I feel a lot more confident on after effects now and am working quicker. I think I'm going to go back and edit my other idents now that I have learnt more in the tutorials I've been doing. I feel as if in the first ones, I was trying to show off every effect I learnt in the workshops, rather than creating professional, realistic idents. So, for that reason, this ident will be kept simple, and I will use an initial storyboard.
I've started with creating a background, this time just pink not patterned. I've used a filter on photoshop to add edges, to make it a bit more interesting than just a plain background.
I thought about adding the hand writing effect I had learnt, but it would mean the piece would be quite slow compared to my others. I would also need to change the font, as I want to make sure all four idents work as a sequence. I will start by making the other assets for this ident, then maybe add in this effect, as learnt in an online tutorial, when I am finished.
I now think that this idea is far too simple compared to my other idents, so maybe in this ident the focus can be on the text rather than the imagery.
I added the hand writing effect, but sped up the pace.
'The' drops in from top at the start, and the diamonds grow and twinkle, as I continuously alter their scale and rotation.
The cupcake starts off in the distance, and flies in towards the front. I've done this simply by altering the scale, position and rotation. The diamonds also appear, a feature I thought about right at the start in my design direction boards. The cupcake then flies off screen. This is inspired by watching the movement of the coin in the Hustle intro.
I have added this count down effect to add emphasis to my show being about the top ten. I think the countdown effect might be slightly too fast, so I will lengthen the amount of time each appears on screen slightly.
Now its too slow! I have decided it looked better how it was before.
I have played around with a few effects for how the ? which appears after the 1. could disappear, rather than just altering the opacity, or shrinking the scale, as I have done so many times already. I've come across the block dissolve effect which I have edited so it is quite subtle, but still makes an interesting change as a way to exit the screen.
For the title, the letters drop in from the top, one by one. A lot of the movements I am using are related to what I have been doing in my silent movie sequences.
After the title has been on screen for a while, there is short blank space where I can include some imagery, but before deciding on this, I have decided to create the end.
I have been wanting to fade out the end of my idents but I wasn't quite sure how to make it look right. When using a black solid layer, it looked too dark.
I then had the idea to go in to photoshop, and to create a grey layer, but to use an effect on it to make it more interesting than just a plain background. This works much better, and I think I should go back and apply it to the other idents to make sure they all work as a set.
Now that the video is nearly done, there is that blank space to put the images in that I need to go back and work on. The space is just over two seconds long, which seems like quite a long time when editing in after effects! I want to be careful not to over complicate what I put in this gap though as there is already a lot going on in this ident, so I have gone and looked back through my storyboards for inspiration. I am thinking about the cupcakes just appearing in a row, as in the storyboard inspired by the Jamie saves our bacon intro.
As I've already used a lot of my ideas in my other idents, I think this would be a good place to start. Hopefully I can get the action to link in with the music.
As planned in the storyboard, this starts with a close up of the cupcakes, then they travel at speed across the screen.
The view zooms out, and allows for all the cupcakes to move along the frame in rows.
I have decided to expand the scale of the cupcakes, and lower the opacity. I am finally happy with my ident, I just need to make tweaks, such as making sure all timing is perfect, and sorting out the twinkling diamonds
Here is a screen shot of a complicated pattern that makes the diamonds shrink and enlarge and twinkle.
Here is my final video. This is my favourite ident, so I think I will go back to my other idents and alter them so that they are as good as this one.
I ended up making a few changes to the end of the ident, as I realised I need all of the idents to look the same at the end. I've altered all of the endings.
Final Video:
