OSTN Ident: Initial Ideas

Trying to keep the student t.v. theme in mind, I began drawing up some ideas of my own, which I could then suggest to Mike (my partner for this project). Many ideas sprung to mind, the strongest of which was the visual effect of morphing a grid (stack) of tv screens into a hexagonal latice, then panning out to reveal the eye of a bee. ALthough Entomology is probably not the strongest concept, I felt the idea of the TV screens and alien looking eye would be visually quite strong. Here is a concept drawing of the bee character + basic storyboard:

When I brought this idea to the table, the relevance of a bee seemed even less appealing, and due to the limited time we had, modelling and animating a bee would’ve taken too long. Eventually we went with an idea Mike had, which was a nightclub scene, which most students can probably relate to. We developed the idea further, bouncing some ideas around, I felt that I did not need to hold back on any seemingly outlandish ideas as I know Mike pretty well and this worked to our advantage. Eventually we came up with the idea to have a retro dancefloor (with lights) as the focal point, then to introduce a character dancing in an embarrassing way, inspired by the Brent dance in Ricky Gervais’ “The Office”. The punch line then came to us through watching an animation by Cyriak Harris (animator for Sumo.tv) which I have posted below:

Cyriak Harris: (inspiration from first animation) An extremely raw and imaginative compilation. Some find his stuff too chilling, but I like the simplicity and humor in his work. I especially like the little touch of leaving the cyclist’s hat where it is on impact.