Idents
I have changed the background sound and adjusted the sound effect for the following idents.
Evaluation
The purpose of Television Idents is usually to help establish and to promote the channel brand identity, along with helping the viewers to identify the channel as they usually appear before a show starts. It also reflects/ establishes the channel's ethos. The target audience is targeted and reflected through Idents; therefore it helps the audience to connect to the channel. Additionally, they help to fill gaps in the schedule and to maintain the continuity of the broadcast schedule. As well as providing imagery for the announcements that appear during the credit roll of a show.
The typical design feature of a Television Ident includes a logo, colour scheme, tone, duration, text based vs. image based. Logo is a very important factor of an Ident as it tells us what channel it belongs to. The colour scheme is part of their brand identity as each channel has a different set of colours that represent them. Tone is also something that needs to be considered seriously when making an Ident as every channel has an different audience so, it needs to match with their audience and the type of shows that they show for example, since ITV3 is aimed at adults and shows programs that are usually of a thriller and mystery genre, if they made a bright bubbly type of Ident for their channel it would spoil the atmosphere of the drama.
The opportunity that Television Idents allow is that, it can be used to showcase creative talent of new and existing artist as they are given a great amount of creative freedom within the given guidelines. Some channels allow audience participation through their Idents and this enables them to grow fond of the channel as they are able to communicate with them. An example of this would be CiTV as they allow their viewers to part take in a Ident competition called ‘C things’. The kids summit their drawing and the winner gets to have their drawing featured on the channel as an ident. They animate the drawing to turn it into an ident and have the kids name appear on the lower third of the ident. Also, unlike Break Bumpers which only appears on commercial channels, Idents are generally shown on every channel.
The limitation of Television Idents would be the duration as they usually last for about 15 seconds or so. Therefore, you would have to keep them short and memorable. This makes it hard for the artist to fully deliver their message as they won’t be able to fully express their message across. It also hinders the artist’s creativeness as they won’t be able to explore as much as they would like to as they have to keep within the given duration. Typography is also the other thing that will be a limitation as you would have to keep the text short due to the limited timeframe.
2D animation techniques have evolved a lot during the past years. The traditional techniques such as flick book, cell animation, hand drawn rotoscoping, drawn on film and photographic stills were handmade and didn’t need a computer to view it as, the viewing system was connected to an electric source which would make the film run continuously. But now, due to better and advanced technology we can produce 2D animations through digital techniques such as 2D bitmap graphics and 2D vector graphics.
The pioneers of the above techniques were great people like Joseph Plateau, who invented the Phenakitoscope; William Horner – the creator of Zoetrope; Emile Reynaud – the inventor of Praxinoscope; Thomas Edison – the man behind the Kinetoscope; Edward Muybridge – he took pictures of humans and animals in motion; Lumiere brothers – the inventors of Cinematography.
The developers of the above techniques include well known company and people like Walt Disney – they are widely known for their animations and are still releasing animations, Hannah Barbera Production – an American animation studio that took over the industry for decades and made great cartoons like the Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Top Cat, etc. Warner Bros – their most famous animation was the Looney Tunes, Norman McLaren – a Canadian animator, Len Lye – he was known for his contemporary work such as Monty Python, Yellow Submarine, A Scanner Darkly and Persepolis.
The planning that I undertook during the preparation of producing my Television Idents was the proposal. It includes a shot list of the 3 animation, a CiTV audience mood board, background information about the channel, target audience and the channels ethos. Along with a brief description of the animations, an equipment list to show the equipment's that I will be using, the technique that I will be using to produce my animation and the pros and cons of the technique.
CiTV has a very random style of narrative, which consists of basically animated things like plants and animals doing their daily life stuff like eating, swimming, flying etc. The subjects are always alone. Plus, they always end with the subject making a noise like burping, screaming or saying kaa to produce the channel logo. Therefore, my choice of narrative also follows this pattern, except for the alien ident as I wanted to make it more interesting so I added another character in there. The ident that closely imitates the CiTV ident style is Kaa, the bird ident, as the bird just flies in the sky then screams Kaa and the logo appears. So it seems like an extract of its daily life. My Alien ident is basically about an alien landing to earth and a guy spotting it and screaming out the logo. I chose this narrative because I wanted it to be audience friendly. Hence, I featured a small non scary looking alien and a stickman. I also chose a comedic scream to make the ident look funny and this works due the guy screaming a beat late so it looks like he finally registered what he had just witnessed. The frog ident was also made to be funny because kids at that age usually laugh at silly things like burp and fart noises. Therefore, I created my frog to burp and my cousin who fits the target audience actually liked it but his favourite was the alien one because of the screaming stickman.
My characters are very basic because of the audience and the CiTV conventions as they use characters that everyone knows and are usually animals. Thus, I chose an alien, bird and a frog as my characters since they are mostly liked by young boys. The visual style is quite childish and not drawn well to appeal to the young target audience. So, it looks like it was drawn by a child and sometimes they are as I mentioned before CiTV holds a competition called ‘C things’ from time to time. This competition lets the viewer draw the ident. As for the sound, CiTV’s ident doesn’t feature any background music but has ambience sounds and sound effects to fill the gap. It also features sounds made by the characters. I produced my idents in Adobe Flash as CiTV creates their ident using this technique. I have never made flash animation or used the program before so it was challenging to use at first. However, after watching several tutorials on YouTube and reading blogs on how to use the program, I was able to animate my drawings. The animation isn’t as smooth as I was hoping for it to be but I am quite proud of the finished product.
Feedback from target audience
Frog Ident
They said that the animation was good along with the burping sound effect as it made it funny. They also said that it would have been better if the frog had made more movements i.e. leaping from one leaf to another then burping the logo.
Kaa Ident
They said that the bird was flying too slowly and that it would have been better if the bird was flapping its wings. The good points were that that colour scheme was bright and appealing along with the drawing of the bird.
Visitor Ident
They liked the sound and the storyline as it looked interesting. The tree looked real and the alien looked like an octopus. They would have preferred the UFO to look more realistic and the alien’s eyes to move.
Feedback from peer
They said that my idents were timed well, the choices of shot types and cuts were good along with the sound. It looks suitable for the targeted audience. The close up at the end of the idents was good because they could see the logo better. The medium close up in the bird ident was good because the clouds that were still in the shot were moving. Thus, it felt real. The flow of the animation was good overall, the motions were smooth. The pointers that they gave me to improve on were that the frog has a disproportionate head so it would be better if I could resize it. It would look better if the background was more realistic and had more details like other birds flying, more leafs, have grass on the ground, if the sky was colour gradient it would look more real. The bird looks robotic because of the straight slow movement. There is no free motion.
The strength of my idents would be the colour scheme, sound effects, narrative and my choice of shot types as they were pointed out to be the positive points of my animation. The idents were overall loved by the audience so I believe that it was fit for purpose and audience.
The weakness would be the motion as many pointed out that they would have loved the characters to make more movements like flapping their wings. The visual lacks details like having grass on the ground so this hinders it from looking professional. Overall, I am satisfied with what I have produced because they turned out better than I imagined them to be. Also, this being my first time of creating an animation it was a rewarding experience, learning new program and challenging myself. However, I don’t think that I will create any more animations in near future as although it was a fun experience, I didn’t like the whole process of creating the ident frame by frame and it was a very stressful process for me.
The typical design feature of a Television Ident includes a logo, colour scheme, tone, duration, text based vs. image based. Logo is a very important factor of an Ident as it tells us what channel it belongs to. The colour scheme is part of their brand identity as each channel has a different set of colours that represent them. Tone is also something that needs to be considered seriously when making an Ident as every channel has an different audience so, it needs to match with their audience and the type of shows that they show for example, since ITV3 is aimed at adults and shows programs that are usually of a thriller and mystery genre, if they made a bright bubbly type of Ident for their channel it would spoil the atmosphere of the drama.
The opportunity that Television Idents allow is that, it can be used to showcase creative talent of new and existing artist as they are given a great amount of creative freedom within the given guidelines. Some channels allow audience participation through their Idents and this enables them to grow fond of the channel as they are able to communicate with them. An example of this would be CiTV as they allow their viewers to part take in a Ident competition called ‘C things’. The kids summit their drawing and the winner gets to have their drawing featured on the channel as an ident. They animate the drawing to turn it into an ident and have the kids name appear on the lower third of the ident. Also, unlike Break Bumpers which only appears on commercial channels, Idents are generally shown on every channel.
The limitation of Television Idents would be the duration as they usually last for about 15 seconds or so. Therefore, you would have to keep them short and memorable. This makes it hard for the artist to fully deliver their message as they won’t be able to fully express their message across. It also hinders the artist’s creativeness as they won’t be able to explore as much as they would like to as they have to keep within the given duration. Typography is also the other thing that will be a limitation as you would have to keep the text short due to the limited timeframe.
2D animation techniques have evolved a lot during the past years. The traditional techniques such as flick book, cell animation, hand drawn rotoscoping, drawn on film and photographic stills were handmade and didn’t need a computer to view it as, the viewing system was connected to an electric source which would make the film run continuously. But now, due to better and advanced technology we can produce 2D animations through digital techniques such as 2D bitmap graphics and 2D vector graphics.
The pioneers of the above techniques were great people like Joseph Plateau, who invented the Phenakitoscope; William Horner – the creator of Zoetrope; Emile Reynaud – the inventor of Praxinoscope; Thomas Edison – the man behind the Kinetoscope; Edward Muybridge – he took pictures of humans and animals in motion; Lumiere brothers – the inventors of Cinematography.
