King of Comedy Development://

Because my set of ident ideas are generally quite different,  I decided to tackle each one individually first starting with what I had initially thought would be the easiest one. So here are the development, mock ups and experiments for the film : King of Comedy

The basic concept is to show the subtitles at the start, accompanied by the audio, which would intrigue the audience as it's in a different language meaning that they'll be forced to read the subtitles to understand what is going on. I wanted to focus on the idea so keeping the motion as minimal and appropriate was essential, rather than letting the software take over.


King of comedy 01 from Tim Wan on Vimeo.
This is my first attempt, mainly to test out the timing and to get an idea of how my storyboards would compare for the other idents. I think it's worked rather well, the subtitles go well with the audio, which makes it quite interesting. From playing around with this idea, I have discovered that 10 seconds is an incredibly short time to play around with. I found that I had to limit the dialogue to be able to fit in the title in the end.

I am aware that there are so many things that need changing / tweaking and I'm looking to resolve this my experimenting more with AE and developing my storyboards when I need to. Things to consider:

Audio - should it continue till the end?
Title at the end - needs to have show time and channel 4 logo
Colours - Sticking with the original white on black text for the subtitles was the initial idea, but looks a bit bland.
Type - again, the layout and choice of type? Should I go for the realistic subtitles look or experimental/ aesthetics approach?
Timing - Still a bit tight with the timing, particularly with the ending, it feels quite abrupt.




King of Comedy ident development from Tim Wan on Vimeo.

Further developed this a bit, changing the colour of the type, but mainly experimenting with the ending. I've managed to get some fonts for Chinese characters so I've been playing around those along with the layout and title sequence. I am still unsure about several things, one of them being the audio and whether it's suitable as an ident. The 'Coming soon' page seems a bit rushed, with the subtitles and everything else before, I was only left with about 3 seconds to display the program information. It was difficult to achieve a suitable layout while fitting in all the information. Perhaps the solution could be to separate the information into 2 frames?


Ident Development from Tim Wan on Vimeo.
Again, a bit more tweaking around and altering minor areas. The starting point is pretty much how I planned it to be, but I'm still not sure whether to stick with it or try to be more experimental. I've also changed the background colour to white as I felt that the black gave it quite a dark impression especially as people won't know what the film is. The audio was stripped off for this one and it seems to work aswell, I guess this might be a point to raise during the crits. Finally, I spent a bit more time playing with the ending again, this time, I took away the 4 logo, so there's less distraction from the title. The website for the channel would then be displayed right at the end for about 1 second.

Development

After dedicating a few extra days on refining my concept through storyboarding, I have finally started to translate my ideas into digital. These were not really ideas, but simply a few experiments to test out the timing, getting a rough idea of how fast things will need to move and realistically how many seconds I'll have to reserve for displaying the title and channel four logo at the end.

You might have noticed that I've started uploading my videos through Vimeo now, I think the playback quality is better, the player itself looks a bit better than youtube and it actually displays the full video without cutting a seconds off the end. It'll take longer as they won't get converted straight away and that, but I think with good time management and a bit of patience, this shouldn't be a major issue!


Idea Experiment from Tim Wan on Vimeo.

Developed storyboards - Digital://

Further developing my storyboards - focusing on visualising the ideas, exploring the use of typography, choice of colours and design direction so far. 

DVD interface://

Developed Storyboards://

With these storyboards, I have decided and focused my ideas around the concept of incorporating the original audio along side subtitles at the start. This would act as the main theme throughout all the idents, which would make them easy to recognise as a set. The storyboards show how I have developed and tweaked some of my ideas, paying more attention to detail, timing and trying to interpret my ideas onto paper as accurately as I can.

The idea of each ident would start as a sequence of subtitles based on part of the selected film's dialogue. I wanted to films to speak for themselves yet didn't want to spoil it for the viewers, therefore only giving them a preview through audio and written text.

Initial Storyboards://

Initial storyboards; these were mainly for developing thoughts and concepts for the tv idents. Main issues with this was the challenge of interpreting my ideas and trying to think with motion in mind, secondly because the choice of films I have picked are quite varied, it has made it rather difficult to develop a concept that would allow it to flow fluently as a set of idents. What I needed was a concept/ idea that would allow me to experiment with in a range of different ways, working with the selection of films I have chosen.

The storyboards show a range of different ideas that I have explored briefly. I didn't want to spend too much time perfecting the timing and accuracy of the drawings, this was purely the process of recording down any rough ideas. The genre of films I have chosen are quite random and different, people who haven't seen a Stephen Chow movie wouldn't really know what to expect or know what to compare it with, therefore rather than trying to explain to them in the ident, I wanted to keep the audience intrigued and curious as to what is coming. Therefore one of the main ideas that I quite like was the concept of maintaining the original undubbed audio as part of the starting sequence of each ident. This would be accompanied by a series of subtitles at the start, syncronized to the audio but translating the audio for the viewers. 

Selection://

The 5 films that I have decided to base my idents on are:

DVD Schematics

First schematics plan, showing the layout of how the DVD interface would work. It seems rather complicated for something that I initially thought would have been quite simple. Not entirely sure about the layout still, but will see what feedback I get from tomorrow's crit://

 

Revised concept statement://

Subject://
A season of films that feature Stephen Chow.

Concept://
Design five 10 second idents that function individually and as a set that promotes the chosen genre of films. Chow is a well known actor in Hong Kong but in contrast is practically unknown in the UK, my concept is to promote a season of his films that would introduce a different approach to comedy towards a UK based audience.

Initial ideas://
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Audience://
Movie lovers who enjoy trying something new, people who are into international cinema and comedy. Considering broadcast on Channel 4.

Tone of voice://
Lighthearted, vibrant rather random, which follows the flow of Chow's usual films.

Considerations://
- Stop motion with motion graphics on top for titles, idents etc.
- Colours - vibrant, random, clashing, 80's, 90's
- Type - subtitled text?

Feedback response://

After receiving the feedback given based on the current blog posts and presentation, there are evidently a few key areas that I will need to revise on before I start generating ideas for the 5 idents.

Strenghts://
It seems that my strengths so far lie on the subject matter as the majority of the people felt that it was a good idea to base it on a fairly unfamiliar actor. I think this would be a good challenge as it's not a genre of films that have been worked on before as a season of films. It seems that I have a good sense of direction with where I'm heading so far, but with only 4 weeks left I think I need to start making some decisions of design direction and design context.

Weaknesses://
'I am still not clear on what Stephen Chows movies are like', I think this is both the main issue and the advantage of my subject chosen. As it'll be new to most people and quite different to any other Chinese films they might have seen, the main challenge would be to appeal to the audience and sustain their interest. On the other hand, I could adapt the style or use images taken from the films as part of my ident, which would make it more interesting and give the audience an idea of what they'd be expecting. The audience being too broad was an issue that was mentioned a few times, and I do agree with this. I think I really need to narrow it down a bit more, as this would affect my ideas and visual approach throughout the development. My research also seems to be lacking on examples of work, probably a good idea to do this as a record and also to help generate some visuals for my ideas, in general I think I need to update my blog a bit more on what I've been looking at so far. With 4 weeks left, I definitely need to start making decisions and start considering design aspects like: type, use of colour, imagery etc.

Typography module session 01://

Concept feedback://

TV Idents presentation://

Concept proposal for the brief on TV idents://