Cruella Ident Development

After a lot of indecisiveness, I decided to focus my last ident around Cruella de Ville as I thought that she had some of the most notable characteristics and connotations of a villain. Also, she is the only female villain in the group and it just mixes things up a bit.
I started by producing a couple of basic storyboard ideas for how I could represent her a best and as simply as possible. I decided to focus on this storyboard and see how it turned out.

To start The storyboard I worked with creating the spots to represent the dalmatians. These pretty much worked out exactly as I had hoped and keep the flowing cartoony style of the other idents.



I found the hair a really difficult aspect to try and animate. I started by trying to use the hair effect that after effects comes with but this created a really defined and detailed kind of hair that was actually really difficult to manipulate properly. I also tried to use a single mask so that I could move vectors to try and create the hair but it looked really static.

So eventually I had to use several masks (17 I think) to make up the hair and move each one individually to give the hair flowing effect. I think that it does represent hair quite well but as someone pointed out it does also look a bit like tentacles. Hopefully teh rest of the ident will work enough around it to show that it is hair.



With the hair I added a similar set of masks to make the streak of white flow down through the hair which I think worked really successfully.



After figuring out these main parts of the ident I realised that none of it had any purple to link back to E4 like the others do. So I went back through and tried to change some aspects of the animation to purple and see how it looked.
I started with this by making the background purple but it looked more like a strange planet or something than dalmation spots.



I also tried to make the spots purple but obviously this just made it look like something ill or something alien.



In an attempt to get purple in to the animation somewhere I decided to use lightning effects to add flashes and link back to evilness as well (as there are often lightning storms and stuff when villains are around).
I used a lens flare effect set really mildly to give the purple more a flash. I thought it worked well but tried it without the flare anyway.



As you can see it makes it look a lot less flashy so a lot less lightning-y. I went with the above slight lens flare instead.



At the end I also incorporated a tiny little bolt of lightning to make the E4 logo stand out slightly as different from the regular one. To make it I used similar effects to the way I made the lightsaber.