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.