The developers of the above techniques include well known company and people like Walt Disney – they are widely known for their animations and are still releasing animations, Hannah Barbera Production – an American animation studio that took over the industry for decades and made great cartoons like the Flintstones, Yogi Bear, Top Cat, etc. Warner Bros – their most famous animation was the Looney Tunes, Norman McLaren – a Canadian animator, Len Lye – he was known for his contemporary work such as Monty Python, Yellow Submarine, A Scanner Darkly and Persepolis.
The planning that I undertook during the preparation of producing my Television Idents was the proposal. It includes a shot list of the 3 animation, a CiTV audience mood board, background information about the channel, target audience and the channels ethos. Along with a brief description of the animations, an equipment list to show the equipment's that I will be using, the technique that I will be using to produce my animation and the pros and cons of the technique.
CiTV has a very random style of narrative, which consists of basically animated things like plants and animals doing their daily life stuff like eating, swimming, flying etc. The subjects are always alone. Plus, they always end with the subject making a noise like burping, screaming or saying kaa to produce the channel logo. Therefore, my choice of narrative also follows this pattern, except for the alien ident as I wanted to make it more interesting so I added another character in there. The ident that closely imitates the CiTV ident style is Kaa, the bird ident, as the bird just flies in the sky then screams Kaa and the logo appears. So it seems like an extract of its daily life. My Alien ident is basically about an alien landing to earth and a guy spotting it and screaming out the logo. I chose this narrative because I wanted it to be audience friendly. Hence, I featured a small non scary looking alien and a stickman. I also chose a comedic scream to make the ident look funny and this works due the guy screaming a beat late so it looks like he finally registered what he had just witnessed. The frog ident was also made to be funny because kids at that age usually laugh at silly things like burp and fart noises. Therefore, I created my frog to burp and my cousin who fits the target audience actually liked it but his favourite was the alien one because of the screaming stickman.
My characters are very basic because of the audience and the CiTV conventions as they use characters that everyone knows and are usually animals. Thus, I chose an alien, bird and a frog as my characters since they are mostly liked by young boys. The visual style is quite childish and not drawn well to appeal to the young target audience. So, it looks like it was drawn by a child and sometimes they are as I mentioned before CiTV holds a competition called ‘C things’ from time to time. This competition lets the viewer draw the ident. As for the sound, CiTV’s ident doesn’t feature any background music but has ambience sounds and sound effects to fill the gap. It also features sounds made by the characters. I produced my idents in Adobe Flash as CiTV creates their ident using this technique. I have never made flash animation or used the program before so it was challenging to use at first. However, after watching several tutorials on YouTube and reading blogs on how to use the program, I was able to animate my drawings. The animation isn’t as smooth as I was hoping for it to be but I am quite proud of the finished product.
Feedback from target audience
Frog Ident
They said that the animation was good along with the burping sound effect as it made it funny. They also said that it would have been better if the frog had made more movements i.e. leaping from one leaf to another then burping the logo.
Kaa Ident
They said that the bird was flying too slowly and that it would have been better if the bird was flapping its wings. The good points were that that colour scheme was bright and appealing along with the drawing of the bird.
Visitor Ident
They liked the sound and the storyline as it looked interesting. The tree looked real and the alien looked like an octopus. They would have preferred the UFO to look more realistic and the alien’s eyes to move.
Feedback from peer
They said that my idents were timed well, the choices of shot types and cuts were good along with the sound. It looks suitable for the targeted audience. The close up at the end of the idents was good because they could see the logo better. The medium close up in the bird ident was good because the clouds that were still in the shot were moving. Thus, it felt real. The flow of the animation was good overall, the motions were smooth. The pointers that they gave me to improve on were that the frog has a disproportionate head so it would be better if I could resize it. It would look better if the background was more realistic and had more details like other birds flying, more leafs, have grass on the ground, if the sky was colour gradient it would look more real. The bird looks robotic because of the straight slow movement. There is no free motion.
The strength of my idents would be the colour scheme, sound effects, narrative and my choice of shot types as they were pointed out to be the positive points of my animation. The idents were overall loved by the audience so I believe that it was fit for purpose and audience.
The weakness would be the motion as many pointed out that they would have loved the characters to make more movements like flapping their wings. The visual lacks details like having grass on the ground so this hinders it from looking professional. Overall, I am satisfied with what I have produced because they turned out better than I imagined them to be. Also, this being my first time of creating an animation it was a rewarding experience, learning new program and challenging myself. However, I don’t think that I will create any more animations in near future as although it was a fun experience, I didn’t like the whole process of creating the ident frame by frame and it was a very stressful process for me.