7 Cedars Ribbon Boards
Adapt static creative to motion graphic animations for property ribbon screens.
For the casino, getting a message out to customers on property as often and in as many places as they can is pretty important to the Marketing effort. One of the more under-utilized spaces were the ribbon board screens that ran video content above the bars and pit areas around the whole casino. My job was to take our existing and future digital content, static landscape ads, and bring life to them through motion graphics so they could be broadcast on those screens and catch a player's attention.
These screens were four HDTVs strung together side-by-side, creating a narrow, panoramic profile that aren't anything near a standard video format. The screens themselves were all assigned to a single video channel in the CoolSign content manager, meaning they were fed a standard 1920x1080 HD video file, but only displayed a small sliver of the bottom of the video file.
West Pit ribbon board in the casino.
I began by first structuring the AfterEffects (AE) file with guides marking the visible area and the a "blocked" area of a composition. Then depending on the artwork I was working with, I'd have to break up the vector elements from one of our designer's Illustrator files and prep/optimize them for motion graphics use. Often this meant breaking body parts of a single vector object into individual components (arms, legs, hands, etc.) and then organize them into layers I could easily import.
Project workspace showing composition organization, file structure, and "blackout" space.
The real fun/difficulty of this project was finding ways to bring creative that wasn't designed with motion in mind to life through motion. This changed month to month, as new promotions and events came and went throughout the year. Below I have a brief demo reel that shows how the corresponding static promotions were animated.
Deliverables
Motion graphics .MP4
Tools
Adobe AfterEffects
Bally CoolSign
Adobe Illustrator CC
Bally CoolSign
Adobe Illustrator CC
Project Goals
Continuity between static advertisements and motion pieces
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