Samurai Ident

I wanted to each of my Idents to be different yet follow a similar style. This one was influenced by my interest in Japan . The samurai is the main focus of this Ident, being iconic to Japan I thought it was well suited. The British Museum also has a Japanese section.

I started of by sketching a storyboard. I wanted the door's to slide back to reveal a Japanese setting . The camera would then zoom in to the Samurai, his eyes would glow white and the the font would appear.

This was my first layer in photoshop I had to layer them separately so that I could animate them separately in after effects.

This is the image before I edited it.

I then highlighted the areas of light to make it look more dramatic.

Finlay I placed the Samurai inside and highlighted him also I added the glow effect in After effects. The samurai was taken from my own photograhs, which helped as the resolution was high, i searched on google but could find any which were high res or at the desired angle.

Creative Process

• Used images and layered them on photoshop
• seperated the layers so that I could animate them in After Effects.
• Highlighted select parts or my layers to look good

After Effects

• Positioned the Anchor point so I could move the doors from a certain area.
• Keyed the doors until the movement looked smoothe
• used the graph editor to create the right motion
• used the scale tool to give the illusion the samurai was coming closer
• changed the opacity so level lit up as the doors openend
• created fast blur so the doors looked more realistic as they opened
• placed blur onto samurai so that he did not look to sharp when the doors opened
• placed blur on to background so the Samuari stood out as I zoomed in
• added glow effect to the samurai eyes
  
• placed white out so it appeared as if the eyes lite up the whole room
• used present typography
• duration 5 seconds
  

Premier

• used soundtrack
  
• used Sound effect from uni hard drive
• placed sound effect on Dore
  
• rendered to desired format
• duration 5 seconds
  

I had trouble with the image quality for some reason it looked better in after effects to when i rendered it out as a movie file.

I also was realizing the importance of tidy file management, as I would end up having some many video files which were slightly different I may have changed them due to their poor quality or general changes . In future projects I will create a separate folder for test files. This would make my work space allot more manageable