Animated Commercials for Global Warming

Recycle Now - Food Waste - How it is recycled

This is an animated video about how food waste is recycled by RecycleNow. I think this video is a good animation for me to look at first as it is highly related to the topic I want to cover in my animation and will be a good start to inspire my own animation. I like the drawing style of this animation because it's quite simple and line less using only block colours to distinguish shapes and objects and using no source of light and shadow. The animation looks quite simple with objects only rotating or moving along all in one direction or things easing or fading in and out, It's not as complicated as something such as an animated person which would have individual moving limbs. The style of it also has a hand drawn feel about it because of the way the blue smiley face was animated as if a pencil had drawn out the lines. The colour scheme is very earthy using mostly green, brown and beige and steers away from being too dark as they avoid using harsh shades like black and instead use their darkest colour as a navy blue in places where you would usually imagine black being used. They've also used yellow and different shades of blue which are colours that can be associated with sunshine and clean water, I would assume these colours would symbolise the environment getting better and becoming richer, cleaner and a healthier place to live in. The soundtrack is an instrumental and uses soft sounding instruments and sounds such as acoustic guitar and xylophones and other things.  It sounds very much like a casual background track as it's not upbeat or too slow but just has a steady and comfortable pace. It doesn't have any sound effects but uses a voice over of a man talking and giving information that goes with the animation, his voice sounds like a friendly mid tone male voice with a little enthusiasm and a welsh accent. They also have one on how garden waste is recycled which follows a similar theme and the same soundtrack. The voice over in this one is a slightly deeper sounding male voice with a british accent. It can be found here: http://vimeo.com/15661770

Recycle Now - Plastic Bottles - How are they recycled

This is another animation for Recycle Now about how plastic bottles are recycled and encourages the public to participate in recycling. Unlike the Food waste animation this one is much shorter by almost a whole minute. The art style and simplicity of the animation is pretty much the same and uses the same sound track and british voice actor for the voice over. It's also more to the point about what are the uses of recycling plastic bottles and what other useful things they can be recycled into such as, plastic bags, fencing or more plastic bottles. It also briefly explains how they are recycled, such as separation from other trash, sorted by colour, cleaned, shredded, melted into pellets etc.

Save Our World

The style of this animation looks as if it was a made like a paper animation even though it was digitally made, the textures and colour and the way it was animated make it look as if all the objects were collaged and made out of scrap pieces of paper. This is the kind of style I would like to animate my own animation in with the paper craft kind of look and movement. I think this kind of style is very effective for a topic about being eco friendly and doing activities like recycling because the animation looks as if it was recycled itself from paper, it looks organic and original and as if it was made with hands and not machines. This animation also has a deep male british voice over and sound effects such as birds tweeting, wind blowing, rain falling and crickets chirping at night. They have also used a sound track which sounds like a minimalist instrumental and uses a repetitive tune. They also use researched and factual information in this animation as random facts by having the voice actor say "did you know?-" and they would have him read out a fact which is also displayed as text on the screen. I think this is useful as it's not only delivering a message throughout the animation but also stating the facts about the effects it has now and could have on the world in the future. Some of these facts sound intimidating though the voice actor doesn't speak in an intimidation tone but I think it would have the audience worry about the future and act upon on it. It also encourages to do thing as a family and to get your friends involved too and lists a variety of different activities you can take part in to help such as recycling, reducing waste and changing the amount of things you buy and don't need.

EDP Commercial

This is an animated commercial for EDP by Jessica Walsh. Unlike the previous animated commercials the voice over is a mature female's voice with an american accent and a calm, tone. They also use a soundtrack that has lyrics which is different because the previous animations used instrumental music for the background. Though They haven't made much use of sound effects and I think this is because their background music includes lyrics and having sounds effects would just sound like there's too much going on and could be distracting to the main message being delivered by the voice over. I like the colour scheme and style of this animation as the whole thing is very minimal such as the restricted colour palette being only white, red and some grey and all of the objects in the animation were made only by basic shapes such as circles, squares, triangles, semi circles etc. and they haven't used overly complicated shaped that are created by a hand drawn style and they've kept it simple instead. I think this style works well because it looks clean, crisp and very modern and there is also a strong contrast between the red and white. I think it sends a different message across compared to the other animations because it doesn't talk much about what the audience can do to make a different or the effects global warming is causing, instead they mainly talk about their company and what they do but I don't think it sends across a strong enough message that makes other people want to participate in reducing co2 emissions.

Commercial Links:
http://vimeo.com/14062859#
http://vimeo.com/15661770
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dO6A44co9A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bn8R_XqjjI0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xInCu7099Q