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.