Hello everyone, this is Evan Abrams,
and in this video, we're going to be creating a mood board.
And a mood board is kinda collection of inspiration
that generally starts most design projects
and motion design is no exception.
While it may seem that great videos spring
fully formed out of the creator's mind,
it's usually from a pretty exhaustive pre-production process
and that process typically begins with
the nebulous and ethereal mood board.
Now, if this were the 1980s, we would probably
put up a cork board and cut some things out of magazines
and start pinning them up with sticky notes
and connecting them with red string,
it would really start to look like
a conspiracy theory starting to take shape.
However, it's 2019 and we can do better.
So in this video, we'll be making use
of a collaborative quiet of tools
brought to us by this video's sponsor, Milanote.
(upbeat music)
Now before we begin, what is a mood board,
what am I talking about?
Well, early in the production process
in the pre-pre-production, maybe you only have
a creative brief, there's no images associated
with the project yet, you want to put together
a mood board to kind of decide on your visual direction.
Now there may already be some creative thoughts
going into it, bunch of things in word form,
it's useful to take those ideas
and to turn them into images
so that other members of the team,
or just yourself if it's only you working on it,
you really just wanna put out all the images
that make sense with this project.
You don't need to come up with everything all at once,
you can gradually work your way there,
and a mood board will help you do that.
A mood board could be very literal
so in the case of working with a brand,
you probably throw their logo on there,
various associated colors, fonts and imagery,
basically a pile of things that has to be in the project,
but it can be very abstract as well.
It could just be a collection of things
that you want to evoke a feeling in the audience,
or a bunch of images that you wanna draw inspiration from.
The purpose of the mood board
is really just to get you started,
to figure out: "where are we going with this thing?"
A lot of projects can seem very daunting
and nebulous and who knows what's going on
and what am I gonna do?
Well, you can thwart a lot of those things
by going through the pre-production process
and near the beginning you find the mood board
which can give you that visual direction that you want,
by tapping into the various resources around you.
Now this is all pretty abstract,
which makes sense 'cause mood boards
are fairly abstract things.
So let's crack something open and actually look at one.
Alright so, like we said in the intro,
in this video, we're gonna be making some mood boards,
talking about mood boards,
and we're gonna be using Milanote to make it happen.
Milanote is a wonderful web app created
by some Australian agency folks,
so you know they know mood boards.
If you like what you see, if you wanna follow along
and do as I do, then you should use the link
in the description to get organized,
stay creative, and start using Milanote.
I use Milanote for mood boards,
and other parts of pre-production,
let's just crack open the interface here,
you can see, I do a bit of my tutorial planning,
whenever I have ideas I try to throw them down
into a board here and connect things
with arrows and organize them into sub-boards,
boards within boards, just to organize a lot of my thoughts,
but today, let's focus on mood boards.
The mood board is a collage of images of fonts,
of colors, of objects that are meant to evoke a style,
so by referencing the mood board,
you should be able to figure out
where you're goin' with this project visually speaking.
Now I mentioned that mood boards can be literal
or abstract and anywhere on the spectrum between.
Here's a very literal example.
Let's say we're going a piece for Alfa Romeo,
who we're gonna make a television spot for them
or some kind of campaign, we might select images
like these for our mood board to convey,
yes we will have sweeping vistas of Italian countryside,
we will have red cars, we are gonna be using
the brand's kind of tagline as our watch words,
the mechanics of emotion, without heart
we would be mere machines.
So these are kind of things about Alfa Romeo,
and when we look at this mood board,
we can see things that might literally appear
in the final product, but we could also
take a way more abstract approach, so,
let's say hypothetically, I was creating
a motion design project around the beautiful game of chess,
I play a fair amount of chess
'cause I'm a bit of a nerd and a cliche I suppose,
not to say that people who play chess are nerds,
but you know I'm one of each so what're you gonna do?
Whenever I approach a project,
no matter what it is, whether it's for me,
or for somebody else, I try to touch
on all the steps of pre-production,
that's brief, mod board, script, AV script,
all the way through to animatics
and then we start production.
By taking care of a lot of these little steps,
a project becomes way less nebulous.
So here we've decided on some goals,
the purpose of the video, the technical deliverables,
you'd wanna know the audience,
you'd wanna know the timelines for delivery.
