This project for me was primarily concerned with getting familiar with After Effects and to that extent the project was a success. Prior to this assignment my knowledge of After Effects had been entirely limited to what the interface looked like from afar. However now, after following a few tutorials both in class and online (mostly www.creativecow.com) I have proficient enough knowledge to navigate comfortably around the interface and find what I am looking for with minimal difficulty. Having said that of course there are a lot of things I have yet to explore within the program as it is by all accounts a very intricate and professional piece of software and will take a long time to learn fully. Something I would have liked to touch on more in this project is the scripting (expression) system used to create dynamic events. Fortunately the path I took in the creation of my indent didn't require much more than the odd simple rule at best. While I am not entirely satisfied with the aesthetic outcome of my final product I am pleased to have been able to steer the design very much towards my original storyboard and even improve on it with some nifty effects I have been taught through tutorials. Even though I said I wasn't entirely satisfied with the end product I do however think it was more or less a success. There are just a couple of design points that I would have liked to go over again, specifically a more definitive ending that doesn't (as it seems to now in my opinion) just seem to trail off. Although I was pleased with the graphics used I would have liked to have been able to merge the text and the background image better so that they seemed more "as one". Although ultimately this isn't a problem as the viewer knows what he's seeing isn't supposed to be at all life like. It is still pleasant however to have something that looks plausible. Overall I was impressed with After Effects as an application easily picked up for beginners and on it's remarkable hidden complexity which I would love to explore further in future briefs. The project was a real eye opener as far as special effects creation goes, never before having . Although I found this brief interesting in essence I also found this one of the most stressful briefs yet. For some reason I found coming up with the idea's surrounding the design near impossible. I realize from this brief that I much prefer working with interactive design over this more static based media. However I also found out a lot about just how dynamic this program can be. All in all I found the brief to be one of the hardest yet, even though I'm not entirely sure why. This is not a project I fancy revisiting, but it's certainly a project I'm glad I did visit at least once.

For this project I intend to chose the "Fear Season" ident. I picture this as being the one most suited to things I have attempted in the past and so should have a better idea from early on where I plan to take this. At a first glance I would quite like to see myself doing this project using live filming as this is something I've not ever really utilized to it's full potential before having always found film quite daunting to work with. As this project will require me to use After Effects, a program have not formally used to any major extent, I would also quite like to experiment with some of the more advanced features it has to offer. However, like with most things, I don't think I will include many of the experiments in the final. I will however try and cater the product towards a much more simplistic style. In past projects I have had a tendency to over complicate my ideas and end up with little time left before the deadline still working away at an idea that is ultimately out of my reach, so in attempt to correct this I will not in anyway over complicate the final product but instead just experiment on the side with the advanced features of this powerful new tool.

These images have been taken from Wikipedia and they document in brief view the transition of style the ident has taken over the years with the BBC. I'm hoping this will prove a useful resource for myself (and anyone else who wishes to view it).

Due however to the dire way in which blogger handles images, formatting will have to be revised at a later date. Bloody blogger!

BBC 1















1953 - The first ident, "Television Symbol", or the "Bat's Wings".

This is by far my favorite of the idents on display here. I find the simplicity of the indent much more intriguing than the over complicated and fanciful displays of the shear and massive amounts of cash that a company is willing to put forward to obtain the 15 second long intervals between shows.

















1963 - The first incarnation of the globe.

















1969 - The first colour ident.

Station idents (also called 'sounders' or 'stingers') are intervals between broadcast periods, shows and similar in both radio and television that identify the station. Station idents are often based around a central channel theme to help promote and build the channel. In US FCC law all radio and television channels are required to ident. The idea is that due to the overwhelming number of channels on both television and radio a listener should be able to tell which broadcaster he/she is listening to. It used to be that FCC demanded all channels to ident every hour within a 3 minute window. Law's have since relaxed to some degree, but many stations in the US still abide by this practice. More recently idents have become ever increasingly prevalent as a means to advertise future broadcasts on the station by means of combining channel ident with feature ident.

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