E4 sting: bird animatics & style frames

Ugh. I really, really have been neglecting blogging. I hate myself for it; maybe that's why my work has been so lackluster and crappy so far this year...

At any rate, aside from mass panic about ADT in general, I've started really trying to nail these two ideas, starting with the birds — mostly because that's more solid than the personal/safari one so far...

The first thing I had to do was get the damn style frames sorted — I'd been having tremendous difficulty pegging the colours and such as seen in my last posts, so I took on board what Ed had mentioned about colours and using the white for the telegraph poles and tried to come up with something a bit less ugly. I still think it's bad... but hopefully it's getting there. My concern is that it still doesn't look like an E4 ident?! Something about the colours still seems off to me. Then again, the idea does too. Just... everything. Ugh.

Maybe the colours still need to be darker. I've kept in the gradient but really toned it down — hopefully it's an improvement. I dunno.

Playing around with the composition of the shots too. The characters are really stiff and lifeless which doesn't help but I found myself geting really worked up and worried about which birds I should use... then I worried about the angle of the wires. I quite like the skewed close-up one but this makes the whole giant E4 landing on the wires thing kind of difficult.

I quite like the two smaller birds as there's room for them to really bounce but I dunno if it really works. Are they too similar in shape? I half feel I should stick with the fatter bird, just because it might  work better as an idea if he's huge and fat which causes the wire to bounce around. I don't know.

I found I was really having difficulty imagining the characters moving — hence the little doodles all over the page and countless more in my sketchbook trying to figure out how they'd look in motion. I think that's why I'm having such difficulty... I just can't see these moving, for some reason. What a crap animator I am.

MORE STORYBOARDS. My previous ones were really just to illustrate the rough flow — these are still super-crude but I tried to pay a bit more attention to the sequencing of the bounces etc, with the intention of sticking these into a rough animatic a bit later. Again I still found I was having REAL difficulty to imagine the bouncing... it's quite tricky to time, but for some reason I just couldn't seem to visualise the action. Here the small bird juts kind of flies in, lands and wobbles, then makes a little cheep. The other one doesn't respond. He tries again (supposed to be a bit bigger but I screwed it up) and the other one then suddenly cuts in. Cue alternate bouncing, getting faster and faster until BOOM giant E4 comes springing along.

Pretty much the same thing, just with a different composition and a fatter bird. I think it kind of works in terms of composition but I'm not sure about it. It's easy enough to change, I suppose. Part of me still really likes this composition. There's less negative space but maybe it's too close.

AGAIN, same, just slightly different angle and trying to think about what actually happens to the two after the E4 comes in. I thought maybe they kind of got pulled down and then flung up into the air as it bounces up but I dunno if that makes much sense. OH WELL.

Last little storyboard is kind of a mix. I still don't like the straight wire but again, it's pretty easy to change I guess! I opted for the smaller bird in this version just to see how it works. It seems to give more space for the E4 to come in but part of me is still more attracted to the fatter bird. 

Also added a little bit at the end where the giant E4 kind of... poops off the wire as a little send off. It's stupid, but I was tired and stressed and worrying and I needed to amuse myself with something.

SO anyway, after that I started stringing together some animatics. They are atrocious and I hate them and they suck. But oh well. It's a start...

V3

"first" version (actually V3 due to my annoying SAVE EVERY TIME I MAKE A SMALL CHANGE habit) is... eh. I hate it. The timing is kinda sorta working but I'm not too hot on it — especially the intro. I think more sound will help — I also don't think there are quite enough frames (or I picked the wrong ones) to tell the action properly. He's supposed to fly in, pause for a split second before dropping onto the wire and wobbling. As it is he kind of just sits there weirdly. Shoulda picked better panels. Or add some more. But oh well.

I don't think the bouncing is working that well... it's really quite difficult to peg using static images. I think I really need to cut the characters out and  get them moving properly in After Effects but at this point I was just trying to kind of see whether it would fit within the timeframe. 

The ending is almost there. It seems to be working, but I dunno. Doesn't seem like much of a pay off. Maybe the birds just need to be more frantic instead of getting higher. Also the  sound — it just seems... lacking. Somehow.