It's important, even on personal projects
to give yourself deadlines so you're not just
sitting' on stuff for a long time.
So this example, I've given myself
a little bit of directive, a little bit of
the angle I wanna take on the game of chess
and how I wanna represent it in motion design.
We're talking' about an elegant, simplicity,
intricate interaction of elements
game of perfect information that
allows for unpredictable outcomes,
so this is kind of the big blue sky, top level thinking
that might translate into a mood board,
something like this, a little interplay
of positive and negative space and impossible geometry,
using a lot of black and white, high contrast
with pops of color, and we organize it all on a mood board.
So this is much more abstract,
a lot of these elements probably
won't appear this way in the final piece,
but all of this should help evoke
what the final product is gonna look like.
Now there are some literal elements in here
such as fonts and colors, these are specific choices,
but a lot of the imagery, a lot of the video,
we're not gonna literally be doing
exactly what you see here.
These are meant to inspire and guide
the final style of the piece.
Now when you're assembling your mood board
no matter what method you use,
you wanna pay attention to how large
and where you're putting things in this mood board.
Generally the larger and more central something is,
the more important it is to the overall style.
It takes up more space so it has more weight.
So we would say looking at this mood board,
the central video here is probably
the most influential on what we're seeing.
Usually that might be an image that you start with
or just some little piece or maybe a sound,
maybe it's music that really starts you off
so whatever it is, you wanna start
with that, and build around it.
That's also worth dropping things down
that remind you of what is the direction
we're even going in, throw on some text,
throw on some words that are important
to the brand, to the project, to the style in general.
But the mood board is also part of a process
and when we look here at this end,
when we look at this mood board, we see,
you know there's a lot of high contrast, but it's very dark,
we're seeing a lot of kind of gloomy imagery.
The goal of the project was to make something seem
more dynamic and fun and accessible,
we've kind of Dark Knighted it here a little bit,
we've taken a fun thing and possibly
made it terrifying for audiences.
But one of the things I love about Milanote
is the way it can really hep you iterate stuff.
So for example, this here, this little
bright ray of sunshine, I think is worth keeping,
and I think these colors are also worth keeping.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna copy those
and we're gonna make a new board,
and I'll walk you through how to do it.
So to make a new board in Milanote,
you just drag it out, drag this board icon out,
drop it down, and give it a name.
So we might name this, bright version.
And Milanote attempts to create an icon
based on the words that you put down,
which I find very charming.
And we can start piling things in here.
So, in the bright version, I've already got
some unsorted things that I can start,
drop it in there, start dropping these things,
these wonderful, much brighter,
much more colorful approaches to this stuff and,
so now I've got a bunch of cards,
they're still unsorted but I'm just gonna go ahead
and I'm gonna paste in the stuff
from that original piece, the original pieces
that I liked from the first one.
And I'm gonna start adding to it from these new sources.
So here's a little image I picked up from B hand,
I really like the way this hand looks
with these little creases here.
I'm gonna go exactly that far,
I might simplify it, maybe somewhere between these two
is where I wanna be, I found this to be very evocative,
I love the bold color choices,
I love how different they are, just by smoking,
but you know I think that's a pretty good looking hand,
this is a similar shape of hand that I really enjoy,
this representation of a chess board
I think is pretty nice, that came off of Dribble.
Here's another one from Dribble that is a little bit,
you know a little bit more "gradiated".
So you could start to bring things out,
and you might think well, some of these
don't really fit, maybe they need to be
smaller and off to the side 'cause that's kind of secondary.
This is also gonna be smaller, it can go over here.
The big thing, the big thing that stands out to me is
this piece here, 'cause I think that's the most important,
you know this bunch can go just over there,
anyway I'm just resizing and reallocating
these things around, and now I think we need to add
some more things in here, so we might have
another video, one thing I love about Milanote
is you can just drop videos in,
you can clip them from around the internet
and drop them in, this here is a wonderful piece
from Gunner, it's a great montage
and you could even play video here in your Milanote board.
And you can just watch it through
and see the motion, get inspired by what you're seeing',
it's really important with the mood board
to be able to assess all of these inspirational pieces
almost at once that it just hits you
with some kind of a feeling.
