Defining a concept is one of the most important aspects while planning a project. It doesn’t matter if we want to make a video, an app or even a post on Steemit, there will always be a concept behind the whole project, serving as a foundation. Having said that, I believe that being aware of the importance of a concept can improve dramatically the quality of the content we want to develop.

Nowadays I value the power of defining a good concept because when I started in this area, I had the tendency to belittle its value, so I usually started with the practical part instead. As you can imagine, the projects created at that time turned out to be very superficial, although technically well executed, but that's not enough.

Then what is a concept?

The creative process usually starts with questions such as "Why do I want to create this?", "What do I want to communicate?" or "What is my goal with this creation?". Answering these questions will lead to creating an infrastructure where the creation will be built to ensure a logical line, and this is what we call concept. You can see this as the foundation of a building under construction: if the structure is strong, then you will be able to create several floors, thus increasing its complexity and richness.

From theory to practice - Whiplash Tribute

To better understand the power of a concept, I would like to share and analyze with you a work I did for college (along with a colleague), that had a very large conceptual and technical focus.

This project turns out to be a tribute to the Whiplash music from the film Whiplash, 2014. This project emerged from a work proposal for college, whose objective was to create an animation in Motion Graphics that focused essentially on the symbiosis between sound and image. For this purpose, I decided, together with my colleague, to use this specific song to create a visual narrative that would illustrate the concept of the film. We even considered using Caravan as the soundtrack instead of Whiplash, but at the time we had little time to do the project, and Caravan would undoubtedly be a much more demanding song.

In a very broad way, and for those who have never watched Whiplash, the film fundamentally portrays the effort, dedication, and suffering of the protagonist on his journey to excellence as a drummer. During his course, he ends up having classes with a teacher of excellence and equally rigorous, who produces good results but takes his students beyond their limits.

For this project, we ended up importing the basic concept of the film for this video, focusing essentially on the effort/suffering of the drummer and the rigor of his art. But how would we illustrate all this?

Note: There are certain decisions that we made given the development of the movie but will not be described as I do not want to give any spoilers.

Graphic symbols

The task was not easy, but we started with the basics: we could not escape the fact that we were listening to certain instruments. Thus, we chose to create minimalist symbols that represented the predominant instruments in music. In addition, we chose the colors based on the refinement that an orchestra transmits us, combining these with the red ones, that refer to the blood caused by the effort of the protagonist, that is present in various forms throughout the whole video.

Having the previous aspects as a base, we had to create an even greater conceptual complexity, so that we could transmit not only the idea of gradual suffering but also of rigor and the very evolution of the drummer. Therefore, we decided to add two fundamental elements: the clock and the teacher. I don’t know if you noticed but the watch present in the video appears in two forms, the first being a watch with a darker background and the second as a different watch, but with the hour's pointer fixed at 9 o'clock.

The first clock appears as an element representing evolution, with the pointers rotating rapidly, representing the idea of the hours passing while the drummer practiced his art. However, the second one appears in a later part of the video, where it is always 9 hours, but having the minute pointer moving. This watch aims to convey the accuracy and precision of tempo, inspired by the fact that the teacher arrives at 9 o'clock precisely at the practice room, no more and no less.

On the other hand, the insertions of the teacher's clips not only have the function of creating a visual note of the tempo of the music but also create a break in the graphics logic of the whole project, where illustrations are mainly used. I think this disruption is essential throughout the video not only to evidence the importance of the character in the movie but also to introduce a different graphic element in order to keep the viewer's attention.

Composition and animation

You might notice that most of the graphic symbols throughout the animation (except for the piano and bass) are repeated and mixed several times, sometimes multiplying them through the effect of the kaleidoscopes. Conceptually, we wanted to convey the idea of continuous repetition, intrinsic to the training of a drummer, representing, at the same time, the most relevant instruments at every instant of the soundtrack.

On the other hand, the focus of the animations was essentially on the synchronism between sound and image, and on the movement of graphic symbols. The idea here was to mark the rhythm of the music graphically, demonstrating conceptually the rigor of the music tempo, while at the same time creating a parallelism between the evolution of music and the evolution of the drummer as a professional.

The sequence

This particular song proved to be very interesting for the message we wanted to convey since it is easy to recognize the various moments of the song. So, we ended up dividing the video into three distinct parts; the first part until the transition from the red background, the second part to the moment the symbols hit the camera quickly, and the third moment, which goes from the end of the previous moment until the end of the video.

The initial moment has the function of introducing the graphic symbols of the music, but also to contextualize the viewer to the video itself. Although at this stage it's not possible to understand the message we want to convey, it’s still an essential part of the entire visual narrative.

The second moment turns out to be the body of the video, illustrating, conceptually, the journey and the evolution of the drummer, through the ups and downs, accelerations and decelerations of the music.

Finally, the third part ends up illustrating a moment of reflection on the part of the drummer, referring to his evolution as a performer, as well as ... I should shut up, otherwise, it would be a spoiler, oops.

Conclusion

As you can see, defining a concept well can lead to the creation of very interesting projects with significant complexity that make sense throughout the narrative, making it a solid product. I know it is very easy to overlook this aspect, I have done it myself many times during my training in this field, but today I consider this aspect as a necessity for any creation regardless of its format.

Finally, I want to leave a very important tip for you to solidify the concept of your project: every time you think you have found a concept, try to explain it to someone in one sentence. If it's complex, try to explain it in less than 30 seconds. If the person did not perceive your concept, then it needs more work.

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Image 1 | Source
Image 2 | Printscreen from my original video

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Thank you for reading so far!

I know that this second part of the series took a long time to come out, but what is certain is that I did not want to continue with these publications without having a computer capable of processing video, and I must say that I was without a computer of this nature for four months.

Either way, what did you think of this publication? I would really like to have feedback regarding this series, because I feel like I have a lot to give you in this area of video production, especially in Motion Graphics. So if you have suggestions or would like me to give you my opinion about your videos, I'd be happy to help.

I hope you enjoyed this post and that it was useful to you!

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See you soon,
Shaden