CoP 3 Practical Robot Arm and Lower Third Text boxes - High Tech

Earlier in this blog (further down the page) I did motion tracking using my arm as a tester with the robot arm which I had made, these results were amazing, however the amount of time it took was far too long!
This lead to a problem, as I wanted to include a person with the CGI robot arm, but with the test of the motion tracking before I thought it would be best for me not to do a motion tracking section because of time constraints. This leads me to change a part of the story and adapt the trailer, so I thought about creating an advert for it with detail about what it is and what does it do?

Straight away I took a photograph for my background which is a plain grey-ish backdrop which contains blue and orange lights.  I can place my robotic arm on top, then add effects to make it look like it's a hologram plus create text boxes with information which the announcer/ speaker will talk about!

The picture above is at the start of the holographic robot arm.  The way I have created this effect is by using a adjustment layer combined with white noise streaks which analog TV's used to produce when there was no signal.  On the adjustment layer by using the "Add" or "difference" mode it can produce different streaks on the original layer, therefore I used "add" because the footage had a lot of small white lines which looks more effective!
Within the scene I have animated the robot arm to rotate and move, to show off it's capabilities as if this was an advert trying to sell it's product.  The reason why I have done it this way was because my research into storytelling.   I looked into a coca-cola advert which tells a story and tries to convince it's audience to buy the drink.  Therefore how am I to convince people to buy this imaginary product?  The answer is BELIEVABILITY!  So what can I use to make it more believable? I decided to add real life facts such as what materials it uses and how it works.
This lead me back to the start of my research!

The link for this video is here

In this video it's showing what the arm can do and it's different modes.  The arm is made of Carbon Fibre a very strong material and also light.  Other links about robot prosthetic arms show they are made of Titanium, a rare metal which is incredibly strong and also light weight!
This means as the speaker talks in my film about the arm which I created it will need to be either be made of carbon fibre or titanium.  I think it will be best to use Titanium because my arm looks very metallic, so I will say its titanium and say that its strong and light weight for everyday use! Convincing the audience that this is a good product for people who have lost their arms!

I need to produce before hand a text box and logo to help the audience understand that this is the same company, "X Gen" which I created and that we aren't switching styles or themes.
For this I thought it would be best to use my blue theme, and use lighter and darker shades of blues to make it stand out more!

As shown above the text is in a teal blue so it stands out and its easily readable for the audience, then by having a chequered dark blue backdrop for the text it adds to the emphasis hopefully this will give the desire of a futuristic company!  I need now to animate this, as if it just appears it will not be affective enough to grab the audiences attention, however it needs to be subtle so that it doesn't draw the audience's attention away from the main focus of the advert!
I decide to animate it like this
(Every 6th frame!)

From above you can see how the text boxes are revealed.  I like this method of slightly animating the outline combined with the classic fade in/out effects as this is effective enough for the audience to notice but not get distracted from the main feature.  Now I need to place this into the scene either at the top or bottom depending on where the main area of 'dead space' is.
(Dead spaces are areas which are not used through the scene and nothing happens, however they are large enough for the audience to notice them and think something might happen in that area!)
I decided to place the text box at the top of the scene.

However In the Image above there is a bit of dead space to the left had side where the blue light is and it seems to be ready to show something which is a major problem as it will distract the audience.
I need to fix this quickly!

I duplicated the text box and put 'Titanium structure' in the dead space to re-enforce the point of what it is made of, additionally this keeps the balance in the scene as the right hand side is dark, therefore isn't much of a problematic dead space!

I am happy with this section as it now shows off the robot arm with some interesting features and information included in the voice over and text boxes.
The next section is my robot eye piece which last time was criticised for having different themes and not staying to a set theme. This will be corrected and also will need to be improved to match the level of VFX used for the robotic arm so they are balanced.