It can all get kind of ethereal and abstract
but the purpose is to help guide you towards a real thing
that you're making, so this is a good start,
let's add some more things.
I think these colors are a little bit dower,
I don't think they're a great spot,
so let me just call those out,
and let's add some new ones.
I looked into some colors over here in Adobe Color CC,
so see I liked this yellow, so I'm gonna just
double click on that, copy it, go back here,
and something fun that I love in Milanote
is that I can drag out a new note,
I can hit hashtag, and then paste a HEX value,
and then that just turns into
a little paint chip of that value.
So I really like that, these three kind of work out
as a color combination, I think those
are a nice triad of colors, very primary things
I think if we're trying to appeal to younger audiences,
that's probably a move we wanna make.
We should probably drop a font on here,
some kind of font, sometimes I have a look
around Font Squirrel, and if you find any images
you like around the web, and you have
your Milanote Chrome extension,
you can just grab any picture you see
by just clicking save here, and then choosing
the board you wanna send it to,
and then save it, and then when you go back to the board,
it just shows up, and you can drag that out,
you can make it a little bit larger if you like.
It also supports transparent backgrounds,
so I might kinda, just put that here in the middle,
'cause it is kinda the title of the piece.
And drag things around it, there we go,
now we're gettin' it goin', things are looking' up.
Now we're gettin' more organized.
I think another video would be great,
so if we're watching something on video we enjoy,
like this Cartoon Network piece by Giant Ant,
terrific series, wonderful piece, amazing studio,
I really love the bold colors in here,
I love a lot of the angles and the characters
and how they make use of a very limited
bold color palette so I would go up here
to my Milanote clipper and then we'll save that video, boom.
And drop that in, so now we've got
another little piece of inspiration into the puzzle.
This could probably use a few more images,
we might hit up Behance and scan around
and find something that has colors or shapes
or textures that we like, something that invokes
the style we wanna try to get to.
Might his up Dribble, Dribble has
a lot of great things on it.
A lot of these things can be hard to search through though
'cause they're not really organized by
any specific stylistic keywords.
But once you find what you're after,
you can always just save it using your Milanote clipper here
and just like that, so I think this'll,
actually replace that, 'cause it's nice and bright,
and now, this is starting to take a little bit more shape.
It can take a little while to round up
all the things you want to flesh out
where you want the style to go,
however, spending the time early on in the process
is gonna save you a lot of question marks later on.
Sometimes you already know the style
you wanna use for a piece, however,
when it comes to commercial work and client work,
you often have to pitch styles,
so this is where organizing and
making your mood board beautiful,
so you can pitch the idea and the concept to somebody else,
really helps, it's not enough that just you understand
the direction you're gonna take, sometimes
you need other people to understand it too,
and that's another one of the functions of a mood board.
I'll also say that what we're doing
isn't meant to be lifting other peoples' styles,
we're meant to be observing the landscape,
figuring out what's best for the project
and then applying bits that we like from here from there,
and then adding on and elevating,
bringing ourself to the table.
After the mood board, we'll generally
go into some style frames where we'll see some concept art,
we'll build on this, this is really only meant to be
a bunch of inspirational pieces
to direct us to create our own original pieces
from the synthesis, so if you find yourself stuck
or struggling with the style of your next piece,
I definitely recommend going back to the mood board,
or just making one in general
if you skip to that step of the process.
Alright, that's it, thank you so much for watching,
hopefully you've learned a lot about mood boards
and how to make them and to be able
to use them on your next project,
hopefully they start off a little bit better.
If you'd like to make use of Milanote
to make your mood boards and many other things,
please use the link in the description,
check out the free trial and if you upgrade
to the full package, then you'll be able
just to fill your Milanote with so many things,
many many things, if you've enjoyed learning
about motion graphics, motion design and production process
then subscribe to this channel.
And we'll see you around for the next tutorial,
and you'll get to see what we make from this mood board.
The plan is to actually follow through
and make something off of this thing.
If you have questions about this kind of thing,
mood boards, pre-production, motion design in general,
please, hit me up on here in the comments,
or get at me on Twitter I'm @ecabrams on there,
thanks again for watching and have a great day.