V4

I switched up a few of the timings (mostly when the white bird cuts in, trying to make it feel a bit more like he's coming in quicker rather than waiting for the purple one to finish) and got rid of that horrible boing effect.

Still not sold on it. Just doesn't really... go anywhere. I think maybe the stretch downwards is a bit long. Kind of needs to be sudden... but again, bad panel choice maybe. Should just kind of drop and then hold at the bottom, then PING. I think maybe some sound will help as well, so maybe have some sort of indication that something's coming even whilst they're bouncing. I did try a whistle but it sounded... really, really weird. Ho ho.

V5



Ugh, okay so I tried to fix it and I think I made it even worse. I think I was panicking again and made some really dodgy decisions — the fly at the beginning is REALLY weirdly timed but I think the wobble sound effect, though dodgy, kind of helps. I also tried to give the white bird a bit more to do, having him turn away after the purple bird lands, but I think it's ust gotten too busy and makes no sense. That's the issue — too much going on! There'll be time to animate him later. I think I'm just worrying and trying to animate before I know what I'm animating.

I think I just need to roll back to square one and try again — delete what I have so far and just start from scratch. I'm getting too wrapped up in what I've got here already which is confusing me massively.

I definitely need to give a bit of time to the Safari idea but this blog has actually helped. I can see how it's not working now, kinda, and hopefully I'll be able to fix it. I have some rough storyboards for the safari one — not too pleased with it but I'm going to crack on with my little birdies for the time being and just try to get something solid in static images before I start cutting them out and moving them around. I really just need to get the timing right...

Personal ident thumbnails/character scribbles

To expand on the last post... more embarrassing stuff.

Ed had previously advised me to pick a few of the characters I liked and work with those... looking back over my drawings most of them were just slight variations on the same animal. At the time I wasn't sure that would work too well so I picked some of my favourites (namely the hyena, the elephant, the mammoth and the bear) and tried to come up with a couple more just to pad things out a bit. I got a bit stuck, though — I played with the idea of a pretty pissed off flamingo that I quite liked (might keep him) and then I ended up drawing my chinchilla.

I then half got the idea that, being a personal ident, perhaps I could base some of the characters off some of my pets back home — namely an ancient chinchilla and two stupid cats. I thought it would be funny as the cats are so wildly different in body structure — one's old and fat and angry, the other is this scrawny little insect-looking thing with massive eyes that's terrified of absolutely everything. I'd thought it could be an opportunity to really go mad with some insane run cycles, but again, looking back on it now... I don't think they really "fit" the idea at all... cats and chinchillas? They hardly fit the other more wild animals I've got going on. Bah.

I nterms of storyboards I'm still struggling. I'm just not picturing the idea properly, I don't think — I sort of have an image in my head but I don't know if it's really strong enough. I kinda toyed with the opening shot just having a big ball being tossed on-screen, then a huge rampage of approaching footsteps and this huge crowd of animals stampedes across the screen. The smoke kicked up by the animals forms the name, then the hyena trots back across the screen looking pleased with itself as the smoke disperses. The animals then rampage back across the screen in pursuit.

On the bottom it's the same idea, just with one really slow character lagging behind.

... eh. Yeah, it's not working. There's no real payoff I don't think. Plus as Ed said smoke is really hard to do. Again he suggested to me the idea that maybe it's like a lion King monolith-type thing with these HUGE stone letters that's my name, which I'd initially avoided because it seemed too arrogant! However I do think that would be more of a payoff, or a bit more striking than some silly wispy smoke.

In terms of visual style I'd initially imagined keeping something quite sketchy, trying to keep some sense of volume and energy which I seem to lose once I start 'refining' any of my drawings. I was struggling, though, and again my lack of colour sense comes through...

Just struggling to work out some colour palettes. I'm really not sure what sort of "feel" to go for — I think that, just generally, these might be too bold and bright and cheerful. Maybe something more muted.

