UCH Ident Document - Matthew Lindfield

For this unit I had to create an animated ident for University Centre Hastings which would be used in official promotional material such as being shown on the website, put on advertisements and shown during presentations. With this in mind I had to make sure the work produced is of industry standards and to the restrictions given. Such restrictions being a specific font, the text shown and using the official university logo.

One thing I knew to keep in mind is to make sure that the idents didn't take too much time to reveal the logo itself, as a long drawn out sequence might not capture the viewers attention as much as a quick reveal could. Even with this in mind, I thought it would be interested in creating a sequence that is a bit longer than normal as I felt something like that would be pretty interesting to look at if done right, plus a longer animation would be more suited for a promotional video, whereas a shorter animation could be used on a website.

One example of a longer form ident would be a lot of the Channel 4 animations which tend to be on a larger scale featuring footage of an outdoor scene, with large monolithic objects either floating in the sky, or being attached to a structure of some kind, as the camera pans across it eventually sits in the correct position where all the objects align up, showing the ‘4’ logo. The main thing with these idents is that they usually take at least 5-10 seconds before the logo is revealed. This gives them a lot longer to play around and experiment with ideas.

Having experience with CGI animation and 3D modelling in general I centred my ideas around these skills. After researching and looking into various showreels, seeing other 3D animated idents and having a general idea of the things the various tools I am experienced with can do, I came up with a few different ideas that I thought would be interesting to animate.

My first idea was to have an environment full of a grid-like structure made of small dots, floating around like particles with most of the dots being connected by lines that seem to appear and disappear at random. As this happens the camera pans through the scene from spot to another. The way I’d incorporate the logo into the scene and slowly come into focus as the camera passes by with the logo coming into full view. The entire colour scheme of this scene being quite sleek with lots of greys and blacks and only a few select colours to give it some vibrance

I did try and create this idea a few times but each time it never came out how I'd liked it too and just seemed to chaotic and lacking any real focus that I would have liked it too.

The next idea was to play around with a fur simulation, with the logo moving through an ground environment that was covered in a layer of colourful fur, the logo being visible throughout the entire animation with it displacing the fur around it as the logo moves. Near the end the logo settles in place and puffs out it's own layer of fur, giving contrast between it's surroundings with both sets of fur being different colours.

Another idea I had related to the university itself, mainly the fine art department. I wanted to create an animation using a liquid paint effect after seeing a lot of vfx videos using fluid simulations so I had the idea that would simulate paint. The animation would have the logo fall into a 'blob' of paint and cause it to splash out into the surrounding environment but also cover the logo itself with some extra colour. The paint would be layered and have a pattern to it, so the resulting splash would cover the scene in a range of colours.

I did come up with a variation of this idea of using concrete instead with the logo made of a brick-like material. This would have linked in with the architectural course ran by the university.

Although I liked all these ideas either some didn't work out in the end or some didn't really seem that good of an idea in the end after some thought, but I feel like they could still work out in a future project if I keep the ideas in mind, especially the paint splash animation as I feel like I could re-think it and transform it into a different idea.

In the end I had two main idea that I focused on a lot and ended up using to create my ident animations.

The first idea was a crystalline animation that had the logo form out of nothing and create the shape of the logo, whilst this happens the logo would shatter inside causing it to have a very crystal like pattern to it. I thought about having some smaller crystals form out of the side of the logo but I found that they were too distracting and messed with the overall shape of the logo.

After doing some research into how I could come up with the idea I came across a guide on creating a 3D mesh that grows from a series of points. After following the guide I managed to create a version of it which had the logo form out of nowhere and achieved the first part of my idea, though the only thing I didn't really like was how slow moving the animation was.

The next step was to create a fractured version of the model, I did this by cutting up the growing structure into hundreds of smaller pieces with random shapes to each one of them, this gave me a version of the logo which was similar to images I referenced of a broken up crystal shape. I did try and combine the two models, the one fractures one being placed inside the smooth version but I found that idea didn't work out so I decided to only stick with the fractured version.

To fix the issue of the speed I decided to rework the origin of the growing part, with the original growing from the bottom-left, but in the new version I had a few different areas that the mesh grew from, this allowed it to remain having the same style overall but made the animation go much faster.

In order to create the audio track for this animation I used a collection of sound effects I thought related to the crystal structure. A glass ringing sound, some chiming sounds and a cracking ice/glass sound effect. I did some editing with the sound effects to create a track which I found fit, the cracking sound playing all the way throughout along with a distant chime sound to give some ambience to it and the ringing sound slowly building up to its peak when the logo formsed fully.





My next idea was based around a process known as a 'quadtree', mainly used for image compression, quadtrees divide an image into multiple areas based around an average amount of colour. In the image on the right the body of an apple doesn't have much variety of colour so it remains as being larger squares of red, but the edge of the apple, its reflection and the stem have more detail so are divided up into smaller squares. This is was bases for my animation as I found the style to be pretty interesting.


For this I created a system in 3D that would allow me to subdivide frames of an animation in the way a quadtree works whilst giving me full control over what I could do with it, the good thing with it being in 3D was I could edit the 3D models themselves. I utilised by giving a slight bevel to each square of my model allowing it to stand out to the viewer, as well as giving a slight edge to every square.

I initially used a static image of the logo itself with no movement or colour but I found that idea to be pretty boring and wouldn't give me much ability to animate it. I then decided to redesign my original image to create something entirely new, I found a good resource of copyright free photos of the sea, after searching for a few I found one that had a bunch of fish in it, this tying in directly with Hastings in relation to the sea.

After creating a composition I gave a bit of animation too it allowing it to sort of go into focus from a blurry image to a fully focused image showing the logo and the text.

When these images were run through the 3D quadtree system I found that the entire thing went from being a blurry image to having a pretty nice style too it being constructed out of uniformly shaped squares.

To create the audio for this animation I wanted to something related to the sea and the seaside so after finding a few different sound effects of the sea, water and seagulls. I created a composition of the sounds creating a short little track made of the sound effects with some slight editing to them, similar to what I did with the crystalline animations track.