Back to the Drawing Board

I showed the sequence I had created to the class and my tutor today. It went down pretty well. Everyone in my class really liked it and commented on a few of the things I liked as being good additions. The teacher liked it as well. She had a few more criticisms and suggestions but overall she liked the style and direction. There were a few things that I saw wrong with it though that when I mentioned them to everyone they agreed. It was a really difficult balance to strike I think and when discussing it with everyone I mentioned this other idea I had been mulling over and they liked the concept. And so I decided to give it a go.

The worst case scenario was that the sequence I have now can be polished to work well. My problem is that I cannot see a great deal of growth possible within that idea and I wanted to try something different. 

I have realised something about this brief and idents in general. It is a very tricky thing to nail. You need to capture a feeling and concept fully in a very short period of time. This requires a certain amount of artistic vision and accomplishment with potentially some strong ideas and imagery. This infringes on another section of what makes a successful ident. That is the fact that this sequence is going to have repeated viewings by a lot of people and as a result needs to stay engaging yet simple and un-intrusive. Nothing is more annoying than a loud, obnoxious, jarring ident.

Now I'm not saying my ident is loud and obnoxious. I think the idea is strong and so is the execution. I have a few niggles with it. One is that it is very dark. This show that I am putting the ident forward to is an Internet show. That means that people will be watching this on all sorts of devices in all sorts of locations. Screen glare or low brightness could result in the ident being completely invisible. Another is that the sound effects and music aren't really engaging or catchy they can't really be timed and as a result could get annoying on repeated viewings. Also there is no real strong resolution or story being told with that setup and theme which is an issue. Some of the sinister and mysterious elements I feel got lost somewhere along the way. 

To fix this I have come up with a new idea. Well it was kind of on the back burner the whole time. To be honest it was more the idea I had at the very start of the project. I started filming on the black background to test the idea and got a little carried away. The time constraint of the piece and uniqueness of the scene made it difficult to show anything other than something in that scene setup and there were a lot of things that I wanted to show that weren't conducive to that type of environment. 

The main thing though is that I want to tell more of a succinct story that has some weight and ambiguity whilst maintaining a sinister style. All of this however, I want to accomplish in a more conventional setting and have it all be brightly lit.

Now just to be clear I am still really proud of the first ident and I think it works really well as a short film or artistic project however, I just think that it isn't as fit for purpose as I know I can produce. And so with that, I head off for round two.