Dancing Paddington Ad…
I’m not really good at advertising.
I’m actually really bad at it.
I spent part of yesterday animating Paddington dancing…and putting it together in an ad.
To put it up on Project Wonderful (an advertising system) it had to be under 100k. This made it a REALLY choppy and bad gif.
But you can see it up on some other webcomics as I’m trying it out.
I made a flash version that is much better. But I don’t know what to do with it.
I’d love some feedback on it. Your thoughts and suggestions.
http://thedreamlandchronicles.com/Paddington.swf
Thanks
Hi Scott,
Regarding the ad, I don’t really care for it. As a fellow designer, I see the direction you were taking but I think it comes across as a bit silly and mediocre. I believe your choice of fonts and text further emphasize this. I know you’re targeting all age groups but this might be too target at the youth crowd. I would suggest going with something a bit more stylized and clean such as a transitional image montage that incorporates some vector elements to keep it sharp. My two cents. 🙂
That’s great Aaron. Thanks.
I think I’ll need to consult a real ad designer. If anyone knows of any.
Comic Sans isn’t a good choice of font, overused and somewhat unprofessional looking. That’s all you need to know.
A quick Google reveals:
http://bancomicsans.com/ As the top result
http://www.designobserver.com/archives/016321.html in the middle
and
http://www.flickr.com/groups/comicsans/pool/ at the bottom.
Thanks Jordan…
It’s actually a font called Kristen.
But I see what you’re saying. I hate picking fonts….ugh.
Maybe you could have paddington dancing without the text? then just fade to the title. Would make people want to find out more. Jordan is right Comic Sans is a very bad font to use.
Nevermind, not CS, still not fond of that font.
I like it, but while it made me laugh a bit I don’t think it would make me curious enough to follow up on it if I wasn’t already a Dreamland reader.
It looks like an experiment in animation rather than an ad as such.
Much as I like Paddington, I really don’t think he’s the best character to lead an ad with, either, honestly. He’s interesting looking, but he may be the least striking of the main Dreamland characters. A pouting Nastajia may be a lot less challenging to animate (Maybe. I know zip all about animation) but would likely get ten times the interest. She’s just got ‘Icon’ written all over her. Alex in that really cool looking armour wouldn’t hurt, either.
I see what people are sayin about the ad, but I did enjoy the animation… makes me think about my wish to see all of dreamland animated one day :o)
Don’t get me wrong, I really loved seeing Paddington animated, but the ad wasn’t that great (no offense). I don’t think I would click on it if I had never seen/heard of Dreamland before.
Maybe if Paddington was dancing faster, doing more clearly defined moves, and you didn’t have any text (like what Wooglie said above) it could be better.
OR what if you had all the characters dancing with Paddington? (this probably would be alot more work though)
I like the ending, where the main characters scroll across the ad and it says “Come re-live your childhood adventures!”
Font-wise: How about using the “Dreamland” font? Wasn’t it made for Dreamland anyway?
I don’t suppose you have a bigger file (or whatever you call it) of just Paddington dancing, without the ad? Like, up close and all?
Scott,
First time poster, long time reader. Not a lot of time to write something coherent so here are a few fragments.
Some suggestions for your ad- first of all, try to have a clear target audience in mind. If you have any demographics on the folks visiting your site (age, gender, HH income, etc) that you can capitalize on, you should. Or if you are looking to capture a market segment ourside your existing reader base, focus on something that would appeal to THAT group instead. Let me go out on a limb and guess that your core readership is teens to 30s, predominantly male (which is not to say you don’t have PLENTY of other visitors, I’m just guessing at your core constituency). A safe bet is the (pouting, smiling, frowning, whatever) Elf Princess that Elliot K mentioned. Heck, kick it up a notch and play off the tension between her and Alex. The heart of many a great story is the male-female dynamic. Humor is always a great draw, too. Let’s face it- the online world jumps and spins and does everything in its power to wave down passers-by on the information superhighway. You have to do something special to get users to take notice. Give them something- a little bit of wisdom, a laugh, a promise.
Remember that in design, there are a lot of inherent contradictions: Less is More, God is in the Details, etc. What you might be looking for are the twin keys of density and tension- enough visual and typographic information to imply much (without being overbearing), and a reason to sit up, take notice, and take action (click through). For written density, try One Sentence Stories for inspiration http://www.onesentence.org/stories/popular/all/ For visual density, well, you have plenty of assets to call on from your characters and stage sets. Have fun, do something surprising, mix it up!
Concept: A close up of Nastajia, backlit, her hair gently waving in the breeze, which zooms into an extreme close up of her eye, revealing a reflected, vibrant Dreamland landscape background, transitioning to a super closeup of Alex’s eye, zooming out to a close up of Alex, then zooming back out to see that he is in turn a reflection in Nicodemus’ eye, smoke lazily drifing from one nostril. Captions timed with the transitions: “A Girl. A Boy. Feelings are Denied. Lunch is Served.”
Ok, don’t take it literally, but the idea here is a relatively low-key way to introduce three main characters, your world, and hopefully get the audience to infer much more is going on. Advantages are bandwith- you can get Flash to handle the zoom/pan stuff with a few still shots and a little creative masking. The hair animation would just have to cycle over a handful of frames. The smoke fx could be handled on the cheap in flash with a little repeated gradient movieclip with alpha and nested animation to create many layers of expiring particles.
Hmm, quick animation critique: Paddington has a complex texture that “swims” when compressed into flash video / jpeg frame animation. For low bandwidth, you want images that don’t show compression so much, or you may want to move into the wide world of vector animation. If you use 3ds MAX at all, a great plugin is Swift 3D MAX (http://www.erain.com).
The world you are building is inspiring. Keep it up.
Mark
Thank you guys I really do appreciate the feedback and crits.
Mark…nice to meet you and thanks for the great info and for reading.
Tif…thanks for liking it. It is a really quick anim. Just to see if it would work. But thanks.
I wanted to make mention of Paddingtons swimming texture as well.
I like it, man.
I love Paddington.
~Brandon
I loved Paddington dancing!! I thought it was smooth enough and he looked awesome. very entertaining. but i agree with andrew, his texture moves about and that’s all i could find that was a bit iffy about it
if you had a series of ads like this perhaps? one for every main character?
That flash add looks GREAT! Wish I knew how to do stuff like that. Keep up the good work and I love your story.
It might be better if you animated more characters and gave them each a bit of time.
*Alex with his sword* “Sword-fighting…”
*Nastajia with her bow* “Archery…”
*Kiwi casting* “Magic…”
“and”
*Paddington dancing* “Dancing?”
*final slide*
I have no clue what to put Felicity in there doing. “Theft” just doesn’t sound very er… inspiring. I suppose you could focus on her acrobatics and agility… Hmmm…
Gotta say I love Mark’s idea. I’d click on that in a heartbeat.