6B) Evaluation of ident group work

Explain what you have tried to accomplish through the suite of idents  (Group Member 1- Roopa)

When were were reading the scenario from the brief  which was set by the client because it outlines all the requirement that are needed to complete this project which is to create a suite of ident to promote and brand Christ the king.

During our first meeting with the client, we were able to discuss with him any amendments and negotiate any changes that we felt that were right in order to complete this project. after this meeting we were able to plan our idents because we finally got to know what he wanted, so we set schedule which included deadline for each stage and when a job had to be done.

We were on track with our schedule, this allowed us to accomplish new skills such as I am going to the producer and one of the animator because we have decided to edit one ident because this will be more effectively to the editing process. I have learnt many skills such as communication and how to present to the client as we are working with an actual client who set the brief.

As the target audience is 15-19 prospective students, we need to create idents which will promote CTK, we have used the brand identify (CTK logo) for the college which will be reflected in the content which is created by the college to put on the YouTube channel; we will be creating continuity as we will using the same colour scheme/typography because this will mean the they are linked.

When we was creating this suite of ident, we needed to make sure that we was conveying a message to a non visual audience, you need to consider and make sure that the suite of ident has a clear message which suggests the theme and brand identify.
The pace and density of information of the suite of idents is useful because it allows the audience to understand the theme and brand identify of the channel.


Evaluate how you conducted your roles (Individual) Roopa

My role
- producer
-animator
-editor
-lighting technical

During this whole process, my roles were producer, editor assistant and animator. My main role was to be the producer, this involves being for responsibility to make sure that everything is done and to maintain  to hire or but camera equipment or props.

I have to able to make sure that the project is on schedule which means that I am basically in control of the all of  the paper works, which was needed for pre production and the production plan. During the production stage, my role was to get all of the equipment and location booked out and to assist with the shooting production.

I will need to write an risk assessment on the locations that we are going to be using to film our suite of ident because there is could be hazards that could end with one of the crew getting hurt so it is important to take photos of it so we can avoid it when it comes to filming. 

 How have you worked to try and achieve what you set out to do – explain decisions made with detailed examples from your own work (Group Member 2-Shanee)

Our design is clearly recognisable as a suit of idents this is due to the way that the visual style is consistent throughout. It has a clear sense of continuity with the colour of purple, which appears throughout. The visual style is also consistent throughout, which ensures that each of the idents is clearly linked and can be by the audience. They all begin and end with the same concept, which makes them identifiable to each other. This is to create brand loyalty within the idents as the audience will see a clear between them all.

Tone was another thing, which we aimed to maintain throughout our idents while making it appealing to both the client and the target audience. We wanted our tone to be energetic, lively and vibrant. This was done mainly by our colour and visual style, which comes across with these traits. 

Diversity and Lifestyle, our theme, is also clearly demonstrated throughout. We have used multiple races, ethnicity and gender etc. and the activities are all school related, demonstrating lifestyle. We decided to use a wide range of diverse characters within’ our idents to show our theme of diverse. This prevents both legal and ethical constraints surrounding this area from affecting us. It also means broadening our audience as it means that audience’s from all races, ethnicities and genders will feel included. It also means that the school isn’t represented falsely. For example having only boys may give across the view that it is an all boys’ school. 

On top of this a clear Brand Identity is shown throughout our suit of idents. The use of purple in our idents represents the school and demonstrates our identity of independence and devotion. The actual concepts show this to as each of them demonstrate students showing them traits. Example, the art show one demonstrates a independent student how is clearly devoted as she has decided to stay behind after school to work on her art project. We decided to go through with purple as it is the main identifier with the school and therefore it would help in creating brand loyalty with the audience.  It is also very vibrant and eye catching, which would appeal to our particular audience. We also went ahead with the use of students working alone to demonstrate their independence and devotion. We then used the surroundings coming to life in order to make these traits appealing to our target audience. These, however, could have been improved by foregrounding the main themes to a be

Theme and Brand identity could have, however, been improved as none of them were clearly foregrounded and therefore although the audience got a sense of them, they were not as clear as they could have been. This could have been improved if we had gained audience research before the creation of the project, solely on our ideas and came up with clear concepts based on it 

Another thing we have worked to achieve is to make it appealing to target audience. The use of colour is appealing to our particular audience along with the characters and the visual style. We have used vibrant colours such as our identifying colour, purple. This is so to make the how video more eye catching for the audience. The characters are also very appealing to the audience because they are of the same age and are therefore are relatable to the audience. Finally the visual style is appealing to the target audience because it has a good concept, which means that it will make them think, therefore catching their attention. This was all confirmed through our audience feedback collected through a survey. 

Finally, the production was clearly appealing to the client shown through the feedback we have received from them, with no negative feedback what so ever.  however, this was on the rough draft and we do have some things that could be improved and have been made apparent through the audience feedback and our own views.

