Evaluation

Overall, I feel that this project went well even with the slight problematic start. Creating animated sequences with the iPad app Brushes was a new experience for me and I feel it worked well with the look I wanted to make, even thought it took a long time to get a working style for my idents. Once I had access to the iPads, I got a lot of work done, and I feel that my drawing I did for the City Of openings was my best one as I had more experience with the program at that point.

As I has having problems getting the right software, scheduling was a problem on this project. As there was a 2 week break in April, I had no access to college iPads and had to improvise by making makeshift idents using different software. Once I got back to college, however, I worked extra hours to get everything doe on time, especially when working with Brushes. There were also a few issues with exporting the finished drawings, as that could only be done at college as well. The limitations did make it more difficult to keep up with the deadlines, but eventually I got everything to work in the end.

Editing-wise, I feel that I did not use as many After Effects techniques as I could have, but as my idents are mainly focused around my own drawings, I did not need to use After Effects as much as other people on this project. Most of the After Effects techniques I used were masks, time stretches, and camera movement.

I feel that my finished work went over quite well with the client and that they liked the finished packages I created, and I hope they will be used in the future.

Finished City Of Openings

For my finished City Of intros, I have made many versions which have the different titles on them. They all look the same, except for the text at the end is changed. There are also two different versions of the openings, one is 15 seconds and the other is 5 seconds. The feedback given from Val was good, she thought the package was pretty much complete and the only alterations I made between Monday and today were that I changed the text placement to a more title safe area.

cityoffashion from Lucy Holman on Vimeo.


cityofart5sec from Lucy Holman on Vimeo.

Editing City Of Intros

I used similar editing styles to my idents, such as speeding up the footage to fit the 15 second  time of the intro. Te main difference is that I have added a camera to make the opening look more interesting.

The keyframes are set so that the start of the video is more zoomed in and pans down the picture, and eventually shows the full image.

Start of the video, camera is zoomed in to the sky and South Downs

Middle of the video, camera has moved down ad zoomed out

At the end of the video, I had to create an extra part of the picture in Photoshop because I needed to add more sky for the text to fit in. After creating the new image, I made a motion path to created the panning effect of a camera going into the sky.

Almost Finished Work Pitch

I have showed off my main sped up drawing to Val, and the feedback I got was generally positive. The main feedback given was that there was not enough room for the text on my image, so it was suggested that I make the camera pan up to the sky and that the text comes in on a blank sky background so it is easy to read. I should also get a full list of the City OF titles from Val so I can create multiple versions of the intro.
The other thing that came up was the fact that the intro at the moment was too long for the show, even though it was suggested for me to make it longer before. Because of this, I shall make 15 second and 5 second versions that could both be used in different parts of the show. The 5 second versions could started from when the picture is fully drawn and pan up to the sky to show the text.

Andrew suggested to add a camera angle to the ident to make it look more dynamic, so I shall look into adding a camera and who to pan it across the image.

Drawing City Of Ident

The drawing for the City Of opening was done in the same way as the idents, however I have had to structure my drawing differently so it will be drawn in the way that was suggested in the feedback. I started by drawing in the sky and South Downds in the background, and building up the picture in parts so the landmarks that were more in the foreground would appear last. As there is a lack of layers available on Brushes, I could not have sketch layers either, which made it a bit more difficult to draw.

My finished artwork

First Idea Pitch

To show off the concept of my opening, I used my original drawings from the channel idents, and put them all in one composition, whilst masking out the backgrounds of each of the drawings.

For my feedback, I was suggested to make the idents longer, to the length of an actual TV show opening (15+ seconds). Although the brief says they wanted short openings, I could make a set of both, ona having the picture drawn in, and one that's shorter without it. I was also told that the picture should start from the background, and then have the pieces of he city come in rather than the sky coming in last. The skyscrapers in the back do not fit in either, and I was suggested to scrap them in favour of having the South Downs in the background instead.

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.

FIrst Idea Pitch

After showing my ideas for my idents to Val and getting other ideas from my class, I feel that this is going to be a promising idea. Val seemed to like the art style I have used for my mockups, so I will try to replicated that in my final idents. However, I am still unsure how I am going to make the pictures look like that are going to be drawn in. I have a concept that I like, but I lack the proper execution as of yet.

Mockup Ident

So far I have mocked up a couple of idents. I have drawn pictures of the Brighton Eye and the Pavillion, and I have then animated it in After Effects to see what it would look like being drawn in. FOr my final ident I hope to find a way to record myself drawing it for the best effect. The length of the ident is 10 seconds.

Animation starts with the sky fading in

Each part of the picture comes in layer by layer

The final picture

Change In Style

After talking about my idea with Chris, I have decided to change my art style to focus more on Brighton landmarks rather than making it based around people so the idents look more local and recognisable as Brighton, as I have drawn a couple of sketches in my book of these places and got better feedback from these drawings than the art style I was originally going to use. I will look at photos of Brighton and draw them in a similar style to the artists I have researched.

Art Research

I have looked at 2 artists in particular, as I like their art style and the way they use colour in their pictures.
The first artist I have looked at is Christopher Nielsen. I like the way his art is drawn, especially how his character designs look unique and how the colours and strokes are used throughout his art.

The second artist I have looked at is Ben Mounsley. His art style bears a resemblance to Christopher's in the way that he uses bold colours and less outlines on his pictures.

In my art, I hope to use a similar colouring style to these pictures, by using less outlines on my pictures and the same sort of colours that are used in these pieces.

Ident Research

After the talk with Val, I have looked at some existing idents for channels, to look at their length and timing.

This BBC Three Ident is 21 seconds long, which is rather long for a channel ident. The talkover part of the ident is around 10 seconds long, which is around the time the brief states that the ident should go on for.
When watching BBC Three on TV, one of their other idents went on for around 20 seconds, so the usual time for idents on BBC Three is 20 seconds long.

Really's idents go on for around 20 to 30 seconds, as they are fully animated scenes that are similar to that of comics. The talkover time seems to be around the same as the BBC Three ident, lasting around 10 to 15 seconds.

Channel 4 has a veriety of length for their idents, varying from 30 seconds to 5 seconds. Again, voiceovers last around 10 seconds. For our project, we will have to make various ident lengths, so it is helpful to see what Channel 4 have done with their footage to make various ident lengths. Many of the short idents are just sped up or parts of longer idents, which would a good idea to do with our own idents.

Meeting Val

After getting our brief for this project, we had a meeting with some of the people that work at Latest TV. From this meeting, we got some extra information on the channel, and what would be needed for the idents and what shows would be on the channel.

As the channel is local, the main target audience for the channel would be the locals of Brighton. The content on the channel will have various audiences, so the idents for the channel should be varied to suit most audiences. The channel will run for 24 hours and as well as having original show,s there will also be bought in content. The channel will be commited to local news and shows 2 hours a day. The main font of Latest TV is Verdana, and the logo colour is red so it would be best to stick with these as they are the channel's current branding.

The shows the are being thought of at the moment are Brighton Lights, The Vote, City Of, Deep and Meaningless, and Shuvit (Name of show may be changed).