4Mations Evaluation

For my branding project I was asked to rebrand 4Mations, an animation based channel from Channel 4. I was asked to create a logo, a banner ad, a website design, and preloader storyboard all within the same brand.

I started by researching into similar brands by channel 4 such as E4 and Channel 5. I wanted to create something that could be used across all of the products. Almost a story that can be told through the stings and preloaders, giving the channel a personality aswell as a brand. I started with the logo. I decided to create a logo that comes to life, The 4Mations Robot was born. I liked the original feel of Channel 4 it maintained with an extra humorous twist. If I had more time I would like to explore the idea of making the logo 3D. This could have been a better way to illustrate my idea.

The story behind the logo is simply that of a clumsy, accident-prone robot that always gets in trouble. I illustrated this in the storyboards for the preloader.  I think the idea for the storyboard works well with the brand of 4Mations. This also can carry on into many different funny scenarios. I like the way that the preloaders and stings are small cartoons in themselves, representing an animation channel.

So far in this project I’ve used tools familiar to me such as simple drawing and Adobe Illustrator. For the next part I had to learn how to use Adobe Flash. This was to make my website banner animation.  At first I found the program quite difficult to use. After learning the basics I started to work on a few skills that would make my animation better. Including smother revealing of the robot arms and of the scratch marks at the end. The idea of the stupid robot works well I think.

The website was simply designed to give maximum attention to the content. I used large bold headers to separate the sections and kept the navigation constant at the top. Slight styling such as little scratch marks were used to carry on the 4Mations Robot idea and a colour palette was used throughout.

Overall I was very pleased with my progress on Flash and think the animation I designed would work well as part of a campaign. I would like to have spent a little more time learning the action script side of flash and maybe make some of the animations a bit smoother.