Project: Title Sequence

So, my second brief required me to produce a title sequence for a programme from a list. I chose The Culture Show.
The Culture Show is a weekly magazine show that is on every Saturday at 7pm and it's content has features about what is happening in the world of art, music, fashion, film and performing arts. The current Culture Show title isn't very visually exciting - I have done a review of it, please see the post below.
I began research by looking at title sequence designers and came across Kyle Cooper who produced excellent sequences for films such as Se7en, Mimic and Spiderman (which was also one of the choices on the brief). At this stage I also tried to do a brainstorm... something I'm still not very good at.... so I looked at the definitions of culture and society on the internet, hoping to gather some inspiration or clues.
Next thing I did was to breakdown and evaluate the current title sequence - something that didn't take long as I found it to be quite a 'non-fancy' sequence (again, see previous post).
In the research stage I also went around Manchester and took alot of pictures of visual art and things that are appearing in our cities that have evolved into what our culture is today.
I started to have lots of ideas early on in this brief, especially when I found out that it is called a magazine programme. The word magazine really stuck with me and I came up with alot of ideas where the sequence would evolve around taking the viewer around a magazine layout and the content shown would be what is featured in the show - like it's contents page. So I researched alot of magazines - especially culture magazines like i-D and also just focusing on front covers.
As a musician I also had alot of music type ideas - namely a speaker pumping out music and also driving out the content of the show. As research went on I preferred the speaker idea more than the magazine idea. After a one to one tutorial with Alex we discussed visual ideas and we came up with a scenario where 'I ' would be producing a magazine cover and placing polaroids onto the cover to line up with text - then the polaroids would 'come to life' - and thus would give me chance to edit what I film into those polaroid templates. However she did mention that some other people had similar ideas and I must admit that put me off the idea. We had also discussed making it have a sketchbook feel with maybe some of my doodles from my sketchbook 'wrapping' its way around the polaroids/footage. I kind of liked this idea and it stuck in my head.
Going back to my research in my sketchbook I was once again more drawn to the 'speaker' idea and thought of maybe incorporating a sketchbook feel to it - I then produced a separate 'sketchbook feel' idea.
After the research stage I began to look at what my content should be. After that I went ahead and started filming.
I incorporated both the Speaker idea and the Sketchbook idea together.
I found editing really difficult, especially as we were using Motion for the first time and also because we had, had only one tutorial on it before the Christmas holidays. When I did finally start getting comfortable with using Motion and Final Cut together I found that it was very late on in the process and basically very near the deadline and so I felt that I rushed my project.
In the end I felt that what I had thought of wasn't what I had produced. The only thing that I feel ok on, is that I timed most of the footage really well to the music that I used, which was the intro to one of my band's songs. I chose it because it had a good riff and punchy drums to follow. Looking back now, I think that the song may be too 'heavy' for the sequence and feel of the show.
Explanation of sequence (which I will post up soon!!)
Starts off with a speaker emerging and then as the first beat of the music starts the speaker comes to life. In the beats that follow the title of the show is co-0rdinated with the beats - and this pretty much carries on throughout. I wanted to give the footage I used a sketchbook feel, so tinted them and on some gave them some 'tv noise' to look scratchy and used. I also put in one of my doodles too to give it that feel. The end part of it, with the footage appearing in time to the music and looking like they are 'falling into' the 'Culture Show' title in the background, I did to basically say 'all this is crammed into this show' (I know you'll all know what I'm talking about when you see it - I will post it up soon!)
Overall I think time management was a big issue with this brief. I think that the Christmas holidays threw me off track and I found it hard to get back into working. I also think that we should have had more tutorials on the software that we were told to use - my group still haven't had a tutorial on Illustrator!
Time management and learning about the software will definately be issues I address early on next brief.