Ident: Final Version

This is the final version of our ident, which we physically filmed using a light box and pieces of coloured plastic, as planned. However, we had to cut it shorter than anticipated, meaning we didn't get to use the full length of our stop motion animation. To achieve this effect, we filmed the sequence as normal, and then sped up the footage 4x on Final Cut. The name we decided on, as before, was "Elemental Studios", due to the four colours representing the elements. Originally, we planned to form the name of our company out of the pieces of plastic themselves, but we found this was too complicated and made the title look virtually unreadable. Therefore, despite initially wanting to avoid using Motion, we nevertheless ended up having to familiarise ourselves with it. In order to achieve the above font, we wrote out the name of our company, added a background glow and then deleted the text itself in to mirror the effect of the lightbox. We programmed the text to move towards the audience slightly as the ident played because no movement at all made the whole thing look rigid and unnatural, and this was the simplest, least distracting motion we could use.

We combined the Motion graphics and filmed element in Final Cut, cropping the image in order to centre the circle of plastic on the screen. We then heightened the colour saturation of the red tones on both components in order to give the entire image a warmer, brighter and therefore more eye-catching ambience. In the end, I think the ident turned out significantly better than we could have anticipated; despite being fairly clearly made by a low-budget company, its rough, distressed, shadowy style suits the tone of the rest of our film perfectly.

AF