When it came to the actual animation side for these guys I'd half thought I'd be able to build up the rigs using photoshop images and puppet pins with null objects; it's definitely feasible to do, given some of the experimentation I've been doing, but my hesitation is that it wouldn't really be what the brief is looking for. Ed mentioned that After Effects works far more with stronger and more graphical shapes; the bear and elephant he said, in particular. Trouble is I'm really not great at that sort of thing, it would seem — I'm certainly not looking for anything hand drawn in terms of animation, which I think may have been the impression Ed was getting. I'm certainly not hoping for boiling lines or anything like that. Just to keep the outlines over the characters mayhaps.... I dunno, I'm worrying again. What on earth am I trying to do with myself?

I dunno. They're horrible. I especially hate that bear. What the hell was I thinking? YELLOW? And a pink mammoth? Good god...

I kind of liked the opportunity to do something quite papery and sketchy and scribbly so I half played around with the characters being literal ripped up bits of paper with the outlines on the top. I kind of liked it but I think it's more a hand drawn thing than After Effects... again, looks as if I was totally missing the point, but I was really just playing around.

The little paper cutout bear I kind of like. That's almost got the same charm to it with some nice textures and could feasibly be animated in After Effects, but the danger is it looks from the surface as if it would be stiff and lifeless. I'd easily be able to distort the character's limbs to give them flexibility but eh. I don't know so much that it would work.

I don't even know what I'm typing anymore.

Bird style frames and more scribbles

Ugghhh

I'm still not really getting anywhere. I seem to be just sitting here and worrying, not getting much done at all...

I think it's because I'm really not quite sure what I want to do with this — maybe I'm worrying too much about what will look amazing and wonderful (which is an important consideration) and not spending enough time thinking about what I want to do. Because I feel like I'm getting behind, I'm sitting here panicking that I've not got time to really experiment and decide.

At any rate, I've been messing around and started to try and figure something out in terms of style. I liked them at the time (maybe that's just because I was struggling so I was just pleased to see that I'd made something) but looking back... no, they're horrible and ugly.

It looks so ridiculously simple I'm ashamed to admit how long it took me. Again, playing with the wire idea — giving some telegraph poles in the background — the biggest issue is the colour of course. Everything's pretty indistinct and the birds are getting lost. It's hard to look at. I also really hate the design of the birds —they're just not working for me at all, especially the small one. I just think they look really static. It's hard to see them moving. They don't look like animated characters... just really bad drawings.

The gradient I think is very distracting. I liked the idea of a subtle gradient to give the impression of a horizon but it's really not working. Maybe it's the colour — it's way too light, so the white bird is getting lost. Tried to rectify it by making him purple but that just looks even worse. BAH.

I had a surprising amount of difficulty with the small bird, mostly his beak. The front view is always a tricky one for such a simple character but the beak was especially problematic. I wasn't sure how to suggest it was there without it looking completely weird. I think he's too short — needs to be a bit longer and maybe have the beak a bit lower?

My grasp on colour is utter crap.

Second one — again, really really ugly and boring and static. Trying to sort out the problem with the bird's design. I kind of liked the beak on the small bird at this point — I could imagine it flapping really wildly up and down, in a very kind of "cutout" kind of way (almost like the heads of any Canadian character in Sound Park) which would be quite funny but thinking about it now I don't think it's especially fitting.

Tried to fix the gradient, looks even worse now. I think it's just... the wrong colour, and it just, I dunno, it's too obvious. It's so distracting. There're maybe too many colours going on here as well.

I did do another mockup of the whole satellite thing as well, but it's so hideously embarrassing. At least now I can see that the whole thing definitely isn't working, though...

 

I can definitely see that it's really not working. At all. The satellite REALLY breaks everything apart even more — colours don't fit, it's distracting, makes no sense and oh my god the composition of this whole thing could not be worse. It adds an unnecessarily complex element into what needs to be very straight, short and to the point. I'm definitely missing the point here...

I'm also starting to think that those speech bubble things just aren't working at all. Shame. I liked the idea, but I don't think I'm good enough to pull it off...

Getting wound up with myself at this point I started trying to draw some stuff to calm me down... and be a bit productive.

