Video Creation: Russian Dolls

In this segment I of the video I wanted to communicate the line "whether you're large or small" visually on screen for large or small businesses. My original idea in my storyboard was to have two separate objects, one that is usually small and one that's usually large.

After talking through my story board with Ian of VPoint TV he raised the idea of instead using identical objects with only different sizes being the stand out difference. After thinking through ideas like a car and a toy car, and other miniature versions of normal objects I came up with the idea to use a Russian doll. I like this idea especially as there were several different sizes between the largest and smallest Russian doll, which i felt communicated both large, small and businesses in between those sizes. It also allowed me to play with stop motion animation for this part of the video.

close up of largest Russian doll

After borrowing a Russian doll from a friend of mine I created a clean white background using two pieces of white card, then I lit these with soft boxes to prevent reflections as best as possible as the Russian dolls had a slightly glossy surface.

Here are a couple of shots of the key wide shot of the dolls, I animated these by first placing them all in a row, recording a few seconds of footage and then taking one away. I repeated this process which then allowed me to animated each one appearing. To achieve this I simple put the videos together in the timeline in reverse order so they appeared rather than disappeared. 

Close up of small Doll

I then ended with a close up of the smallest Russian doll when the line ends with "or small" to point out even small companies can get in contact in a fun and visual way. I decided to leave the second smallest doll in the frame as it gave some perspective to the size differences.

Overall I think this idea worked well, both to illustrate large or small companies, but also any size in between, the animation was simple but effective and when cut to the music will help move the video along quickly without staying on the point too long.