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.

live brief evaluation (or i'll be glad when this is over)

The main thing that I think of when I think of this brief is having far too many ideas and things to learn and nowhere near enough time to carry it all out. I really wanted to try to stretch the brief as far as I could, to really take my web skills further and see what else I could do instead of just a nice layout and working links.

My first ideas were very much wanting to show the mix of the real and virtual in my life, and not really concentrating on the everyday boring routines but looking at the traces left by my scurrying around the place and the weird things in my head, which naturally affect my perception of the outside world. I was also interested in the idea of leaving traces on web pages, which found it's way out in my new addiction to twitter, which I started using as a tool to track my thoughts about just about anything and also my ideas and research for the project.

I also started using myspace and facebook more as it was suddenly classifiable as work since it was an example of “web 2.0”, although I didn’t end up using them in my project at all.

The final product is something like my original idea but not. It’s a lot simpler than I had originally planned, my original idea was to have lots of random pages and having them all interlinked, almost a representation of my mind or memory. The final product is still pretty random, I tried to keep the text to a minimum apart from the pop ups, I wasn’t about to explain myself or anything on there, I wanted it to be confusing.
Some of my ideas such as the singing kokeshi and myspace feeds had to be abandoned as I was running out of time and it was making everything far too complex. I had to simplify my ideas into something I could actually make instead of something that I couldn’t get to work.


I think in the second year of this course I will definitely be doing interactive design, as much as I like motion graphics and am starting to like video I’m starting to become obsessed with the possibilities of interactive design. After looking into the twitter API and getting an idea of how web 2.0 works and how different sites can be mashed up together and used as well as looking into the work of Brendan Dawes and John Maeda which focuses on the more experimental uses of digital media. At the start of the year I was still interested in web design but wanting to see if I would be good at anything else, and after messing around in other areas for a bit I’ve found that I’m more obsessed with web design than ever, as everything else I’ve enjoyed this year can easily be brought into web design, which is something I tried to do by using video and second life in my website as well.

Video editing is hard :(

I entered this project with some enthusiasm as video is something I’ve been interested in quite some time but never really experimented with. But was a little worried about the group work side of things, wondering if there would be conflicting ideas or if I would be left whimpering in the corner as my work got trashed and twisted into something else. I worry too much.

Another concern was my insomnia, which insisted on me sleeping at stupid times instead of following a normal sleeping pattern, resulting in me being unconscious in bed while some of the lessons were taking place, and just generally making myself a bit stressed worrying if I was causing the group to fall behind. Once again I was worrying too much! Steve was very understanding of my little problem and never seemed too annoyed when I would show up at three in the afternoon.

But the group work itself didn’t really pose any problems, me and Steve worked well together and genuinely liked each others ideas, and listened to each others feedback. It was interesting to see his take on our idea, which was “anger at technology”.

While we were developing our ideas and getting used to using final cut, me and Steve worked on two separate films, which we were then going to edit into one film. Unfortunately we were supposed to be working in a group of three, but our third group member never made an appearance. But we still had a bit of a democracy functioning, the parts we both really wanted to be included (me – synthy sounds, scary growling man, “techno”, Steve – penguins, fade outs, explosions), were included in the final edit. And we both got a say on the final edit, we’re good friends so weren’t afraid to say what we really thought about the film.

I think our idea development could have been a bit more structured, it was more a process of each other exploring what the theme meant to us and then bringing our ideas together. I’m still having some difficulty with the idea of storyboarding everything first, to me it seems much more effective to try the idea out and see if it works then planning everything before hand, especially since we were using stock film and not shooting anything of our own. I think for the second part of this module where we actually shoot everything ourselves will have to planned a lot more, and not just knocked together on a whim. But for this section at least I think my approach worked well.

The programs we used for this project (Final Cut, DVD studio Pro) seemed a bit overwhelming at first, lots of confusing looking buttons and two preview windows and for quite some time not knowing how to get rid of the “un rendered” screen of agony and woe and the annoying bleeping sound. I found final cut very frustrating to use as a new user, although the basic functions were easy enough to figure out, wanting to make something specific happen or just preview the film without exporting it all was confusing. Hopefully all this frustration will pay off in the second part of the module.

If I was to do this project again I would like to have been able to attend all the lessons I missed from being unconscious, I do have a sense of not really being there for this project which annoys me as I’ve still worked hard. I would have also liked to had a little more time if possible, and seen if I could get myself to storyboard my ideas and maybe even do it in a group.