Just thinking about those monster birds again (I hadn't quite clicked that I was still being too complicated) and trying to get more of a design in place. I'm still not keen on any of them. They just don't feel right in any way... the only one I'm really liking is that coloured one at the very top towards the right. Underneath the crow. Even that's bad.

Regardless, I was stupid. Rather than stepping back and asking myself why it wasn't working, why I hated what I'd done, I pushed on and wasted more time on yet another crappy mockup. Then I panicked and started rushing it because I just wanted to get it done.

Colours again are ugly. I wanted to give another sense of location — the birds maybe on a kind of rocky spire thing in the middle of the sea (oh my god why did I not see this was such a crap idea) so when it pulls out to reveal what's eaten them... yeah. He's kind of perched there, then shrieks his "E4!" thing. Ed was absolutely right — it just doesn't look like an E4 ident.

Good god.

I think the biggest problem I'm having is a kind of... visualization one. I still don't really know what I want to make and I don't feel I've got the time to develop it. Rather than being able to say "this is what I like, this is what I want," I'm trying to do way too many things all at once and am just kind of doing them less than adequately.

Ed was absolutely right, it's just getting really complicated, so I need to really step back and just bring the complexity down. He said the idea of the birds bouncing was fine — just keep it to that. Then at the end maybe their silly bouncing contest is kind of interrupted by this GIGANTIC E4 that crashes into the middle of the wire. My brain is still really frazzled so I'm having difficulty pulling exactly what he said to me out of the bowels of my brain... I was a bit of a panic and so embarrassed by what I'd made I wanted to sound like I was understanding everything he said when in reality I was a heap of mush. In terms of visuals, I believe he said to try losing the gradient and giving a darker, block colour with the telegraph poles in white to eliminate some of the busyness in the backdrop. So I think that will work. Hopefully.

I don't know... I feel like I've wasted so much time on these things that so clearly aren't working. I just hope I'll be able to pull it together.

Bird storyboard thumbnails

Following Ed's feedback I've started scribbling out some rough thumbnails and trying to figure out what the heck I'm doing with these birds...

I'm crap at making decisions, so I figured I'd just throw out as many possibilities as I could and see which one I liked best... or if I was unable to figure out what worked, hope that Ed would be able to give me some more expert advice.

The first one I thought of actually occurred to me after scanning back over my older scribbles — I thought the birds on the wire in itself was actually an okay idea. It could be quite nice to animate with the twanging wire and lots of opportunity for silly expressions and some squashing/stretching etc.

I kind of like the slightly skewed angle as well but I don't know how much sense it makes in terms of composition. I might need to play around with it some more... I also got a bit stuck with how to 'end' it. Nice idea in principle but I'm just struggling to finish it off.

The closest I got to an ending was the big bird jumping too hard and sending the other one skyrocketing off into the air, and then... nothing. Total blank. Along the bottom I was playing around with a slightly different composition and trying to give a bit more of a sense of location, rather than just having them in some obscure void. So... telegraph poles! I seem to be drawing lots of those lately.

It got really stupid at this point and I wondered if the small bird, after being launched up, could bring a satellite crashing back down.

Told you it was stupid. I think I'm trying to be too clever with this, rather than keeping it simple. I just don't know. At the time it made me giggle but looking at it now I can see that there's far too much going on — introducing these extra elements just starts to deviate from the point.

Giving up with my bouncing birds I went back to the idea that one of them gets eaten — seemed a safe bet, as Ed said that was a fine concept in itself. Rather than introducing another element (i.e. giant monster bird) I thought it's maybe some sort of... I don't know, tweeting contest or something. Small bird peeps, big bird always outdoes him. Eventually the small bird shows off and brings a whole flock of tweeting E's across the screen. Big bird eats him.

... yeah, again, I'm just trying to be too fancy with it. The big flock of flying birds would be pretty, sure, but again I'm completely missing the point. KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID. Gahhh.

Final attempt before giving up hope was bringing back the monster bird again. It broke my heart to draw that panel of the beak closing around them. I think it's a workable idea but I just don't know. Nothing I'm producing at the minute seems to be 'clicking' and falling into place. I really have no idea what on earth to do with this and it just feels like nothing I do is going to be visually or conceptually strong enough...

