Evaluation of Channel 27 Ident

After many hours of hard work my Channel 27 ident is finally complete. It’s not how I originally expected it to look but I’m still happy with it. The brief for this project was very simple. To create a 30 second TV station ident Using some fairly basic linking, timing, lighting and camera techniques we shall try to come up with some “less is more” don’t change the channel eye candy. My first thoughts about this were to create something very simple yet interesting to watch, possibly similar to the ones that E4 have been using recently.
My initial sketches evolved a rather large “27” and the use of a smaller character to give the 27 a real sense of scale. I created the 27 by finding a great looking font and making it into 3d by extruding it. From this I explored a variety of textures that could be used on it. I wanted it to look shiny and hopefully reflect my character in it. I read up on a few tutorials on the net about raytracing and decided that it was the look I was going for. I used a long exposure photograph of some lights to texture it with. The end result was very impressive and it really stood out against the white background.

From this I needed to create a floor because without one the 27 looked as if it was floating. I used a plane and made that reflect the 27 above it, giving it a water/metal like appearance. I decided not to use any shadows as I thought this would take away focus from the reflections.

My character began its life as a robot looking creature in some sketches I had done. I started to model it in 3ds max and got the head looking how I wanted it. I had intended to add a body and legs but had a change of mind and decided to create a flying head type being. I made him some arms with hands and fingers that used custom attributes to animate the fingers. The head was set up to possibly include some lip syncing using morphing however a lack of time ended this idea. The two eyes used a ”LOOKat constraint” and a dummy box so that they constantly look at the box. To get the character to fly I drew a path using a spline then applied a “path constraint” and made him bank round each corner. I textured the character using a technique know as cell shading to give it a cartoon appearance.