Despite the advantages of working with clients through the Internet, seeing the fruits of your labour grow close to home does not compare to seeing it through an LED screen. It gives you an unparalleled sense of pride in your local community and in your own work. This is the emotion that I felt when working alongside fellow Ottawa Music Industry Coalition (OMIC) members Karim Rostom (Kaspien) and Jeff Watkins (Loretta Media) in the context of the Capital Music Awards (CMA).

This event, now in its 4th edition, was held at the Bronson Centre on June 1st, 2023. It aimed to highlight and celebrate local talent through an award ceremony broken up by multiple live performances, featuring the likes of “Empress Nyriringango, Marie-Clo, Mimi O’Bonsawin and Ottawa’s own hip-hop success story City Fidelia” (OMIC, 2023). Safe to say, the night was going to be packed with a lot of content and a lot of talent. In this context, Karim and Jeff reached out to me to create an animated version of the event’s logo as well as a subtle animated background, both of which were going to be used for the presentation slides displayed during the ceremony.

What seemed like a relatively straightforward was surprisingly new ground for me. At first, I animated the logo by track matting the shapes I wanted to animate and inserting my own copies of said shapes, making it easier to manipulate them via expressions. However, due to the limitations of Google Slides, I had to refrain from animating the text and keep the animation just on the logotype. This is due to the fact that GIFs, the only type of file that could be seamlessly integrated into the slides, would make the edges of the animation loop look grainy and unpleasant. Therefore, I opted to stack a PNG file of the text on top of the already animated logotype to ensure a neat display of the logo’s text. The background, on the other hand, was a piece of cake: a particle system and a fade is all I needed to create a seamless loop.

Working with Jeff and Karim was a very pleasant experience and led me to contribute to the small but thriving music scene in Ottawa. This commission also helped me improve my adaptability to technical limitations. The GIF format is outdated and clunky, but I managed to work with said limitations in a pretty effective way. It’s a shame I caught a cold a few days before the ceremony. I couldn’t show up, but hearing that the event went well warmed my heart and made me proud of my region’s talent.

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