Brand Me - Ident

From the start, I knew that I wanted my ident to be quite simple and quirky, and to have a direct link with my final logo design. Since I have a love for drawing and 2D animation, weather it be hand-drawn or digital, I had the idea of the text writing itself in. This was something I knew was possibly to achieve using After Effects, but I wasn't quite sure how. After research and getting some advice from a friend who is very experienced with After Effects, I decided to create a mask over the text, which could then be key-framed at the start and the end.

To begin with this seemed like quite an odd method as it was new to me, but I soon got the gist! I placed the motion paths over the text and this would determine how the text would write itself out. I didn't want this ident to last any longer than five seconds. 

I was unsure how this would be achieved with the head icon, however, I liked the idea of it popping into appearance. I thought this would add a bit of a bounce to the ident. This was achieved by simply increasing its size from 0 and then adding in some alterations in size to give the illusion of bouncing. This process didn't actually take that long, to my surprise. 

Audio

I knew that I wanted a penacil sound effect to accompany the text appearing, so I had a look online at some different pencil soundtracks. To my surprise, there were loads, because (something else I learned during this process) pencil sound tracks are very  popular because they trigger ASMR which is a sense of relaxation caused by certain noises. This did not do anything for me! 

After having several examples to choose from I knew the pencil sounds for the upper and lower text needed to be different because they differed in size. 

Final Ident