Southend Film Festival 2012 Ident

It's that time again! For the third year in a row I have produced an opening animated ident for the Southend Film Festival, this year taking place between the 3rd and 7th of May. You can watch it just below!

Hit the jump to see some concept art and more details about the production!

I started planning this piece at the start of February. One of the longer stages of development was actually the live action video and photos needed, mainly because it decided to snow and I had to wait about 2 weeks before the weather was clear and sunny enough to get the footage I needed!

The idea is similar to that of last years film because the White Bus were asked by Southend Radio if their building (the one used as a drum at the end of the film) could be featured in this years ident. Because it was right next to the Adventure island theme park and the pier it was a great area to get a lot of ideas.

The character was really fun to dream up, and even more fun to animate. it started out as a non-species specific monster at first, with a chain ball at the end of it's tail. As soon as I did a test illustration with colour, using the colour of this years film festival logo as the focus, the creature ended up becoming a sort of mutant goldfish, who I ended up naming C. Auratus, after the goldfish's Latin name Carassius auratus auratus. Thanks Wikipedia!

So after that month of planning, filming, snapping photos and storyboarding I got stuck into the animating which took on and off 4 weeks to put together. I drew up all the frames in Illustrator and brought all those into Flash where they were treaked about a lot. Time consuming but enjoyable to make, especially when adding in animation smears for the quicker pose-to-pose actions/ See if you can spot them all by pausing the video at just the right points! There was an extra scene that had to be cut before I started animating it that didn't really add anything to the film and I would still be working on it now if I had kept it!

The ident will be, just like the previous two, screened at the start of every movie screened for the Southend Film Festival, so if you are in the area in May please come and see a movie or three (the tickets are cheap!) so you can see this on the big screen! There will be a Gala night at the Odeon featuring a gangster movie called Hard Boiled Sweets, filmed almost entirely in Southend! Will be posting more about the Festival itself in the near future so keep your eyes peeled!