Examples

Tim Clark - "GMTV Idents"

Working to a brief

	Audio Newshour, Today, LK Today Idents Wake up to the Web Ident

Newshour, Today and LK Today are quite good examples of starting from a brief, it's changed to become slightly different on screen, so we've just had pre-shot video. The Today titles look very different from that now for various reasons. If it's a corporate ID or one of the big flagship idents, the Newshour Today titles, Lorraine, when you're dealing with those you just don't know where you're coming from so those are the worst ones.

The Today titles we had to change quite quickly because it just wasn't working. Visually that all stemmed... the way I set up the job in the first place. I had the brief then I changed it for various reasons half way through and we couldn't get it to work properly on screen so we had to re-design it again.

Their actual brief was they wanted it looking like the inside of a computer

Understanding the audience or user

	Audio Newshour, Today, LK Today Idents Lorraine Kelly titles Lorraine Kelly preliminary sketches

The whole show is like a magazine, it's split into three main sections, the News Hour, Today Programme which is the chat show element, and the Lorraine Kelly bit, which is very much aimed at housewives, so those three parts of the show have very different identities. On Friday you've got something called Entertainment Today, it's showbiz gossip, so that has its own look and it has its own sort of remit.

The audience is always changing, so breaking those down, Newshour used to be a lot more hard nosed, aimed at predominantly men or business people, business women as well, getting up for work, so they'd be interested in that news, and an hour later you've got the Today programme which is just chit chat, and that's a very different audience, it's people who are still at home, maybe working, maybe a bit younger, and you've got the Lorraine Kelly section which is really aimed at housewives who are still at home, more often than not with their children, so it's based a lot more around hair and make up and a few health problems.

So three different identities and you think well they're probably easy enough to relate to in terms of graphics, but when we come to the Today Programme, anybody who's trying to do a re-design on that they don't know what shots to do, they don't know whether they want to have the presenters, they don't really know what they're trying to say in the graphic. So that's a big problem.

There's a really good example of that in the Lorraine Kelly titles. For years they had the titles and it was always Lorraine Kelly in it and this time they wanted a new look. The brief on paper was they wanted `normal' women, whether women working, couples, just normal women, so we thought it might be quite nice to go out and shoot women at work and at play, sort of stylised in cafes, what have you, just sort of close up, and then interleave that with video shots of whatever might be coming up, whether it be stars or fashion, so those titles went out for a little while, and we had a back drop of video, a women related video, business women, shopping, babies, I think there's a couple of shots of women as doctors and nurses, career women if you like, so that was the backdrop and the foreground was stylised model shots of women getting ready, putting make up on, business women on the phone.

But very quickly with their ratings, the stories had changed so it wasn't really about the career women and the harder nosed stories which they'd hoped, so we had to do a re-design and they just didn't know how to package the programme, so the senior editor said 'I see the Lorraine show as like a coffee break at the end of the hubbub of the main show, let's do something with coffee pots'. You've basically got a background of a coffee pot and a sort of stylised cup, interlaced with video footage of what might be coming up, again stars or health or women related stories, and it was just such a weak way of putting a job together.

Research techniques and methodologies

	Audio Olympic Games preliminary sketches

The Olympic Games one just seemed to flow. Initially we weren't allowed to use the Olympic rings 'cause it's a copyright logo and we haven't got the licence for it, but all along I wanted to do something along those lines. I think it was the anniversary so it was in Atlanta, so it was a mixture of olden day sand if you like and a bit more high tech which came in the type and I think we did about three or four different storyboards 'cause it kept getting thrown out, how we could put the Olympic rings in. Then it was going to be sponsored by the British Olympic Federation and I'd done the same thing with the logo there, then it came back again and it was different logos that we could have used. All the time it was going to be whatever I had, whatever the logo was I'd have done the same treatment, and when we were allowed to finally use the rings it just kept it together but that was all based on an idea that was quite strong in the first place, so it doesn't matter how they'd have changed it, I'd have still come back to that, so that's nice when an idea works.

Design methods and practical development

	Audio Newshour and Today preliminary sketches

I was doing the Today titles and the News Hour titles back to back and on my storyboard they were going to revolve round a globe with a sort of grid system. News Hour was going to be very much more hard line news and the boxes were going to have VT images of the day's news which would come round the globe. I set about to do that and we were just so back to back and I was learning the equipment on that stage anyway, so got that one out, then within the next 20 minutes as soon as that was finished I started on the Today titles, so they said well that works fine on its own without the editorial going in.

That was another problem, they would have to decide editorially what footage goes into that graphic, and the Today titles were going to be much the same but a bit more morphing in the centre, a bit more like an energised sun, but still with VT footage going round of the presenters. Then they said well we don't really want the grid system because it looks too much like the Newshour, so that was thrown out of the window, so I went home and just did a couple of effects and came up with something that looked quite nice, it was a morphing sun just expanding and it starts to blob and the development of the sun in the middle, but then there was no way of flying pictures around that because it was a background on its own. So we ended up putting those soft little segments around the screen, which we were updating quite often, but people couldn't see what they were and there weren't enough shots, they didn't know how to package the show.

The Today programme, which is the flagship programme, which is the sofa chat with Eamon Holmes and Fiona Phillips, it's sort of current affairs and it just goes hand in hand with newspaper stories so it's quite up to date, and initally they're saying well let's make this programme an element of what's going on all around Britain, so let's have views of places around Britain, Stonehenge or Angel of the North, which you'll see in the shots, but then they became completely irrelevant, then spring time would come and you go what do you show for that? Oh some flowers and some lambs and it just became more and more irrelevant, 'cause all along they didn't want the presenters in it, then they said well let's try and put it with the presenters and that didn't work because it wasn't designed to do that, so we just knocked it on the head and I re-designed it, so one could have worked without footage, the one with footage in News Hour, which should have had footage didn't, and the Today titles which shouldn't have had footage we tried to put footage in so that was an example of a success and something not working there.

Creation and construction

	Audio GMTV2 ident GMTV2 Mood Boards

I was doing a redesign for the ident, and I wanted to bring in a lot more of what print was doing at the time, a lot of white space, changing our colours slightly, which was the old traditional very dark blue and the gold. It did look very clean but at the end of the day it was the wrong colours, they thought it was too cold and I had to convince them that you can still have whites and blues and still make it look warm. I just made mood boards which are just cut out from magazines, shapes, colours, with absolutely nothing to do with our content, so straight away when they looked at that they could get a feel.

It's actually one of the projects that didn't work out very well. It was the ident but we were trying to sell it on the gold and the light blue and quite a bit of white coming in. I'd shot quite a lot of stuff on the camera, which I was desperately trying to make work and we got the background ok and we got the gold animating really nicely, we just couldn't bring up the letters GMTV. I had a go, somebody else had a go, it went to a 3D designer outside, came back, still wasn't right and I finally nailed it on the head and it worked ok, but then they were saying that the background was too blue, let's bring some colour in, which we tried to do. They re-designed it some time later and the typeface, which I quite liked, which you see on the reel, was a variation on what we were using on GMTV2, but the Chief Editor just considered it a kiddie typeface, wanted the whole thing rounder and bubblier. I purposely made the yellow orb as a disc as opposed to a ball, but they wanted to bring it back to the ball.

Presenting and gathering feedback

	Audio

Once we've put the final logo on and it's finally to tape, that is our signing off really. Once they've got it, that's it for us. You get a few producers, like the senior producers who don't really want to come down, so you might have to put elements onto tape throughout the project. (This text is taken from main presentation material).