My Final Ident Video

This is my final ident video. I started with creating how the final image would look (see posts below) and then worked backwards at how it all would be animated. In all fairness I did thing about the animation from the beginning though we were supposed to concentrate only on the final image- From when I started to draw the first faery, I knew I would have to get her to wake up then close her eyes again. Whilst drawing the outline I decided that a small wing flapping should be in the motion as well.

To animate this I put all the faeries into one Photoshop file, in their correct order and on top of each other. This helped as I had to use Photobooth on the macs instead of the scanner, so the images wouldn't have been aligned properly otherwise. When everything was in the right position, I exported each layer as a transparent-enabled .png 24 file. Then, after importing them all into Final Cut, I arranged them into the timeline, and then went backwards so that the reverse would work after the first 5 frames. Then using the pen tool I added fades in the video so that the overall effect would appear much smoother.

Finally, to create the sound effects, I wanted the timbre of the music to be normal at first, and then warp into something slightly strange, but not so strangely that the audience feels that the ident is out of place, as they are generally slow and subtle. In order to create this effect, I went into the program Garageband, and used one of the samples I found on there as a starting point. This was from the drums section and was quite fast paced. I think this would be fitting as the beginning of my ident as the 'normal' music, but I wanted it to fade out, and not simply by using the volume fading pen tool in Final Cut, as I think that then the music would be uninteresting. I had heard about a musical device before called 'Flange', which creates a bubbly sound effect on a track. After seeing that this effect was available within Garageband I used it as a fade for my track. Therefore, I feel that I was successful with the original intent I was going for with my production ident.