Creative Process: Mobile Print Stop Motion
My main responsibility during my summer internship at UNC-Chapel Hill’s IT Service Desk was to create content that would draw students to the ITS Desk’s resources and inform them about their services. I was assigned the task of promoting Mobile Print, which was a new feature of CCI printing. To begin, I did some research about the Mobile Print feature and wrote down anything of importance (what the feature was, how to use it, what it included, etc.). I, myself, didn’t quite understand what this feature was when it first came out, so I knew what kind of information would be helpful to other confused students. I tried to only include necessary information in order to keep the content condensed, while still guiding students to the ITS Desk’s website for more information.
From here, I decided that an infographic (or infographics) would be the best way to summarize all of the information in a way that students could quickly refer to when needed. Fortunately, I was taking a course called “Introduction to Digital Storytelling” that included a few lessons on creating infographics, so this project allowed me to utilize and apply what I learned in class with a real life situation. After referring to a few others for guidance, I created my own infographic, which took about a week or two to complete. I also created a promotion poster that included less information about the feature, but that would lead our audiences to the ITS Desk’s website. To make the poster really pop, I included a neon typography effect, with the help of a YouTube tutorial.
Afterward, I decided to try my hand at Adobe After Effects to create a video promo for the feature since I not only had some extra time during my shifts, but also knew that a simple infographic wasn’t eye catching enough. I’d always wanted to learn to make a kinetic typography video, so this was the perfect opportunity to try it out. I watched a tutorial and some examples to base mine off of. It took about 3 weeks to finish, simply because I had never used After Effects before. Although it isn’t perfect, I was very proud of how it turned out, especially since I had wanted to make one of these for quite some time.