Evaluate how you conducted your roles (individual)- Shanne

I feel that my contribution to the role of assistant director towards the product was overall successful, however there were some things that could have been improved.  Some things that was important when completing this particular project was our skills, contribution, professionalism and organisation and there are both strengths and weaknesses in both my role and our group for each of them.

In terms of skills, we done quite well when it came to sectioning out everybody’s individual skills. For example, Calvin was the camera director as he had the most camera skills. However, this was a slight downfall because everybody in the group didn’t have the same skills set. Personally, I wasn’t as good an editor. This meant that some of the idents might be lacking under certain conditions. For example, when we were filming the ident with Calvin in it, Maya had to film and each of us had to edit our own ident. As a result, each of us had to learn our lacking skills. On one day, we all decided to learn how to do animation. It turned out okay but could have been improved, had we had a lot more practise.

I feel that we all, including myself, done quite well when it came to contribution due to our organisation and professionalism. This was due to the fact that we had weekly meetings. If these were not done, we would have been able to split up work evenly, like we did. When it came to the editing, due to this, it did take a lot longer than we had planned but otherwise it went quite well.

 6b ) Evaluate the success of the process or responding to the brief and the effectiveness of your group organisation - informed by the feedback of others (Group Member 3: Maya)

The success of our production management, response to the brief and our group professionalism organisation was that our suit of ident was very consistence through out which shows that our audience can recognise as Christ the King channel by doing this it creates a clear theme of diversity and lifestyle which as group we think that we delivered that theme to our target audience. This is very important to have a theme because it makes it easier for audience to recognise as ident and create brand identity. We branded the college as let they be life, which is phrase on the college logo also, use the colour purple to create brand identity of the channel. I think our ident was fit for purpose as we meet the brief and done more research also due to our survey most of our target audience all agree that it is recognisable as ident and create brand loyalty and gives them an insight of what college produces.

However there are some weakness of production management response to the brief and the groups professionalism/ organisation, which are we had negotiated with the client with time duration down to 20 seconds instead 30 seconds as we through it would be more effect if the ident is shorter especially because we making animation.  Another weakness is that on the brief is say that has be seasonal ident include the 4 season through out the year but negotiate with making 4 suits of idents which was successful. I think as a group we manage our project well but next time we could be better with time management especially with editing as realise that we need more time for editing and wasted time. Also we could have done better on time management with booking location and back up location for example the art room we had to book in advance.      

From feedback from client and our target audience I can successful say that we produces a good product for our audience giving all the information need in each suit of ident and our theme and brand identity of the channel is clear and consistence. However, one thing I would do next time as group is get better understanding is what we are trying to achieve and what message we sending to our target audience. 

Evaluate how you conducted your roles (Individual) Maya

As my role I am the director of this project and my role and responsibility is make sure that everything goes smoothly and goes to plan. This one of the important role when producing the product as the director needs to make that acting is on point and at professional standards. This is because if the director is not making sure that actors do put 100% the gives a bad reputation of the director. As an director it’s a huge role to play as you need to persuasive and need to be in control. As director they will be opportunities such as, recognition from other film industry.

My contributions to project brief was explained an idea that our team thought it would be a good to promote the school as a positive place that young people can study at Christ the King. I also made my own mood board for my team to look at and from there we done our pitch. For my theme and idea I chose lifestyle as I the time spent at Christ the King it mostly lifestyle of CTK I experience such as, art exhibition, sports torments, talent show, fun ways to learn. 

As a director and an editor i think the strength of my ident i produces was up to standard as i kept up with the style of an object and i think i really bring out theme which was diversity and lifestyle. Another strength was i used different camera angle in my ident which it made it more effect especially with the colour splash add a bit of more life. However the weakness i had to face was i started rot-scope and found out that we did not want to use that technique so we wasted a week. Another  weakness for my ident is time management as we did not get the room given and we had schedule a different room such as the art and graphic room which delay our shooting plan. I think my ident is one of the strongest as i include more camera shot also has some nice animation in my ident.

Comparing, to the Crime Scene the strength of this ident that Shanne was  responsible the outcome of this was oneof the best ident that i filmed as well as Roopa, The strength of this on was that we had MES and and represent what the college produces. Another strength was that the animation and the colour splash it really came alive. However we really struggled with this ident due to that we think it would not tie in with the ident. We also struggle with the music as it did not fit with the crime scene ident so we found another one that it fitted in. However, there some strength of this ident which the camera shot and the animation was very professional.     

 


However, in this ident  i filmed this ident and made up the choreography for this ident we filmed plenty of shots. i think this ident that Calvin done was the best ident. as the animation was amazing comparing to the other ident. especially with the animation playing with him which was fun to watch. However ther was major difficulties with the camera shots as some shots we could not use as it was shaky and brightness of light was not level. So we hard time trying to fixed it, but lucky we had other shot we can used and animated over it.



The last ident we done was the football which i direct it and Calvin and Roopa edited. I think this ident could be improved as we could added more animation to it to make more fun to watch. The downfalls of this ident is that the ident was not upload on time for Calvin to see it to make sure that it was up to standards for each idents. The impact of this was that we could add that much animation to it. However there was some strength that we came across of no discrimination and diversity which had meaning behind it, 

Overall the process and outcome was successful and we work well as team which it made it easier to communicate with each other even-though, we had some arguments we still kept it professional. I think as a team we deliver to the brief and the outcome of project was successful.        

