Caterpillar Ident

Untitled from Polly Williams on Vimeo.

This is my solution for the caterpillar ident. I was not happy with the way that the ident started, so I decided to use a large heart floating across the screen to slowly reveal the caterpillar....

The viewer moves closer to the caterpillar and the volume of hearts increases. I think that this amount of movement works well.

My main issue is that it is not clear enough that the caterpillar is blowing the hearts from his mouth. Also, the fact that they are smoke may not be clear enough. Increasing the opacity could help to convey this.

My other issue was moving away from the caterpillar and bringing in the text information as a smooth transition. My initial idea that I presented on my story boards was that the hearts turn or merge into the letters making up the text. I had planned to do this by copy and pasting the hearts in as vector paths and then tracing over the letters. However, since designing my story boards for this ident I have designed a very specific appearance for the words that is almost an identity for the program now which I like. I think it helps to link the idents together.

This is why I have instead decided to use the same process that I used for the beginning of the ident, using a close up heart floating past to act as a screen so the caterpillar disappears and the words can come in....

Once the words are full screen, I used a translucent solid layer to fade out the background slightly so that the text becomes more clear.

I chose to bring the "five" channel icon in from the front to make it more interesting for the viewer.

I think that this translucent solid helps a lot with the readability of the words, especially the white ones, but still allows the hearts to be seen moving in the background while the text is stationary.

IMPROVEMENTS :

I think that I could build up the volume of hearts even more, and also alter the perspective, opacity and size as they move to help enforce the idea that they are lightweight and floating in a breeze.

Other than those changes I might make, I think that this is my most successful ident so far. I especially like the colour palette and the artwork, so I think I might use it for my packaging. I don't want to use all the assets for the packaging as I dont want to overcomplicate it.