Ident Practice

As said previously, we wanted to try a video in the style of stop-motion animation. Before doing that properly, however, it seemed logical to try and film a practice run using an iPhone and its pre-set time-lapse setting (which took a picture every few seconds). 

We wanted to use a lightbox and clear, coloured plastic cut into mosaic pieces to form our ident. There was no pre-tinted plastic available to us, and so instead we made a circle out of plain plastic and covered it in different shades of acrylic paint ourselves, using a sponge to avoid overly visible brush strokes.

 The original intent was to make the four colours represent the four elements, consequently naming our studio something along the basic lines of "Elemental Studios". However, as we initially wanted to spell the name of our company at the end with the pieces of plastic, we decided that name was probably too long. We still need to think of a solid idea for what to call our studio but, as this is only a practice, this doesn't pose too much of a problem at the moment.

 After we finished sponging the paint onto the plastic, we tested what the circle looked like on the lightbox. The smudges of the sponge actually looked significantly better like this; the plastic has an obviously handmade feel, suiting the overall independent-production ambience that our finished film will likely have,

 We then cut the circle up into piles of vaguely triangular shapes to form the mosaic. At first, we thought we might try to keep the relative shape of the circle, but that soon proved impractical.

We ended up with four piles of coloured plastic shapes just like these. As they were smaller than the original circle, any smudges or imperfections mattered even less.

We put the piles of pieces onto the lightbox to see how they looked andm in fact, the streaks of paint have a nice streaked effect reminiscent of bamboo paper. In all, we were pleased with the aesthetic value of our idea, and so proceeded to test the more mechanical part of it; actually filming the time-lapse sequence, albeit without the title of our company actually coming up.

Here are the three pracrice runs we did. The one that seems to work best is the first version, because it isn't too fast (like the second one) or badly centred (like the last one). In the real thing, the name of our company will come up once the circle of mosaic is formed. 

AF & DY