End Sting

Brief: To design a 3-5 second End Sting with the company's logo you have been given.

Logo: ENO (English National Opera)

I began by researching the logo to find out the designer and typeface, it was designed by CDT design in the early '90's, CDT design is based in London and was formed in 1979 by Mike Dempsy with Ken Carroll and Nick Thirkell, their clients include Royal Mail, City and Guilds and Action Aid.

I researched the actual structure of the Logo and The English National Opera to understand their style and image.

I decided to create some ideas based on the Colliseum building, mainly the sphere, using typography to create faces as if they were singing and images of dancers, simplified to create the letters ENO. The ideas had to be relatively simple to enable them to work in moving image and the End Sting had to be only 3-5 seconds long.

I worked some ideas into storyboard format to see how the ideas would work limited to frames, The typography idea proved to be quite difficult as it would have to redrawn numerous times to get the letters to portray facial expressions and the letters were limited to E, N and O.

I liked the idea of the revolving sphere representing the Colliseum building as I thought this could work quite well in moving image and through research I discovered that the sphere on the building actually lights up and revolves.

I put this idea into a story board, then designed each frame in Adobe Illustrator, turning them into symbols I imported them into Flash to create the animation, I decided to add background music and chose Mozart's Marriage of Figaro as the tune builds to a climax and then slows which I thought suited the animation. I was pleased with the final End Sting and enjoyed working with Flash, it was good experience to gain knowledge of an additional programme and to work with moving image.