Ident Video Final Piece

Here is a link to my Ident Video

Feedback On My Work From People In the Industry

After showing my work to people in the industry, I was able to gain helpful feedback which will enable me to improve my main task and two ancillary tasks.

Pete Carvell is Marlwood School's IT Technician, you can see a link to the school website that he was responsible for designing here. The improvements he suggested that would help my production are:

• Images in the carousel need to be the same size
• The edge of the page needs to be in line correctly
• Darker colours of certain teams don't show up very well, therefore possibly scrap the different colours and add small specific team coloured basketball jerseys next to each team
• The background picture contrasts too much from either side of the page, it is too dark on the right and too bright on the left
• For the 'important dates' page the columns can be moved closer together to make it easier to line up which date equates to which event
• Possibly increase the font size of the text on the 'important dates' page
• Make the channel number 'channel 122' more visible and more clear on the page, possibly add it permanently to the top of the page by the name of the website and slogan
• Make each box at the bottom of the homepage the same size and length and line them up together

Steve Richards is a graduate in Film Production Technology from Staffordshire University and was very helpful when analysing and making suggestions about my ident video. His suggestions included:

• Make the shot landscape to fill the screen
• Ass different cuts next to each other, an alternative way of filling space
• Audio - use sounds of the ball dropping into the net, or the basketball trope of shoes squeaking on the gym floor

Tony Baxter is the Managing Director at Voodoo Designs. Here is a link to his company. Some of his suggestions included:

• Make the header/title more bold and eye catching as this should be the first thing that catches the readers eye
• Lose some text, it it too bunched up and is too close to the edge of the page
• Add a drop shadow effect to the smaller picture as it is too blurred in with the background picture

Ident First Drafts

These are my four ident ideas. I decided that all shots would be in slow motion as that is one of the main conventions of an ident video. There are two different shots, and two attempts at each shot. For the shot underneath the basket, I decided to do it again as I felt that the sound was not to the right standard, also the way the ball entered the net was not as 'pretty' as it could have been. As for the other shot, I was unsure of having a model in my piece as it didn't fit my purpose which was to be generic and simple. However, I did like the idea of the 'layup' shown so I retook the shot but focused on the basket, cutting out the model for the most part.

The reason I like this ident is becasue it is very generic and suiting of a TV ident, as there are no faces which make it lose its generic appeal. However, there are hands at the bottom of the shot which devalues the ident as it isn't quite purely generic.

This ident is effective as you get a medium shot of the basket, so there is more to see. It is also a different finish compared to the first ident, as this is a layup compared to a standard shot. The weakness is again the person shown which doesn't make it generic, although this is impossible to avoid when filming a layup.




I like these idents because they are generic and simple which is what I was going for. I chose to take two different shots to have an option to choose, as the first shot didn't finish into the net as nicely as it could of. The second shot is more of a 'swish' shot meaning it is very central to the net and results in a swishing motion of the net, which is the best looking shot.

Ident Ideas

For my Ident, as my television genre is based on basketball, I have some initial ideas based on the real media examples I have previously looked at. Although I have not done much analysis on the idents from 'Sky Sports' and 'ESPN', I have gained inspiration from some of their idents.

The initial ideas for my ident would include:

1. A slow motion close-up focused on a basketball net, with the ball going through the net. This is a typical trope of a sport ident but would be a fiitng choice.
2. A close-up or mid-shot of a basketball rolling down the street - this would give an urban theme to basketball which is not fiitng within the conventions of basketball.
3. Slow motion pan of an empty court, possibly with balls on the floor/rolling.
4. Snapshot of a coach talking tactics with his team, including a shot of the whiteboard and the coach talking to the players.

Clarifying My Target Audience Based On Competitors

As I have chosen my television channel to be based around basketball, this means I will have a specific target audience to adhere to. To discover this audience, I decided to research into the target audience of my main sporting competitor, ESPN. Here is a link to the marketing statistics for ESPN, although these statistics are based on the US audience they are mostly given as percentages so they can be reinterpreted to fit the UK audience.

Another main competitor in sports is Sky Sports, who are based in England therefore are a stronger competitor than ESPN. The target audience for both channels is predominantly men, although sport is becoming increasingly popular with women. This means that for my main and ancillary tasks I cannot exlude the female market as I will lose a large chunk of my audience.

Real Media Conventions of Idents

I have found a useful website that shows ident's for popular channels including all channels on BBC, ITV and Sky. The link to the website can be found here. From this website I managed to gain information on the real media conventions of idents.

Here is a link to my slideshare presentation about the real media conventions of idents. This has helped me as I have gained the key features of idents which has prepared me to create my own. I have also included a conclusion and 'lessons that I have learnt' that will enable me to create a successful ident permitting that I keep to these lessons learnt.

Idents Real Media from ollyquilt

ITV & BBC Idents

At 6am on Monday 14th January 2013, ITV unveiled its new identity across all its outlets including broadcast, online, its studios and distribution. At its heart is a new logo designed in-house by ITV Creative in collaboration with design specialist Matt Rudd, and type specialists Fontsmith.

For its flagship channel, the most noticeable change is its renaming back to just 'ITV' - dropping the '1' introduced back on 11th August 2001. Its idents convey scenes of day-to-day life of the British public, and they are overlaid with the new logo which magnifies the predominant colour of the area behind each of its sections to create an ever changing image. It is aimed to have a broad, ever increasing range of idents to reflect the mood of the day, the season or time of the year.

At Christmas 2013, Mums on the Run, Night Cyclists, Log Fire and Ice Scraper returned to supplement the Christmas idents, with the rest of the set airing again from 2nd January 2014. For 2014, all the first set of idents have been edited so that the ITV logo appears sooner, and stays on throughout - in the manner of the second, third and fourth sets of idents.

For the launch of BBC ONE HD on 3rd November 2010, the current set of idents received a further update. The swirl over the logo form-up is now solid red and the logo itself is better defined for HD. Unlike ITV1 HD - which has idents that include HD in the logo - BBC ONE HD's presentation is up scaled from the SD channel and no HD identifier is used.

Impact on my own production:
This passage of information shows that idents, logos and even the channel name can be slightly altered and the channel will still be highly popular. This means when creating my ident video I can have several drafts that don't make the final cut, and then possibly add them in later to the channel for a fresh look which would keep the audience from getting bored of the idents and the channel overall.

Deciding a TV Genre

In the UK, there are some sports that aren't available to watch as they are not considered popular enough. A prime example of this would be basketball, which is aired in most countries and is most popular in the United States. This means there is a niche in the UK television market for a basketball sports channel that aires live basketball and I have decided to base my TV Website, Double Page Spread and Ident Video on basketball.

Mission Statement & Brief

For my Advanced Production I have decided to go with:

Option (9) A website for a new TV channel (to include a minimum of three hyperlinked pages with original images, audio and video extract), together with two of the following three options:

• A newspaper advertisement for the channel;
• A double page spread for a listings magazine, focused on the channels launch;   (Task 1)
• An animated ident sequence for the channel   (Task 2)

     = Chosen options.

Pitfalls to Avoid:

• Make sure the website is live by the deadline
• Make sure any media I upload is available
• Don't overcrowd my piece with too much text

I decided to choose these tasks because the final pieces differed from the AS print pieces. This means I will get to use new digital technology and other software that I am not used to, which will improve my overall skills as a media student. For example, in AS I never used any technology involving film, therefore it will be my first time using software like 'iMovie' when it comes to making my ident video.