 V. Explain the changes made to the ident resulting from various constraints and unforeseen challenges. (Group Member 4 – Calvin )

During the making of the four idents, we went through different constraints/challenges such as copyright, ethnicity and location.

As for copyright, we originally plan to have four different soundtracks for each of our four idents but it did not go to plan as we realised it will break the consistency/continuity and also the soundtracks we chose was copyrighted. At first I felt using one soundtrack will not suit with all our four ident especially the crime scene ident as happy music do not usually fit well with thriller crime scene.

In able to include a soundtrack for our suite of idents, we will need to be aware of copyright, the owners can choose to grant permission for others to use their work. Usually we will have to make a payment for the right to use the material after we write to the copyright holder and ask for permission.

It has taken us a while to find the right soundtrack to fit with our idents as we were looking for a vibrant, lively and happy music. We eventually found one that could also work with the crime scene ident. As of now, our four idents has the got the same soundtrack throughout to help our consistency/continuity and it is also copyright-free as we search on YouTube for copyright-free soundtrack. We do not have to worry about the owner of the soundtrack as it is free which gives us the right/permission to use it. The soundtrack is called 'Happy Upbeat Background Music' which was created by Audio Lounge Music.

If we had gone with our original plan that is the four soundtracks, we were going to use without asking permission to use it. Our suite of idents would have likely be taken down and we could be sued.

Next, we have location; the only problem was the location for the Art Ident. Our original location was the art room, an actual art room. We did not film in that location because it was always busy with art students who were doing their work. We even booked the room to film, yet the room was filled with students doing their work due to exams. This affected our schedule as we did not filmed that day due to the room was taken. We had to find another location to book and film in, this means that we had to do another risk assessment etc. We eventually found a room that is quite similar to the art room, which was a room for photography students. The room was a good backup choice as the room is still an art setting.

Using this room helped us save time for our schedule and was a better option than us had to wait until 5:00pm for the art room to be free; some of us was not able to stay until 5:00pm due to other plans.

Last but not least, we have ethnicity; we needed to have the right talent for each of the idents to avoid from offences being taken and discrimination from our final product. For example, we shouldn't just have male talents throughout our suite of idents or one race (skin colour) throughout. As our theme is diversity, we will need to portray both genders equal and as we live in a multicultural city, we need to be careful when portraying different religion so we don't portray Christ The King as a single-faith college sixth form. We need to be careful as it can cause a lot of problems and controversy. We had to make sure each of our ident won't be offensive and doesn't discriminate other people's background, gender and their religious belief.

This made us find different talents to helped build our theme which is Diversity; Our 1st ident (Art) include a black/light-skinned female drawing, the 2nd ident (Talent Show) include a black male dancing. The 3rd ident (Sports) include a female playing football which represent equality and our 4th ident (Crime scene/Media) include a white

Evaluate how you conducted your roles ( Calvin Individual)

Throughout the whole process, my roles were Camera Operator and Editor/Animator. I was the camera operator for only two of our idents which were the Art ident and the Sports ident. My main role is the Editor as our group believed that it is best suited to me as I have experience in and passion for video editing. I have used many different types of video editing software at home such as Sony Vegas Pro, Adobe After Effects and Cinema 4D. These softwares together can help create videos to stand out, which I believed our suite of idents is stood out from the rest. I used two editing software After Effects and Sony Vegas to help create our suite of idents. I have also used CINEMA 4D along with Photoshop to help create the CTK TV's logo and the 'Up Next' bumper.

Roopa, Maya and Shanee were my assistant editors as they helped contribute to the final product. I sent them each rough cut of our idents and they did some animation on each ident using Photoshop. Then they sent me their finished version which I’ll add more animation to it and also do visual effects to make the products stand out.

This whole process helped me to have mixture of practical and creative skills such as learning how to animate with paint brush and also learning how to use rotoscope brush. This process also given me the ability to work under pressure and meet tight deadlines, which are skills needed to be an video editor.

We had some problem such as when we were doing this animation technique known as rotoscoping (earlier in the post-production stage), we realised rotoscoping is very time-consuming as we wasted quite a lot of time, some of us took longer than other which slow down the process. We eventually had a meeting to discuss that we won't be doing rotoscoping anymore as we wasted a week of doing rotoscoping and it was good enough for professional standards as we didn't even use it in the final cut. We then decided to just do animation as it was quicker and less time-consuming for us. Although we wasted a week which I'm not happy about as it's seems unprofessional, we still managed to meet the deadline because we still had a lot time as we finished filming earlier than expected which gives us more time in our schedule.

I would say my weakness in this process was me being a perfectionist when I was editing all of our final cut idents. I did worked quite slow which I do need to work on. I wanted to make sure our suite of idents is at least professional standards.