Research
To begin this project I decided to have some people take part in a survey. This gave me a good idea of whether people were aware of the issues regarding knife crime. The aim of this was to see if people knew the reality that knife crime is quite prominent in London, especially for youth. These are my findings:
Has there been an increase or decrease of offenses committed using knives in the last year?
Out of the 30 people asked 18 said increased and 12 said decreased.
In the last year, the amount of knife related offenses has risen by 22%.
Due to the increase and statistics to show that a large amount of youth carries knives during daily life schools have been given metal detecting “knife wands”. London Mayor has also pledged an extra £625,000 to fund knife and gang crime projects in the city after the number of offenses rose.
Which of these choices was the most common offense involving knives in the last year?
- Homicide: 0
- Attempted Murder: 5
- Assault with an injury with intent:9
- Robbery: 11
- Rape & sexual assault: 3
- Threats to kill: 2
Robbery and Assault with Injury with Intent were by far the most common offenses involving knives with assault recording 5,570 offenses and 8,363 for Robbery.
Are the police doing anything to prevent or limit the number of crimes committed?
2 people said police would visit schools to have talked about knives and the crime surrounding it.
3 people said they were implementing a unit specifically for offenses such as knife crime.
1 person mentioned the stop and search.
2 people said people would/should be fined if caught in possession of a knife without a sufficient reason.
The rest didn’t think they were doing anything dramatic.
A new Violent Crime Task Force of 272 officers has been created using additional funding from City Hall announced by the Mayor in February. The £15 million task force will focus solely on violent crime, weapon-enabled crime, and serious criminality
The Met Police has introduced patrols using targeted stop and search for areas worst-affected by knife crime. We have seen an increase in weapons-focused stop and searches of 13,548 up to June 2018 – an increase of almost 20 percent.
The question I’ve decided to focus on is “Which of these choices was the most common offense involving knives in the last year?” because I feel like it provides the best opportunities for animating due to having a shorter response than the others.
Analysis
This first section uses text in a more graphical way as an introduction to the animation.
The knife crime definition enters using opacity and then scaling up on the title. It also includes a character offset animation on the actual definition. As I’m only using it as a graphical element it doesn’t matter that you can’t read all the information before it moves on. One of the main reasons why I used music in the background was so that I could add elements such as the knife that can be animated in time with certain parts of the song. The dark background animation is a simple wipe using the position transformation. All of the animations in this project have easy easing applied to make them pop a bit more and to make their impact with the music that much more obvious.
The next section uses a handful of magazine article style spreads which have been fitted with the music to create a transition. The idea for this came from the music video Sunday – GroovyRoom. This doesn’t include any animations but rather utilizes ending and starting new layers in time to the music. Personally, I think the effect works well and made for a good transition into the next section.
The idea behind this was to invert the colour of the text as the new background wipe was done. After getting some feedback I looked for a tutorial and discovered that I could create the effect using the alpha matte option. Similarly to the knife from the intro, this knife animates in using easy eased position keyframes which were edited in the speed graph to come in fast and slow down near the end. This effect worked well due to how it fits with the motif from the audio.
The main animation in this section is easy eased position with motion blur applied to make the transformation more fluid. It also incorporates elements from previous sections such as the wipe transition and the character offset from the introduction. “In the last year?” uses the tracking option in text animate and I increased the tracking to the point where none of the text would show before the animation began. To transition into the next scene I used a wipe again, however, I added the silhouette of a knife to the end to imitate the action of cutting/slicing.
The black border and the texture enter using scale and opacity. A common theme with the animations in this project is that almost all the keyframes are easy eased and edited in the speed graph to make them suddenly enter and slow at the end.
Next, I used trim paths to hint at the word robbery which was then confirmed as it appears from behind a mask using position. “Most common offense” uses scale and opacity keyframes and accompanied by the font was supposed to imitate a sort of stamping effect. “Involving knives” uses the same animation as the word robbery.
The next section utilizes simple position and opacity animation as well as trim paths on the initial “8363” animation. The reason why it looks different from the other trim paths animations is that I animated solid text rather than the outline.
“Has there been an” and “in the amount of” have a blur applied which becomes visible slightly from some opacity keyframes before the words begin to appear. This is done by animating the start and end in the range selector. The “increase” to “decrease” animation is created using position keyframes on “in”, “de”, and “crease”. It’s been timed so that all the elements move at the same time which makes for a seamless switch. The rest of the text in this section uses my tried and tested easy eased position plus motion blur technique. It ends by using a wipe transition which fits alongside a mask wipe to make it seem as if the knife is clearing the text away.
To animate the word “statistics” I went into the text animate option and selected position from there as opposed to using the shortcut P. I then animated the y-axis from 251 to 0 and the start from 0-100%. This effect makes each of the letters rise up one by one rather than as a whole word. Other than simple position transformations the rest of this section uses a similar effect to the magazine style from the beginning and the animation is more or less complete.
Overall, there are some features that I would change now that I’m looking back at it but I’m still happy with the result. Personally, I think that I did a good job of keeping a theme and getting the information across in a creative way. I’m also happy with the way the animation worked with the music. This was a really important feature that I wanted to include because it gives more meaning and character to the animations as they sync with certain motifs.
After watching the animation a couple times after I started to realize just how bad the audio was due to recording it at an awkward time and then editing it to sound deeper. I also didn’t realize at the time but the texture I applied wasn’t very good quality so I took it out for this version. Personally, I think these changes made the animation a lot better.
Aidan Vaughan 