I'm going to try mocking up some style frames in the hopes that I can get something that at least looks reasonably pretty...

Idea selection

Wooow. Ed showed us some pretty great stuff with track mattes and using them to 'rig' up a face, keeping pupils confined inside eyes etc which pretty much blew my mind. Previously when I've tried to keep a character's pupils inside their eyes I resorted to a ridiculously overcomplicated method involving dropping the eyes below a solid head layer and using a mask to cut a hole in the face. Which worked, certainly, but it's not terribly intuitive. I've encountered track mattes before but never even considered using them for faces. My mind is now excited and reeling at the possibilities... I wish I could marry After Effects.

Creepiness aside, Ed took a look at all our work and gave some very helpful feedback which has definitely set me on the right path and reassured me about a lot of things!

He suggested that the magician probably wasn't a good choice unless I was going to do something really wild and amazing. They're a bit overdone, and I totally agree — also secretly very pleased. I would've been totally stuck if he'd suggested it — I had absolutely no idea what on earth I was going to do with it, haha!

He really liked the birds and said that I didn't need to worry — I'd been panicking that my initial "they both get eaten" thing was boring and stupid but he said that it was fine and could actually be really fun. I think I'm happier with that, actually — because there's nothing fixed in terms of "story" I can pretty much have a free reign and just mess around with it until I find something I like.

He also seemed to really like my silly little animal characters and said that I could even turn that into a personal one if character animation was my thing. He got me pretty excited and suggested that I could do some kind of crazy safari-type thing with TONS of these characters just rampaging across the screen. I love it, and I'm actually really excited about it now — it's so simple but will be so much fun. Even though we've always been told to just keep it simple I alwasy find myself a bit concerned that it's going to be boring, but Ed's suggestion of what is effectively just a load of crazy run cycles and ridiculous characters really brings to light the fact that there really is no such thing as "too simple."

I'm pretty much set to go now, I'm going to try and get some storyboards and style frames for both ideas done for next week. I'm mainly going to focus on the birds I think, for now, but I'm going to spend some time looking over the characters for the personal ident and just selecting a few I think will work well. I'm already really liking the elephant, hyena and woolly mammoth — it'd be pretty cool to maybe get the bear in there somehow as well!

Idea development... and some ugly mockups

Another jolly wonderful ADT session — everything we're learning is so super exciting and oh God I just want to get animating now.

Before I go into detail, I'm going to just recap everything I've done up 'til now in an attempt to get the blog up to speed!

I was pretty keen to try and get three reasonably working ideas in place in time for today's session so that I'd have a bit more leeway in case one didn't work out. I spent a bit of time playing with the magician again — I'm still not massively keen on it as an idea, but in terms of visuals I still think it might be kind of nice. I just had no idea what to do with him once he got on-stage. I sort of played with the idea that maybe he prepares himself really dramatically and all he can do is make a giant E4 with bunny ears appear. Cue rotten tomatoes... and one for him, too.

It's boring and crap. But I loved the idea of him somersaulting on-stage.

I did sort of have a brainwave that maybe he could rip a cloth off some mysteriously covered table, intending to make rabbits or a bear appear or something, and instead there's a bed with two sleazy rabbits smoking cigarettes.

It's ridiculous and dumb but it made me laugh. I thought if it was done right it could appeal to the channel's more "late nite" audience but in terms of an ident I don't think it's particularly strong. Nothing to really "brand" it aside from the colour schemes.

I did a couple of super quick mockups just to see how the colours and stage setup might look, as well as check how the characters would sit against something that I planned to be a little more "realistic" looking. I wanted to make sure it didn't look like absolute arse, you understand, as I have about as much a grasp on colour theory as an alligator wearing lubricated rubber gloves.

This one's actually pretty old but I forgot to upload it because I am a huge dumb. It's super quick and ugly but I just wanted to see how the textures could work — it literally took me about 15 minutes. It's simply textures applied to 3D layers and arranged in a vaguely coherent fashion. The lighting was an experiment using a "volume light" script I found, which I shall credit to the owner as soon as I am able to dig up who made it, but it's based on a set of mathematical expressions that link the position/angle of the light to its brightness, cone size etc. The effect is that as you move the light around it responds accordingly based on its angle to the camera — for example, if you point it straight at the camera, it will be huge and bright and blind everything. If you turn it away then it acts as if there is a shade covering it. It's kind of hard to explain but it's rather lovely. Unfortunately I suck at lighting. I just throw things around...

