Ident Evaluation

Evaluation


At the start of the project I chose to try the custard children’s TV show ident brief and create approximately 30 seconds of footage for a TV ident. I tried to make images, which looked like maybe a traditional cartoon or a child’s drawing and push myself to use after effects as the driving engine of my work. We had to source our own images, sound effects ant text for the production so everything needed to be researched and considered carefully in order to create something that fit the brief and my own storyboard criteria. After coming up with an idea and making a story board I looked a lot at short children’s animations like ‘purple and brown’ and ‘morph’ and idents from other kid’s shows like ‘smtv live’ and ‘milkshake’ for inspiration in terms of how things should look, character design and so on and I think my research helped me greatly in my decisions about aesthetics and style. In these initial stages I should have made more of an effort to think up a broader range of ideas to give myself more of choice of ways in which to execute this project and demonstrate a bit more creativity and imagination but unfortunately this was not the case and I guess my sketch book suffers a little as a result. Also early on in the project I looked at existing products that had made use of after effects such some video games and animations to try and get an idea of what can be achieved with the software, I think this helped me formulate a plan of action regarding how I might use after effects myself.
After idea generation and initial research I made an animatic or rough version for a crit so I could get some feedback and what works and what can be improved. The crit went pretty well and I took my feedback, made notes and set to work on making the changes and considerations suggested to me, this should be fairly well documented in my sketchbook. I had to start considering typeface and TV safe zones which I sort of skimmed over really, I should have found time to look at more examples of text and logos before generating my own and I guess I should have made more of an effort to generate a range of fonts and styles before choosing like I did. This is another area of my sketchbook that is weak as a result but I’m confident that the text in my animation matches the style and feel of the ident I created.
On the whole I think I’ve made a pretty good sketchbook, it documents my ideas and the process that I went through to create my ident and I’m quite proud of the ident itself too, it accomplishes what I set out to achieve and fulfils the brief too. It’s not perfect though. One area in the animation particularly stands out, where the custard pours down onto the slug there are missing frames due to some difficulties with importing into after effects but these faults are something that I’ve identified and given the chance to spend more time on the brief I would correct them. After effects has been a great asset to learn about and hopefully I’ll be able to make good use of it in future projects.