My Station Ident

For this assignment, I was required to produce a station Ident animation, using 3ds Max, which represents me.

Prior to having begun to create the Ident, I thought about what theme it could have, in addition to what I am capable of creating on a piece of software I have not used before. I came up with a tennis theme, as I see this as a hobby, although I am not on a team.

I then carried out some research into current station Idents, in particular BBC2. I used some of their ideas and adapted them to form my own. For example, BBC2 use a 3D effect on the number two. Therefore I have used this idea, and added a Bevel effect to the text used.

(Below are my design ideas)

Also on a BBC3 Ident, a 3D figure has been made to full use, in order to maintain audience interest. I have used this idea and included a 3D object in my Ident, which is the tennis ball. To make it obvious that the object is a tennis ball, I have chosen to colour the object yellow and add the white markings.

Additionally, I chose to include a tennis court, containing the white markings. This enables it to be obvious to the audience what the theme is about and what programmes are about to follow (i.e. sports programmes). Furthermore I have made use of sound, found on the internet. Together the sound, ball and court work together to generate a meaning.

Throughout the Ident the tennis ball interacts with the text. To achieve this I created it, for example, so that the ball bounces off the ground and onto the text, forcing it down. I believe this is visually attractive and maintains audience interest because they will want to know what happens next.

TV Ident

Ok, so I haven't updated you on how my TV ident is going. I was going to do it when I returned home for the weekend, only to find out our internet was down. Let's just pretend I posted this on Thursday :)


For my ident, I am required to produce something that represents me. Although I don't play tennis on a team, I enjoy playing it when I can with my friends...for fun!


Below are some screenshots to show how it is developing.

For the text, I used a bevel effect to make it appear 3D and for the tennis ball, I followed an online tutorial. Who would've thought that you make a ball from a cube?! I also used different effects on the text such as bend, rotation and uniform scale
So far it only lasts 16 seconds, but I plan to do further work at the weekend to boost it up to 30. On Monday, I plan to edit the animation in Adobe Premiere Pro and add sound. All will be posted at the end.

3ds Max

Over the past two weeks I have been learning how to used 3ds Max. I followed a tutorial to produce moving text as shown below.

I then experimented with different effects and followed online tutorials to produce further moving text.

My Design Process

During my second year at college, I was required to produce an interactive, non-linear multimedia presentation, using Adobe Flash, which introduced the work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. As stated by the Specification, the presentation had to be suitable for an audience of 11-15 years (Year 7-10), who will be studying his work for a history project.

To begin my ideas, I analysed two current examples of Multimedia Presentations. I gathered their advantages and disadvantages and used them to produce a more appealing presentation.

I then created a Gantt chart to plan my time effectively. I set myself various deadlines, for example: Collect images by __/__/__.

Following this, I produced two sets of hand drawn designs, each with a script. The scripts gave details of how each page will look (i.e. what images will be used and where they will be located, the fonts and colours. It also gave details of other features used, such as sound, video and animation.) I found creating two sets of designs helped me to develop my original idea. This is because whilst creating my first design, I came across various areas I could alter and improve in order to make the second design more appropriate. For example, the first design contained quite a lot of text. In order to improve this, I created the second design to contain Next buttons, where the information is spread out over several pages and not just in one scroll box.

To test the product, I created a table, as shown below (with an example of one entry):

Scene	Test No.	Element to test	Test description	Expected result	Actual result	Actions required
Introduction	1.	Sound	I will test the sound to make sure it plays.	The sound should begin to play.	The sound begins to play when the product is loaded.	No Action

I tested each feature on the product to make sure it worked correctly. If, for some reason, a feature didn’t appear as planned, I reviewed the coding in Flash and altered it.

Below are screenshots of each page created: