Ident Planning and Research

When planning my ident, I had to think about my brand identity, how I want to be presented to my clients. After researching into brand identity theory I came across the ‘Brand Identity Prism’. Defined by Jean-Noël Kapferer, this theory signifies the six aspects which help build a brand identity (https://woven.agency/blog/what-is-the-brand-identity-prism/):

Physique

“Kapferer said the physique should be considered the basis of the brand; it is the clearest visual representation of your brand’s aspirations and how you wish it to be perceived.”

In response to this, I thought about my brand identity to be simple and minimalistic. Using greyscale colours such as greys, blacks or whites to give a sleek look. In addition the minimalist look a Sans-Serif font would help illustrate the overall look I want to go for.

Personality

“How a brand communicates with the outside world, which is expressed through its tone of voice, its design and its copywriting”.

The way I want my brand identity to be illustrated is that my services are straight forward and hassle-free but I am able to create high end content for my clients.  This could be expressed through the minimalistic look and colours. The type of font will also reflect the high persona of my brand. One font in particular reflects the look I am wanting to pursue ‘Helvetica Neue’.

Culture

“The value system and the principles on which a brand bases its behaviour. Tesla’s culture, for example, encourages its workforce to innovate and throw in ideas to keep the brand at the forefront of technological change”.

The value system I want to integrate into my brand is to reflect contemporary commercial filmmaking technical. The idea of contemporary for my brand focuses on the idea of minimalism “Minimalism: Use of the fewest and barest essentials or elements, as in the arts, literature, or design.” (https://www.sitepoint.com/what-is-minimalism/)  When creating commercial content, I want to get across to the client that, “Less Is More” which is a quote from the German architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe (1886-1969). In terms of  filmmaking, in all the videos my brand produces I want to push the idea to help the client push the message of their video in the most simplistic but affective as possible, using contemporary, up to date styles and methods.

Relationship

Thinking about the relationship between brand and customer, it is important for the client to understand what they’re getting other than the product. The ambitions for my brand are a simplistic, easy service where the client and myself can discuss ideas and have product planned and produced without any problems, in a reasonable space of time.

Self-image

Self image is how the client see’s themselves. And the brand identity fits accordingly to whatever target audience the brand aspires towards. For my brand I aim to fit middle – high end, stylish clients. Such as salons, estate agencies clothing stores. Clients who want videos that are more modern and contemporary.

Creating my brand

When coming up with a brand name, I wanted something that was slightly unusual. By unusual I mean a name which went against other trends of company names in the same industry. As I was aspiring to work for moderately small to medium businesses I wanted a name which sounded honest and down to Earth.

Due to the fact that I am a university student, learning the ropes of videography I decided for a name which illustrated that people have to start somewhere so I went for the word ‘rookie’. I didn’t particularly like the way it was spelt (as in the way it looked) so I wanted to change the orthography of the word and create a variant spelling to make it more interesting to look at, so I changed the word to ‘Ruki’. This made it feel more contemporary and introduced a slight semantic change to the word. After researching into the word Ruki, I found that it was in fact a Japanese name of a person, meaning they are a natural entertainer, artistic and have creative qualities. This was an added bonus as this suggests the brand qualities in terms of videography and entertaining an audience.

My final name for my brand became ‘Ruki Production‘.

Using the idea of minimalism, I wanted to go for the sleek look which I had been researching into. Looking at the greyscale colour wheel I wanted to use greys against whites to push the simplistic logo look.

I chose to like the look of the darker greys on this colour wheel as I felt that I would pop more against the whites, I didn’t want to push to black as it didn’t have the same sleekness.

In terms of the logo I needed to find an interesting San-Serif font. I also want it to look quite modern without flicks like old style fonts. After looking through numerous styles of fonts, Helvetica was the preferred choice of font.

I wanted the font quite thin as the bolder style font didn’t have the desired contemporary look I wanted to go for, so I decided to for the ‘Helvetica Neue 25 Ultra Light‘ as the chosen font.

These are the chosen final designs of the my brand.

Planning my Ident

After finalising what my brand logo would look like I was now in a position to plan my ident. Again going for a simplistic look I like the idea of a reveal. After visiting Asthetica Film Festival in 2018 there was a particular ident which stood out which was the UAL: University Of The Arts ident.

The ident consisted of showreel footage, zooming out through a letter to reveal the UAL logo, which then turned to white. I felt that this was very simplistic yet effective and the style I was after.

I decided to create a storyboard to illustrate this idea to create is as my own ident.

To create this ident I needed to list and research the skills I would need to learn in AE:

• How to fill texts with Videos.
• How to zoom out of text to reveal the rest of the text.
• How to change the video fill to a solid colour.

I began researching these skills on Youtube and this is what I found:

For filling texts with video:

Zoom out of text:

Change colour of text: