IDENT CARDS

At the end of every ident on tv a screen comes up displaying information such as the name of the programme and what day/time it's on.
Each individual channel has it's own distinctive style and philosophy. For example - The latest BBCONE idents are all based around an idea of a circle. The circle symbol was decided upon as a 'symbol of togetherness', but also a 'nod' towards the channel's heritage and in particular, the use of a globe logo for much of its history.
Where as more 4 has a very different approach. The re-brand is centred round a bold, flexible logo that morphs through a series of flips, folds and reveals. The colour palette reflects the vibrant nature of interiors, food culture, fashion and other contemporary lifestyle programming.

I've already vectored the MORE4 Logo so I may need to look at how the programme information will be shown when shown.
I want different ident cards at the end to differentiate each one from the rest.

The one rule I considered throughout every ident is to make it believeable. That means sticking to the channel's style. Unfortunalty some things are unavoidable such as using the exact same typeface because of low funding.  To achive the look I first visited manvsmachine's (The company responsible for the rebrand) website and took a screenshot of an ident. like so.

I then placed the screenshot into illustrator and created a new blank layer.
I turned down the opacity of the layer containing the screenshot so I could see what goes where. This helped me to place the logo and information exactly where they are meant to be.

THE FINISHED RESULT!
I'm really pleased with how well they match up. obviously there are a few differences (type, leading etc) but I expected that.

SOUND.

Sound plays a big part in idents. It can complete what you are trying to communicate to a viewer, or you can mislead them completely. Say for example - My top ten is Natural Disasters. So you wouldn't expect the Benny Hill theme tune to be running over footage of devastating disasters.


JON SNOW'S TSUNAMI DIARY





It would be interesting to hear a naration of a news reporter talking about the individual disasters over powerful, high impact visuals for added effect. 0.05 - 0.15 is perfect for what I want to achieve. It's the disaster in a nutshell but adds that extra impact.


Extracting the MP3.
To be able to work and play around with the audio behind the video I first need to extract the audio and convert it to mp3.
I did this by using a fantastic site called Listen To Youtube.

Listentoyoutube.com enables users to extract audio from youtube videos.

First of all I entered the URL into the site and clicked GO.

The site then began to extract the audio from the video.
This can take a while depending on how long/big the video is. In my case the video I used was 24 minutes so it took a while.

VOILA. It's that easy. I now need to download the extracted audio.

Now that I have my MP3 I can now drag it into after effects and play around with it.

Japan ident process|BACKGROUND PROCESS


This is the process I went through to create the background animation for my Japan ident.

I started by creating a new composition with all the default settings.

I then created a seperate composition for the photos I will be using. I made sure to label the photo comp to keep the whole thing organised.

I imported a photo into after effects by using the import option for it become an ASSETT. I then dragged that photo into the timeline.

Shortening the duration that I want the image to appear in the 10 seconds. In this case I only want the image to appear on the screen for 5 frames.
I continued this process for another photo - like so:

I continued this process until I had something like this.

This is the animation that will go behind my type and solids.

final test

PHOTOANIMATION FOR IDENT from Simon Cherry on Vimeo.

Colour Test

Instead of using a static photo background I've used a flat colour background with white type and vectors on top. I thought this would make things more simple but it's removed the impact completely. It's also looking alot like a BBCone ident. This is something I don't wish to continue with