The things that went well in the project are the shotlist, locations and characters. Within the first few minutes in getting the assignment, me and my team had already started jotting down ideas on an A3 Paper. Our final chosen ident was the pixelation animation idea for where a college student is on his way to the college (City of Westminster) but is quite late. He does a variety of different moves such as walking crazy, hovering off the ground, sliding across the floor, etc. This really shows the creative aspects to it as well as the camera shots and angles, it really made shooting this project a blast! We used the Canon T4i (650D) which is capable of shooting 10 frames per second in pictures, which made this a whole lot easier!
The thing that didn't quite go well (or as planned) was the location. We had the opening shot of the character looking into the water. Little did we know that this area was a private residence so security approached us and asked for a permit. Not knowing this was private and we had no permission, we were then told to call the general manager of the residence in order to get the first few seconds of this ident done. The whole process took about 30 minutes therefore pushing our schedule back. Once we were accompanied by security, we shot our beginning sequence!
When it came to editing in the suite, I had to use After Effects to do a mask (for the CWC reveal at 0:47). I had to do this several times because either: it was not rendered correctly, the reveal wasn't as "fluent" or other problems that concerned the actual video itself. We had to re-shoot and shoot additional scenes quite a few times to finally get the finished production (above). Although it was a little stressful, but going that extra mile sometimes push things further. In regards to the pictures and rendering, it was a pain. Not only because there were hundreds of pictures, but on the actual final render as an animation would have a size over 20 GB for a clean 15/fps animation (the video above is 24). I do not have a video compressor so the only way I could upload the video onto YouTube (without having to wait 300+ minutes for an upload) is that I render it as a normal 24 frames per second video as a normal video. Quick, but downgrades the quality by a lot! In fact, one commenter on the video says: "Improvements could be made with the frame rates; more frames would allow the movement to flow a lot better." which is clearly stating the the FPS was not good.
In terms of feedback by other people, they liked the video but there was some disappointments. For example, some say the soundtrack was a bit too loud and others say it didn't fit the storyline. Apart from that, the pixelation technique was quite effective. Personally, I liked the critical feedback people have left because it will help me improve my work in the future. One thing I disagree with is the volume of the soundtrack. A commenter wrote: "...the music is a bit too loud." In my opinion, it wasn't at all loud unless the person had their volume on full blast. From other projects in the past, I have learnt about managing the soundtrack volume levels accordingly to the video and I think that this Ident's volume level did all right.
In conclusion to my Channel Ident, I have learnt now to research on locations to make sure that it's not a private location or if I'd need some type of permit to shoot on a location. Some people do not like photography and videography on their property so it's best to notify them in advance before making plans about shooting there. I'm not much of an animation person but as a first-timer for a movie-like pixelation animation, I think I did moderately well but, of course, there are things I could improve on.
