In order for me to put together a showreel, I first needed to create an ident. I wanted to incorporate my Logo, so I tried a quick animation in After Effects.
First Ident Attempt
I liked the general motion of the ident, but I felt that there was something missing. It seemed a little too simple and it didn't scream 'animation student' to me, so I thought of how I could make it do this, and I thought "hey, animating the logo might do the trick".
As my logo is just my face, I couldn't think of a great deal of things I could animate. I first thought of making the logo smile, but I didn't think this was much of an obvious motion/gesture, and it might be easily missed because of the size of the logo in the ident. Instead, I opted for a wink, because it was more obvious and required a bit more movement that would stand out more than the smile. I also thought it was a little corny which I thought suited me quite well.
Final Ident
I really like how my ident turned out. Making it has restored some of my confidence at animating digitally, as I avoided cutting corners this time around. Some frames did take me quite a while to get right, but I found that using the pen tool for some of the features/the longer lines helped, and I have been able to make a nicely flowing motion.
Icon Comparison
To animate my logo, I felt that I needed to tone down the level of detail, and at first I thought the difference in style between my logo and ident animation was going to be an issue. I thought about replacing my logo with a frame from the ident, so that there would be more consistency, but I was fond of my logo as it was. In the end, I decided that this wasn't going to be an issue. The characters are drawn and coloured in a similar manner, and the colour scheme is still consistent with the rest of my work, so therefore I think it's okay that there's a little variation between the logo and ident.
Now that my ident was finished, I could move onto putting my showreel together. I started by trying to find a suitable soundtrack to accompany my work, and after hours of searching I found one that I liked. It was just a bit too long though at one and a half minutes, so I had to do my best to make the end of the clip flow with where I had trimmed the file, as I didn't want the music to just fade out mid song. It was a painful process but I think I did a good job and it wasn't all for nothing. Besides for being for my showreel - obviously - I have discovered that I don't want to pursue sound design and editing, meaning that I'm finally starting to narrow down on what it is I want to do, because as it stands, I still have (next to) no idea.
Showreel First Draft
I thought I was on the right tracks with the first draft of my showreel, but I think I had made some of the clips too long; especially my infographic clip. I cut some of the scenes down, which meant I had to find a selection of little snippets to fill the gaps. I had to mix them up a bit so there wasn't scenes from the same animation too close together, whilst still trying to focus on starting and ending on a strong note.
Final Showreel
My second attempt was much better, and I'm happy to declare this as my final showreel for 2016. I showed a couple of students my showreel to see if there were any changes I could make, but I actually didn't get criticized . Instead I was praised for how some of my scenes transitioned, which was great!
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