Brief + Overview
We opted for a one-point 3D camera movement approach to the animation, to transform and bring some sort of life to the rather flat 1-dimensional form of the original logo. We believe this will help convey the message of the concept more appropriately.
The animation is calibrated between a standard duration of 15–30 seconds in length with a frame rate of 30fps and screen resolution of 1920×1080 Full HD in a 16:9 aspect ratio.
Concept — “Creation / Revelation”
Trumpet Africa Productions is a Ghanaian established film production company on a quest to explore and document stories that depict the lives of Africans, thus telling the African story from an African perspective.
The outfit takes special interest in promoting and preserving African culture through films, music, and various forms of performance arts. The brief for this project was simply to develop a short piece of animation to be used as the production company’s ident. The animation is to be a reflection of the company and define what it stands for.
The motif is based on the concepts of ‘Creation and Revelation.’ These facets are literally in accord with the purpose that drives the entity as a film production company: creating and developing projects that focus and reveal stories on the lives of Africans.
In this sense, we aimed at capturing the essence and value of being African, fixating attention on originality, identity, richness, and creativity.
Colour Palette & Textures
Albeit the animation will have more of an organic feel, the necessity to maintain or incorporate the company’s core brand colours (which already has presence of brown as a natural tone) still remains. Earth toned colours ranging from dark brown to black and gold are suitable colour choices for this project.
We considered introducing relatively organic and physical materials into the scene to give the mood of the animation a natural feel. Elements like clay, earth, sand, and to some extent gold, will be incorporated within the animation.
Storyboard Narrative
In the storyboard we explain how we sought to help produce a piece that is easily recognizable and readily identified as African.
The 30-second long animation captures a model African countryside setting, meant to make the company distinguishable as a production company originating from Africa. It goes further to show a typical portrayal of an African storytelling scene. The objective was to portray the production company as an effective storytelling tool.
The piece begins with a shot of a sunset scene over misty hills and valleys and gradually glides over scenery and captures a fleet of birds and grazing goats, bringing naturalness and depth to the composition. It then goes over a compound and ends behind a “bonfire-storytelling” scene with an old man (representing the storyteller) sitting in a circle with children listening on.
We finally attempted to define the company’s logo composition and depicting what exactly each element is: two facial expressions merging to form an abstraction of the African map, bounded by a trumpet on the left; both elements form the name of the production company, ‘TRUMPET AFRICA’.
