Change of heart

After reflecting on my attempt to film my ident and speaking to the class about the look and feel, we all decided that to get the red and white contrasting enough and to get the colours exactly right it will be much better to animate the whole ident. This can be done for all of the ideas that I have had, so I will not revisit some of my ideas and see which I feel will work the best as an animated ident. 

Pitch Feedback

Now that I have pitched my ideas to the class, I feel like I have a few things to think over. Everyone liked the idea about having strong branding and making the channel colours the main focus however they felt the video that I showed didnt work as well as it could have. We spoke about the changes I am planning on making to the video but they suggested to go with one of my other ideas as it looked a little like a ladies "time of the month" which is not what I was aiming for at all!
The other thing that was bought us is that I have come up with a lot of ideas but I will not have time to do them all, my tutor asked me the question "how many of these are you actually going to have time for" and I was stumped, this is something that I actually hadnt thought about and now I am looking at it, I will only have time to make a complete package for a couple of them. So going on from this I asked which ones were the favourites and I have narrowed it down to four that I will continue to sketch up and work out from there which ones are best to develop. The four I haver narrowed it down to are the washing machine, the tattoo, the jelly and the lava lamp.

Filming

After some sketching and planning in my book, I decided to go ahead with my ice lolly melting to reveal the Latest TV logo on the stick idea. This is a very simple idea where there is a bright red ice lolly which melts over time (and is later sped up) to leave just a red puddle and a stick which has the logo etched on. The backgrounds will all be white making the colours specific to the show. 

To start filming this ident, I first set up a space where I could melt the lolly overtime without the light effecting the shot with shadows and dipping brightness. I set up a box with a waterproof white lining that could have lights shining down onto it with the camera above the lolly. I then left this to melt overtime although I did encounter a few problems along the way, the problems I had were:

• Lolly took a long time to melt
• Camera did not have enough space to store full video in one shot
• Due to camera movement there are a few jerks in the footage
• The lolly melted and ran off in one direction rather than the puddle I expected

However I have come up with some solutions for the next time I film this. What I have planned is to warm up a plate and put this under the waterproof lining so that it encourages the ice lolly to melt quicker and will also hold the liquid in a puddle rather than running off camera like last time. Increasing the speed of the melt will also sort the issue of not having enough memory on my camera and without having to move the camera to delete other videos to make space there should be no need for the camera ro be moved and therefore it will be smooth untouched footage. 

Here is the movie that I have now edited to be much quicker and I have also edited on the text for the lolly stick. 

Ident ideas

After looking at some idents on other similar channels, I found that they ones that worked most effectively were the ones that made you think of the channel straight away, with style and colours instantly making the link to the channel branding. 

Here is an ident from E4, in this ident you can see that their colour choice has made the instant link back to the cannel branding.

I have decided that this is such an effective way of branding a channel that I am going to go down this path for Latest TV. Their current branding which they would like to keep is a bright red, white and Verdana font. 

To keep this strong theme I will make my idents almost completely red and white so as soon as they come on it will make people think of Latest TV and the logo will be created using a Verdana font. 

In my book I have started to create a brainstorm of all things that are red and could be featured in my idents.

Brief- Latest TV

For this project we are working with live clients, we have been asked to create some ident packages and some programme packages for Latest TV. Latest TV is a show that has previously been online but has now ventured out to free view and have got the rights to channel 8 around brighton but it may stretch as far as eastbourne, their channel will be launched in January but they currently don't have any graphics, idents, lower thirds and stings.

The first half of this project will be creating an ident package to brand the show. This will include idents which are 10 seconds long that can feature a voice over and a 3-5 second ident that can be played on its own in ad breaks, the package will also include a 1 second sting which can be used to quickly flash up between shows or ads and a lower third that can hold information such as what show is coming up next.

The programme packages will all have an opening title sequence but will all have different requirements depending on the nature of the show.

I am very much looking forward to this project as I feel it will be good fun and is also a very big opportunity for our work to be shown to a lot of people. My biggest concern with this project stems from the previous live client projects, where the clients are not very forth coming with feedback and let you wonder off in a different direction to where they want the work to go. To try and overcome this I will try and keep in good contact with Val to make sure that our visions are going in the right direction and the work is what she wants and expects.

Evaluation

I am sad to come to the end of this project as I have really enjoyed this one. This project has played to my strengths and has let me run at full creativity. 
I am extremely pleased with the concept I came up with as I can not see that it has been done anywhere else and I feel that it is exactly the step above the competition the company has asked for. 
My target audience is the parents and relatives that have young children around the age of one and those who have children with learning disabilities. Based on the UK average pregnancy age being at 29, this puts the average target audience for my cards at around the age of 30/31 which sits nicely in the allocated 16-34 giving room for siblings of the parents to also be included in the target audience barrier. 

I am very pleased with how my card designs have come out and there is very little that I would change about them. I have left the message area inside blank so that people can wring their own personalised messages which in my research was a big selling point. The designs are fun and interesting and have left large enough sections for the textures to be felt in and they have all be built around the recommended 3mm bleed. Here are my finished designs for both front and back covers and inside the cards.

I have also made one of my cards physicslly to show how the textures will work and the size of the card, I couldn't be happier with how well it has come out. Here is a photograph of my finished card.

PDF Design

For this project we have also been asked to create a PDF explaining our product. This PDF should include our concept, font choices, card sizes, designs, envelope designs and im my case materials used. We need to make sure that any work that has been used from elsewhere is credited at the end and above all the PDF should be well presented. 

Following this I decided to write up all of my content under the following subtitles:

• concept
• target audience
• size
• font choice
• branding name and logo
• textures
• front of cards
• card designs
• envelope
• credits
• my details

I then needed to come up with a nice design for the pages of my PDF, I wanted the design to be simple but also relevent, so I decided that having the background of mainly green with my sheep, fence and sky at the top would give it enough to have a good appearnce without being distracting. This design also gave me a very good size for all of my text and images.

Here you can see some examples of my page layouts, my PDF is 15 pages long all together.