For my major project of my final year of BOA, I was tasked with finding a client for whom I had to design and produce an ident that could be used on any form of video content they create. The client I decided to ask was Mr. Deepak Pathak, who is the creator and CEO of WEWANA:PLAY. My reasoning for this was because of a presentation Dee did for us in which he explained the whole idea behind his company. Its safe to say it was very impressive. Naturally, we kept Dee and WEWANA:PLAY in contact and therefore made my choice of client relatively easy to choose. Having organised that Dee be my client, me and dee met for a meeting in which we discussed the different aspects of what he wanted from me when creating the ident. Full details of the meeting can be seen on this page.
Planning;
Having received a verbal brief from Dee, I have began planning an ident for his company WEWANA:PLAY. First I have been brain storming different ideas to play around with and will soon be beginning some storyboards. From my brainstorming I established the following;
- The ident has to give off a ‘fun’ and ‘friendly’ vibe.
- Must fit into the colour scheme of WEWANA:PLAY’s current logo.
- Some freedom with the logo itself if needed.
- Could possibly use a music tech student to create some music
This image shows the brainstorm and idea generation for the project.
This process was really short because a lot of the idea generation came from meeting with dee and looking at current idents from youtubers and gaming companies. These ideas are mainly notes taken from those sessions.
Following the brainstorming, the next step is to put these ideas onto paper by storyboarding. I will then show these to Dee and get his feedback, the one he decides is his favourite is the one I will proceed to develop fully.
Concept 1:
These images shows the storyboard for my first concept I produced and showed to Dee at WEWANA:PLAY. It was a very simple idea that I developed fairly quickly. It’s all based around the idea of lightning forming into energy, with the end result being a large event. As Dee had said before that he liked the idea of the ident having some form of ‘journey’ within it, I thought it was a relatively good concept. However, Dee felt that the idea had been done before and therefore decided it wasn’t something I should continue to develop.
Concept 2:
This is the 2nd concept I created for the WEWANA:PLAY ident. After Dee’s feedback from the first I basically created something off the wall that in all honesty, was something I didn’t think would work. As mentioned before, Dee liked the idea of the ident having some form of journey. As WEWANA:PLAY focus strongly on the gaming community, some form of journey to do with gaming was a good place to start. When I think of the start of gaming, I think of the game ‘pong’, a game with a pixel art style. From that came up with the idea of having a pixel art based ident, or at least something that incorporates it. I started with the idea of having a pixel art man running across the screen, jumping into the air and landing closer to where the camera is placed. During the jump he transitions from a small pixel art character to a cartoon style character who is fully animated. Once he lands, he punches the camera screen causing an explosions and the WEWANA:PLAY title graphics to transition in appropriately. Dee did like this idea, but he did feel it was missing some elements that could implemented to make it a lot more detailed.
Concept 3:
This storyboard was more experiment than a full fledged concept. I based it a little around the previous concept incorporating the pixel based character for an intro. However, this time I introduced a second pixel character, this is because of the slogan Dee wants included in the intro. The slogan is ‘I WANNA PLAY, YOU WANA PLAY, WE WANA PLAY’, so I had to find a way to incorporate this slogan into the ident without it breaking the flow. So I decided it would be a nice idea to have character talk to each other. They then combine and form into a console controller which for me is an easy to notice symbol for gaming, and that then triggers the introduction of WEWANA:PLAY graphical assets.
Final Concept:
These images show the storyboard of my final concept for the WEWANA:PLAY Ident. As you can see it incorporates a lot of ideas from previous concepts but with a lot more refinement. A collection of the best ideas from certain concepts was something Dee came up with and this is the end result. The ident starts very similarly to that of concept 3, in which a small pixel art styled character appears after small pixels join together. The character then runs towards a central point on the screen after which a speech bubble will appear saying ‘I WANA PLAY’. Following that, the same small pixels form another character who also runs to the middle. Again a small speech bubble appears this time saying ‘YOU WANA PLAY’. Following that, the first pixel character jumps into the air, and lands close to the camera. The character no longer looks pixelated or moves in an 8-bit fashion, but is fully animated. He/she smashes a phone into the camera that displays the WEWANA:PLAY logo. This is the point at which some heavy electronic/dubstep music will begin playing and the logo will the centralise and the background will fade out leaving the logo on its own. From there I am unsure as to what to do with the logo, my intention is to add some quick effects such as lightning or some form of glow around the ‘PLAY’ part of the logo as emphasis. But that will come once it is nearly finished and I can do some trial and error.
Ident Production
Application
To create my ident I used 3 different pieces of software. The first being Adobe Photoshop. I used Photoshop to create all of the small 8-bit styled characters that can be seen in the beginning of the ident. Below shows the sprite sheet I created with all the different characters and other graphical elements that I needed. Whenever I would need a certain frame of a character, I would copy that particular character and save it as a PNG file. Then import it into flash ready for editing.
The Second being Adobe Flash Professional. I chose Flash because of its 2D animation capabilities as well as how easy it is to pick up in a small amount of time. Below is a screenshot of the ident in production using Flash Pro and its easy to use frames tool bar.
All of the animation seen in the ident is created in flash. Using the multiple tools it provides. One of the tools I used the most can be seen in the screenshot below. It shows a small circle in the centre of the selected image. This is a pivot point that can me moved anywhere within the selected space. This allows you to rotate the image around that particular point, this is an amazing tool especially when dealing with limbs and similar things.
The third piece of software I used was Adobe After Effects. This software is great for creating fancy motion editing and cool effects that create an all round smoother experience.
This is where all of the title elements and special effects were added such as; slight glow on the word ‘PLAY’, zooming through space effect, screen shake on character landing as well. All musical elements were also added using After effects as it also doubles up well as a simple video editor.
The ident can be seen here
George M. Pollock 