OUAN406 - A Tale in The Sting: Idents

OUAN406 - Idents:

After receiving the brief and given three out of four potential choices (channels/clients) to create animated idents for, I chose the Discovery Channel, CBeebies and of course E4. I chose this brief over the other two as I did not plan on conveying emotion through deep topics such as child abuse, third world country problems and so forth.

I personally am not a massive fan of campaign ads as I find that you can't really have fun and "let go" with them. You almost have to tackle the subject carefully and pussyfoot around it showing only empathy and sympathy whilst avoiding all giggles and fun whatsoever. The purpose of these ads is to persuade and inflict bucketfuls of emotion onto the audience to the extent that (in our family) some may even have to switch the channel over to avoid the immediate cringe one feels upon watching these ads. However, some are created with the intention of making the audience feel slightly uncomfortable and under said pressure, a specific audience may feel provoked into giving money to the charity/calling the helpline/playing into the ad's hands. I wanted to create something a little more light-hearted and fun, not something that would bog the audience down feeling sad and miserable for the entire day...

The initial reason for avoiding the title sequence brief was that I personally couldn't think of a single interesting book I had read that didn't possess the word count of say, the Magna Carta! I had books such as Dante's Divine Comedy and Homer's Odyssey running through my head yet still posed the same question of: "How on Earth will I portray this narrative in the space of 40 seconds!?" I wasn't entirely thrilled with creating an epic opening either as I prefer short, sweet and to the point. I personally feel that my attention span could not even achieve the likes of a 40 second animation as I would get incredibly bored of going back to one idea all the time. This is why the ident brief was simply perfect for what I wanted to accomplish, for whom I wanted to entertain/inform/persuade, and for the ways in which I could go about creating my animations.

The next step would be to look at idents and stings from all my chosen channels, compare them, what do they have in common? Who are they aimed at? Why are they appealing? Can I work to this level?