Design Production for Digital//Top 10//Ident 3 Initial Experiments I.

Decided to blog my design development on a daily basis as opposed to a "by- ident" basis to avoid both confusion on my part, helping to keep me on top of my work, and also to work more methodically and clearly than I otherwise would.

Starting work at the very beginning with my intro frame introducing the different 'Top 10' subjects- one for each subject matter in the idents (of course, for this module I am only making four- but could propose the other six for the televised programme)- this Ident (#3) being 'The diet'. After creating my assets in Illustrator (which will be posted on the blog as a PDF at a later date) and experimenting with the design, I found the background looked a little too light- and I wanted something a little more atmospheric. 

I also applied this to my sea background for the section where the penguin swims through eating the fish in a Pacman- like way- again, this more vignette look, I feel, is more appropriate than the radial gradient (light> dark) which makes the image look a little convex- again, this looked much better, in my mind, than the original design (shown in the video example above).

As each of the fish vector images in my composition were imported as separate layers (so that they could each be individually manipulated in terms of position and opacity), I soon discovered the merit of using colour- coded layers, which will help me to distinguish certain groups of assets from the other.

Again, more tweaking as I was working through the video- I felt that by changing the gradient of both of the backgrounds that the black fish felt a little too dark, and dulled the blue tone backgrounds behind them- tried experimenting with different fish colours- white was too bright and harsh, but the softer grey (R201 G201 B201)  fit well into the colour scheme (if straying a little from my initially strict colour palette- though very similar). Exploring different fade in and fade outs in terms of Audio, I started to apply my soundtrack- a xylophone version of Scott Joplin's 'The Entertainer' to my design, with the penguins 'eating' the fish (as their separate opacities drop from 100-0% as the penguin layers travel over them).

Reasonably happy with the design direction I'm following at the moment- but I want to crop out the initial title (not necessary/distracting) which will give more time for the penguin sequence as well as integrating the CBBC logo and TV show text more effectively- oh, and I need to get a MASSIVE move on.