Those curtains are actually animated too. Again, they look bad, but it was just to see if I could do it. They're basically created using colourised fractal noise with the settings jacked way up (vertical scaling to something like 2000) so they look a bit curtain-ish. Keyframing the evolution gives them the look of appearing. Then I just animated the position and scale slightly to kind of make them... pull apart. There's also a bit of CC slant in there, to give the impression that they're being pulled from the top and that the bottom is kind of dragging behind.

Just another silly mockup, using a slightly older (but a bit prettier) design. I was having difficulty with the colours of the human shaped character, and I wondered if this old triangular design might be better in terms of branding... It seems to work, I think? But yeah. I dunno.

For a bit of fun I just plonked him on the old stage layout and made him bounce around a bit. I wanted to make him jump but I didn't want to get too wrapped up in this dude — I still had two other ideas to develop! yYou can also see those curtains I mentioned earlier in action. Sorry about Blogger's hideous compression.

I also did a couple of quick Photoshop mockups of the bird idea.

BEWARE: FLAGRANT GRADIENT ABUSE.

it's stupidly simple and this worried me, at the time, but I figure that it's probably better to keep it basic than have a whole bunch of stuff floating around and getting in the way. There's still not much development in terms of what happens — still all I can think about is having them get eaten. In this particular mockup there are some pretty big issues... the colour of the big white bird, for one. You can't even see him. I tried adding a weird purple drop shadow-type thing for a bit of "flair" and to help him stand out but I don't think it really works. I do like the little gradient on the purple bird's eye, though. I might keep that.

Also, the nest... it looks LAME but I scrawled it up in about 10 minutes, quite literally. An interesting thing happened when I tried to print it, though — my ink is totally depleted so it tinted the whole image a weird kind of purple shade. You can't notice on the rest of the image, of course, but the nest is a kind of light pinkish which looks a million times better, so I might have a little play with that.

Another reasonably quick idea, same principle, just a slightly different setup. Trying to give the image a bit of depth and sense of location, rather than just "two birds in a nest floating in some obscure void. Maybe they keep bouncing each other up and down on this wire until one goes too high and shoots off the top of the screen. Then, I dunno, maybe there's a huge bird up there that eats him. Bah. Needs some work but I like the location a bit more.

White bird is looking better here, I think, but I still kind of like the idea of him being fatter and bigger than the other one, just for visual contrast. Purple bird looks really weird here. What the hell did I do to his face?! Not sure about the outline on the white one — helps him stand out but looks a bit static, I think. Needs something that feels a bit looser.

I'm also growing more fond of the speech bubble idea. I'd really like to integrate that into the animation itself. There's a clever little short called "The Whistler" which uses a very similar technique (albeit for much more sinister purposes...) The design of the speech bubble needs work of course. The typography on the white bird's "4" is HIDEOUS and I really need to work on that. I tried just taking the E4 logo and ripping the "E" segment out, replacing with a big purple triangle thing but it just looks bad.

Overall the mockups are looking atrocious and amateur — kind of like a 13 year old let loose on Photoshop for the first time — but hopefully I'll start being able to refine it a bit more now.

Decided to take a break from all this E4 nonsense at this point and try something a bit different. Something I felt I could be a bit looser and sillier with.

There are tons of great Nick idents all over the place already which is both inspirational and horribly depressing.

