evaluation of ident.

When I first decided to work on the brief for “Custard”, the only thing I was certain of was that I wanted to make something bright and annoying. I’m quite good at making annoying things, and getting better at making bright things, so I saw this brief as a chance to develop my skills further, also wanting to get my head around Illustrator a bit more whilst learning Aftereffects as well.

I started off my research with children’s programs that I already knew of (Pocoyo) and had recently come across (YO! Gabba Gabba), looking at the style of animation and the narrative. YO! Gabba Gabba gave me an Idea of what I wanted my sound design to be like, and how to use simple animated elements. Pocoyo just embodied cuteness itself. I also looked at idents for Cbeebies and CBBC, to see how the channels branded themselves and the style of animation that was used, which was pretty much anything goes. I was struggling to come up with ideas at this stage, so looked at other cute things that interested me, like the Kawaii not comics by Meghan Murphy, and the Katamari Damacy game intros.

Katamari Damacy really helped to get my ideas going, the style of animation was quite simple but looked really good, with lots of hyper-rainbows and dancing pandas. My first idea was based on the Cbeebies’ yellow blobs, Katamari’s hyper-rainbows, and YO! Gabba Gabba’s strange costumes. I wanted to have some actors in animal costumes having a tea party in a park, but since I couldn’t afford to rent costumes (at £25 each minimum), and as masks were likely to be more scary than cute, I had to abandon this idea.

I instead decided to look at the programs that were on CBBC on a Sunday morning, hoping to use the characters from the show in my ident. I spent the next couple of weeks recording the shows, going through them and cutting out images to use. This part of the project was the most painful, as children’s TV is incredibly mind numbing, and boring, and nonsensical. I had to watch the Chuckle Brothers!! The pain!

I ended up only using a few of the programs from the Sunday morning line up, to save on time animating and to keep the ident shorter. After I had the images I wanted I storyboarded the new idea which was based on the idea of rainbows flying around and text popping up and characters bouncing around the place.

Animating the idea was a bit daunting as I’ve never used Aftereffects before, and there were lots of elements to work with. But it turned out that it’s not as complicated as everyone makes out and I got my head around it in pretty much a day. If I could make the ident again, I’d like to work on the sound design more, I think what I used works with the images but it would have been nice to make something of my own.