Fulda Studios
CONFERENCE STAGE GRAPHICS
Fulda Studios is an event production studio that specializes in creating white-labeled event packages to ensure conferences are elevated in a stunning capacity and run flawlessly. We consider the owner Amanda to be a good friend, so when she reached out needing a hand designing and animating multiple conferences (though we can’t say who the end clients were) we were excited to jump in and help!
Armed with a list of important financial information, and a rough idea of styles, we started this project like every HF project - With the Hyperfocus Method.
Designing for stage graphics is different than most, as each convention center has a unique screen size that we have to accommodate. While most videos are exported to a 16:9 format, this screen was 23:4 - which is pretty unique!
This changed how we approached design, to ensure the videos weren’t just informational, but that they also looked good.
STARTING THE PROJECT
With the design boards approved by client, it was time to start the animation process. After Effects is our motion design software of choice. After importing in each layer, it was time to start dropping keyframes to make the motion buttery smooth. One challenge of animation is keeping everything organized. This project had well over 1,000 elements to keep track of. As you can imagine, being organized was extremely important!
BEHIND THE SCENES
PREPPING THE STAGE
After the project was wrapped, we wanted to find a compelling way to share the final animation of this project. Just slapping our flat video on our website seemed a bit boring, so we opted to build our very own 3D conference hall to project the stage graphics.
Step one, was creating our virtual space in our favorite 3D Animation software, C4D. This allowed us to project the video into a “real environment” and give a preview of what the viewing could have looked like. How did we do?
Shortly after our mystery project was wrapped up, Fulda Studios reached out with another conference project. Our previous project had a unique screen size of 23:4, and this new project had its own interesting challenge - designing content pixel-mapped video pillars.
Fulda Studios provided AI-generated inspiration artwork, which was beautiful but begged to be animated.
Not only did we need to recreate this artwork in a software we could animate (like Cinema4D) but we also had to ensure it looped seamlessly.
A NEW PROJECT BEGINS
The first step of the project was to recreate the mountain graphic in 3D. This took some trial and error, but since we work with the best animators on the planet, the end result was a technical, yet perfect solution.
To save time and budget recreating our mountain, we used the separation of the stage video pillars to our advantage. By rendering out the same element and rotating the camera to give the appearance of uphill/downhill we used the seams of the pixel map to hide our seams and create a seamless looping mountain.
WORKING IN 3D
With our 3D mountain recreated and broken into each pillar’s view, it was time to hop back into our favorite animation software - Adobe After Effects. Luckily, all the pixel mapping math was provided to us by Fulda, so we just had to line up our designs to match their templates. After some quality control, and render time, the final project was a seamless transition between people walking into the convention hall, the main artwork on stage, and slides to introduce the speakers.
BEHIND THE SCENES
Working with Fulda Studios is always a treat. Thank you to Amanda and her team for trusting Hyperfocus Motion to be your resource for executing stage graphics for these national conferences!