrative is going and the tone of the film. By using relatively passive narrative graphics, instead of something along the lines of "Know your enemy" from Welcome to the Punch, one can infer that the tone will take a more emotionally based setting and there will be a lot more focus on the character and his relationships. Some examples of possible narrative graphics are shown below, which were made in one double period by yours truly.

The use of smoke in both narrative graphics board was inspired, once again, by Welcome to The Punch. The white and grey blocks in the background show that the middle is transparent, leaving us to find a moving motion picture or video, either shot by us or taken from a  non copyright website. The different colours, red and light blue, are the most prominent colours in our film and bear connotations of danger, desire and high budget films. Although not finalised, the textual content of the graphics comes from the idea of both the police and the underground gangs chasing our main character.

We found that the idea of having passive, still smoke on the narrative graphics looked too amateur however and as such changed it to show more technical ability. Using Motion, we created overlays, one of which utilised the using the effects "Embryo" with other effects such as blurs, and then animated to have it moving across the screen. Incidentally this overlay was also used in our ident due to how well it turned out. An example with the overlay on a black background can be shown below, as well as the motion settings which were used.

The Example:

The two above narrative graphics are shown below without added effects from motion and how they were composed using Sony Vegas 12. This was done through using the effects Motion Blur, Wave and Colour Correction underneath a black rectangle with the text cut out which was done in Photoshop (The second graphic down comes first)

Our final narrative graphic comes from inspiration found in Hummingbird. Although not exactly a narrative graphic as it does not extent the story, as such, introducing previous films which the directors have made is an essential part in raising awareness of the trailer. Because of this we created a background on Photoshop, made up of various layers of non-copyrighted images and including a picture of a sunset I took while in Greece. This was then overlayed with "From the Director's of" and either "Existence" or "The Shadow Man" depending on which shot it was going to be for. These were then assembled on Sony Vegas, again utilizing the Wave and Glow Video Effects to produce this graphic.

JL