ED Ident Evaluation

At the beginning of this project I was unaware of the work and planning that went into creating the perfect ident for TV channels and other similar projects. It was interesting to be introduced to idents for the first time, having not previously had experience creating them, and I was excited to start a new challenge.
 We started to do research on the different types of ident, such as the BBC's old and new creations by Martin Lambie-Nairn, and also other TV channels such as E4 and Channel 4. We looked into the reasons behind the styling of each ident, and how the colour, soundtrack, movement represented the channel it was advertising. We also looked into the cost of producing an ident, and further into how Lambie-Nairn changed the BBC ident from italic to straight boxes to save almost 1/3 of the cost each year.

 When we were given the brief to create an ident for our ND television and film course to encourage school leavers to apply for a place at PCA, we had to plan what we wanted our ident to advertise about the course. Working together with Tash, we decided that the main aspect of the course that appealed to us when we first applied was that the course wasn't just for people who already knew everything about cameras and film, but for people who wanted to learn those things as the course progressed. So we started to look into various existing course ident such as the popular animation ident for a year 1 course in Birmingham that was circulated on youtube.com. We didnt get much in the form of inspiration from our search so we started to list all of the pro's of the course. Eventually we came to the decision that we wanted to include everyone from the group in the ident, to enhance the feeling of "Everyone is welcome" and set about creating a storyboard.    

 At first we wanted to have each person say one word about the course, but as we realised that this might not make sense, we changed the idea. Instead we decided on a pre-written paragraph that was created with the help of some words chosen by members of the class, read out by a few people at a time and filmed in different parts of the college. We wanted to paragraph to be short and snappy, but grab peoples attention at the same time, so we decided on a few short words such as "creative" and "imaginative" and then go more in depth about who we are as people and why we enjoy the course. After giving our pitch to Tim, he asked us some questions and challenged us to think about why we had chosen to present the course like we did. He also gave us some advice on who should say what and where we should place them to give maximum effect.

 During filming we changed some of our plans last minute because we came across a few problems with sound being recorded and timing with a few groups, to counter the problems we simply got the groups to practice counting to three and then saying the words together. It took around an hour to film all of the Ident, I think this is a relatively short production time but because the idea was so simple, it didnt take very long for us to get a few takes of each part. When we started to edit we realised that we should have left a few seconds on either side of the speaking, to ensure we could have edited each piece together easily. Because of this the editing is a little jumpy and not as smooth as we wanted it to be.

 If I was to re-film this ident I would leave enough time to edit and also would have tried to include more people from the group in the ident. Overall I really enjoyed learning about the work that goes into idents, and feel that our ED Ident really expressed the course well, and showed what we had learnt from the research that we had looked at.