There are some really great styles at play, and unlike E4 there isn't really any solid way to "brand" Nickelodeon in terms of visuals — aside of course from the recurrence of orange and perhaps a "splat" a generally, everything has a pretty raw and almost juvenile quality to it. Throughout each "set" of idents, there seems to be one recurring visual aspect that ties things together. In the first couple of examples, it's the presence of the yellow notepaper background. Then of course we have the infamous After Effects examples with its striking character designs. Again: simple green "paper" animals, the presence of an orange stop-motion object and there you go. Branding done. I came across some of Nickelodeon's older mascots — I don't know if they're still in use but for a time they had a set of rather weird characters including Rooftop (a six foot high green moose) and Spoon, I think his name was — the dude in the helmet. I forget the others' names, and I can't seem to find where I found the information originally. Spooky. It's interesting though, and got me wondering if I could maybe do something similar. I was feeling pretty iffy on it but I thought that it was an idea, at the very least, and an excuse to doodle some weird and ridiculous characters.

I sort of had a vague idea of a massive character of some sort running wildly on screen, chasing a bouncing orange ball (hey look it's those animation principles again) which he would then slip on, stretching it into a hole. He would fall through the hole, then come through the ceiling (like a portal) and just repeat this cycle of falling and falling and falling until a smaller character would come along, pick up the hole, and the big character would land on top of him with a SPLAT, forming the logo.

Probably more a 20 second idea, but hey. It's something.

I started with generic and boring looking monsters but I wasn't "into" any of them, so I went back to stripping down some animals and making them look ridiculous.

I sort of wanted something big and silly looking that could feasibly be chasing a ball in such a keen manner. A bear struck me, so... BEARS.

I also played with something a lot bigger— an elephant and woolly mammoth in this case. I love them both but it could be problematic in that one of the idents by Lucas Zanotto features a falling elephant...

I came across a few more idents at this stage. Around 2005 nickelodeon had this big silly looking yeti character with floppy ears. He used to interact with the nick logo in a variety of simple ways — using it like a catapult or metronome, getting his head stuck in the "O," etc. etc. It was rather annoying because he was pretty much what I wanted in my "ball chasing" character, haha! But I thought I might be able to make use of him...

I also started wondering if I could possibly strip down the idea slightly at this point. Instead of having him fall through the hole, he could simply slip on the ball and land in it like a puddle, which would splash the screen. Simple but hopefully effective.

Another idea threw itself at me around this point. He could even be chasing an orange butterfly or something, he grabs it, and it floats him up into space where he drifts past a planet which spins to reveal the logo. Then he vanishes off-screen and we see him drifting in the background, off in the distance, like a really ugly satellite.

I was a bit worried about the "yeti" design at this point, it's pretty much Nick's own so I wasn't sure if I'd be able to use it, so I tried out a couple of others (bottom of this page) but none of them seemed fitting at the time. Looking back, I kind of like the one on the right, next to the tiny capsule-shaped one, but at the time I wasn't sure at all.

MORE MOCKUPS. Not happy at all with these, especially tht first one — I just digitised the drawing SO badly and it looks atrocious. I had a go with some textures and it looked abysmal. I dunno. Again, it looks amateur — like I've been let loose with the pen tool for the very first time. It's pointy and weird. The point of these characters is that they need to have ENERGY (and bags of it) — so keeping them look loose and even a bit messy would probably be the best way to preserve that. The second one is okay I guess. Simple, but eh. I tried something a little more freehand with my favourite textured pencil-looking brush which usually helps. It's got some more life and malleability which the first one lacks but I still hate it. Lazy background, too. Bad gradients. I dunno. It just doesn't seem to be sold as "Nick" to me.

I turned my attention lastly to Mr Yeti and tried to get something colourful and pretty out of it. I succeeded in colourful at the very least... I don't know. I wish I'd come up with the ideas a bit sooner so I'd have had time to consider the visual elements a little more and to refine things but I guess it doesn't matter too much at this early stage? First couple of examples were playing with the backgrounds — he doesn't stand out against the white (also: ugly gradients. ALEX GRADIENTS DO NOT MAKE THINGS BETTER STOP USING THEM) so in the second I inverted things — orange background, yellow butterfly. OH GOD MY EYES. I think it would be better to do something similar to the previous bear example — orange floor, white "sky"?

And finally... just showing that he would, eventually, go into space. Lazily slapped together and looks dreadful, but it kind of illustrates the idea. I think.

Oh my god those light rays are so hilariously bad. It's literally... LASSO TOOL. Gradient (again). Done.