City Of Ideas

Earlier in the month I was assigned with creating a show package for City Of, and now that I have finished my idents, I can now focus on ideas for the show.
From the information given from Val, this is what has been requested by her.

"CITY OF - I can see this working well with the Latest TV ident style brands. They too are very quick appearing at the beginning of the show only. 3-5 seconds in length. Although we may want a ‘What’s on tomorrow’s City of ....’ So far the City of’s that we have are the following: City of Community, City of Music, City of Art, City of Film, City of Ecology, City of Health, City of Fashion, City of Food. Although these programmes may be largely factual programming, there may be exceptions to this rule - such as City of Comedy or City of Accentrics."

The main information here is that she would like the show intro to be similar to the ident style for the channel. With that in mind, I will be using a similar idea to the one I have created, which is the animating a drawing idea. As it is called City Of, I should encorperate more landmarks of Brighton into my drawing, and make it a compilation of all the landmarks into one big picture. As she wants the idents to only be a few seconds long, the sped up drawing should be much quicker than it usually is.

Lower Thirds

I have made a lower third for the station that could be used to show what would be on next etc. It features the main landmarks of Brighton to fit with the theme of my idents and is red to fit in with the colour of the branding for the channel.

Shorter Idents

As well as making 10 second idents, I have made each of them into 5 and 1 second ident versions. These were simple enough to do, and I used the same techniques as I did with my long idents. I used Time Stretch to make the video go even faster, and moved the fade out points on the audio to the 5 second point. I got rid of the audio completely on the 1 second idents as I felt that a 1 second ident would be too short to need audio.

Finished Idents

After all of the problems finding the right way to record my idents, I have finally finished my set of 4 idents. They are themed around Brighton, and include scenes of the Brighton Eye, Pavillion, Pier and Churchill Square.

finalidentwheel from Lucy Holman on Vimeo.

finalidentpavillion from Lucy Holman on Vimeo.


finalidentpier from Lucy Holman on Vimeo.


finalidentshop from Lucy Holman on Vimeo.

Editing my Idents

Most of the work I have done in After Effects has been speeding up clips and using masks to animate the text into the idents, but I have used some other techniques to improve the video.
On some of my drawing videos, parts of the sketch would flash up quickly as I was using them as a guide in the drawing. As the video was sped up, it would be possible to cut out the sketch without there being much difference in the drawing itself.
To do this, I selected my video at the point where it needed to be cut and used the "Split Layer" tool.

 

 I then proceeded to delete parts of the video that had the sketch layer on, so it would flow better.

 

 After editing out the parts that needed to be cut, my timeline would look like this when the video was split into different layers.

The mask I used for all of the text in my idents has a mask path which makes it so the takes comes in from one side, giving the effect of it being drawn in.

There is also a feather on the mask so it looks like the text comes in less abruptly.

Using Brushes Ipad App

Today I went into college to do some extra work on my idents. I have started to use Brushes for my channel idents, and I will have to redraw all of my old pictures onto the iPad. How the program works is that it records each of your brush strokes, which get shown on the playback. I can draw the image and then speed up the playback to show the progression from sketch to fully coloured drawing. I then email the video to Andrew and the video gets processed on the Brushes program for Mac. I have managed to draw four pictures, and I will begin editing these tomorrow for them to be ready to be sent to Val on Monday.

One of my drawings done in Brushes

Work In Progress Pitch

Today we showed our work to Val, and after having problems with being able to animate my idents, I unfortunately did not have much to show Val this time. I showed my animations that I made in Corel Painter, but I would like to avoid using Painter as I do not think the effects is as strong as it would be if I used Brushes instead.
Overall, the feedback I had gotten for my drawings was good but I need to use brushes to animate it instead of Corel Painter.

Problems With Animating

As I have not had access to the college iPads over half term, I have not been able to experiment with using the app called Brushes to draw my artwork like Andrew suggested. I have, for the time being, been trying out an alternative, which was to use Corel Painter's autopaint feature, and screen record the drawing being painted in. There are problems with this, however, as my screen recording size is not the same as 1080p and would have to be upscaled, so I should probably wait until I can use Brushes to animate my idents.