From Final Year Project to National Stage

Weaving visual magic into National Day Parades since 2011

If you have seen the brightly coloured animated graphics accompanying each act during the National Day Parade (NDP), you may be surprised that they were not created by professionals, but by third-year students from Nanyang Polytechnic�s Motion Graphics & Broadcast Design (MGBD) diploma course.

From left: Kristine Chua, Wilson Low, and Patey Ng,
some of the 20 students involved in the NDP project

For the past five years, students from this course have been behind the animation and special effects that you see at our NDP. Each year, about 20 Final Year Project students work on creating the vivid imagery for NDP�s various acts, bringing excitement and realism into each scene of the show.

Their work includes sourcing for reference materials, creating storyboards, modelling the storyboards in 3D software, improving on the graphics and remodelling the graphics to the client�s expectations.

This takes a whopping six months to complete, and the workload is shared by two batches of students. The first batch works on the project for three months, before going for their internship. The second batch will do their three-month internship before taking over the remaining work from the first batch.

For Final Year Project student Wilson Low, since his first year in NYP, he had been told by his seniors that he would be producing motion graphics for NDP once he reached his third year. It was something that he had been looking forward to as he had always wanted to work on a big national project. For him and his course mates, it was exciting to hear about it, and this spurred them to create something great for NDP.

Although there were many challenges, such as meeting the NDP committee�s expectations, getting used to the stage set-up and screen dimensions, and finding appropriate creative resources, the lessons learnt were invaluable for each batch of students.

For Wilson, he learnt much about liaising appropriately with his clients, improving his own technical skills as well as doing a job he can be proud of.

He said: �This achievement is a milestone for us. If we can do a project like this for a national stage, then what is stopping us from excelling in other creative industries?�

NYP opened doors for students like Wilson and his course mates to excel on the national stage.

Because We Can.