1. In this report, I will be documenting the process of making my ident for
Gritt TV. This includes screen shots from Adobe Flash, the software I’m using
to make the ident. As this is already a finished product, the document is a
demonstration of my techniques and the tools I used to create the ident.
The Loudspeakers
I want my project to follow my
storyboard as closely and accurately
as possible.
I started off with the loudspeakers by
drawing the outline ofthe box using
the line tool. I resized the box to
make it look more like a typical
speaker, and also so that I could
work on the finer details. Next I drew
two sets of circles using the oval tool
to represent the outputs and three
smaller circles on the side for the
‘inputs’. Afterwards, I had the gaps closed so that I could colour it in, then I
had the loudspeaker duplicated and flipped it horizontally.
IPod Dock
For the next part, I quickly drew the
iPod dock. Afterwards I drew the ipod.
I made a rectangle using the line tool.
Afterwards I made the edges by
drawing a circle, duplicating it into 4
shapes, aligning them with the corners
of the rectangle, and selecting the rest
of the shape I didn’t need and deleting
them, creating neat and accurate
curves.
After modeling the rest of the shape
into the likeness of an iPod, I focused
on the display. When playing a song without a design cover, the iPod shows a
musical symbol in its place. I wanted to use this since its simpler and neater
compared to creating a proper design cover. I made the symbol in a similar
method to the shape of the iPod: I drew the straight parts of the shape first,
and then I sorted out the round parts using the circle technique from before
(drawing and duplicating a circle, aligning it with the shape and erasing the
lines I didn’t need). After colouring and resizing the iPod and the dock, and
importing the minimalized Gritt TV logo onto the dock, this was the final
product (bottom right square). The minimalized Gritt TV logo was made to
appear clearly enough in small sizes, which the full logo wouldn’t have been
able to do as well.

2. Motion and paint
Once all the main objects I needed were in place, I had the
view zoom out away from the objects using classic tween. I
did this by resizing the objects at the end of the tween. I also
moved them slightly to create perspective.
The next part is the paint streamsreaching into the inputs in
the loudspeakers. Animating this was difficult, as I was looking for a technique
similar to ‘plant growth’ animations,
however the methods I found were
complicated and lengthy. Instead, I first
drew the streams according to my
storyboard, to use as the midpoint of the
animation. Afterwards, I separated the
frame into individual sections, where I
would erase different parts of each
individual stream. The first frame was
almost completely erased to the start, while
the last frame was erased up to the inputs.
The end result is a smooth fluid animation
of the paint streams flowing out from the
ipod dock into the inputs.
Pointing Hand
The storyboard didn’t originally have a storyboard. Originally the Gritt TV logo
was meant to show up on the iPod and then play through the speakers,
however, I didn’t include since the logo would already be appearing twice (on
the iPod dock and as a paint splatter at the end). Instead I had a ‘mouse
pointer’ come in and play the iPod. The pointer was from the Internet. The
image was imported, rotated and flipped so that it was pointing left. The
reason I wanted to use a ‘mouse pointer’ rather than a picture of a real
pointing hand is because I wanted it to represent communication through
computers. I had to make sure that the picture itself was also royalty free.
Music Playing
After ‘zooming’ out more, the speakers begin to
play. The idea was to have paint streaming out
while it was doing this. This was done by drawing
short ‘sine waves’ for each individual jet using the
brush tool, and copy and pasting it over each other.
After this on the next frame I shifted the streams
forward while adding a little to the back. The result
is a repeating pattern of rapid streams of paint
coming from the speakers. As for the speakers
themselves, I set a short frame with classic tween,
where the speakers would ‘bounce’ to the ‘music’. I
did this by resizing the speakers while making them
appear taller, and creating another frame that
reverses them back to their normal size.

3. I animated a short sequence of expanding circles representing sound waves. I
drew the circles in the first frame and expanded them each time for three
more frames. I coloured them grey in the last frame to have them disappear
smoothly.
Finally as this was going on, I had a ‘sheet’ of
dripping paint come down from the top of the
screen. This was done by carefully drawing the
drips at the bottom, while roughly drawing the
edges of the shape and filling it in black. This
didn’t matter, as the edges won’t fit onto the
display area. As for the logo, instead of having
black paint slide down and reveal the logo (this
would have been complicated due to the
arrangement of layers) as I had originally
intended, I had a ball fly in, representing a paintball, and splatter into the
Gritt TV logo (done by having the logo quickly expand through classic tween).
I stuck with this since its more relevant to the design of the logo as it was
already a paint splatter. In order for it to work, I inverted all the colours for it to
show properly on the sheet of paint. At the end, to compliment the ‘splatter’
effect, I drew grey dots in the foreground to give the impression that drops of
paint had also landed on the screen. After drawing all the dots, I selected
them all, converted it to one symbol and made them slowly move down the
screen. Then my ident was complete.
Sources:
http://www.clker.com/clipart-3730.html