Monday 19 September 2016

AS1 Task 2 - Understanding Limitations of TV Idents

Television idents need to be consistent and thus creating limitations on the ident. But this is not always a bad thing as the limitations help the company.

Typography in television idents is a limitation, but it's a limitation that has a certain degree of flexibility. The typography of a television ident can be changed slightly, such as making font bolder or larger, changing it from lower case letter to upper case letters but maintaining the same size or tilting some letters and changing the colours.

BBC has used several different fonts that vary in a lot of different ways, however it is still possible to see a very clear correlation between channels that they are owned by the same company. This is because BBC has made it easy to brand their company because of how clearly they identify themselves to the audience.



If you look at the "BBC one" idents you can notice that there is a consistent image being shown. The colour red in a circle with the "BBC one" being shown either in the middle of the circle or at the bottom of the screen.

Another reason why consistency is important is for the audience. It's to keep the audience from being surprised or disturbed from a sudden change in the consistency of the idents. Some people wouldn't like it if they found out that their favourite television channel has suddenly changed their idents from something consistent and familiar to something alien and completely unfamiliar with everything they have seen from the channel.

In keeping their consistency, channels also maintain their branding which makes it easier for the channel to be identified and it will make them more likely to host a special programme on their channel only which will also increase their popularity.

Colour also matters with idents. Each and every channel, like their typography, has a specific colour scheme for their idents. BBC One always has red in their idents, no matter what the ident is like, it always has red in there somewhere, and it's almost always the exact same crimson red as well.

Colour helps add more identity and uniqueness to idents, same as typography. It helps the audience understand what type of channel it is and what type of audience it is aimed more towards.

So a limitation of the colour scheme on channels is that it always has to be the same so as not to confuse people with other channels, but that limitation is good as it means that there is always consistency in the idents as people will associate that colour scheme to the same channel they always see the ident on.

Aspect ratio also plays a relatively big role on television as well. It always has as adverts need to be made using a specific aspect ratio, channels had to play programmes on the same aspect ratio and all of them had to use the same one. These days it has to be 16:9 because of how televisions are designed these days.

Cinemascope ratio letterbox is used for dedicated movie channels who want to show programmes or movies in the cinema ratios 2:35:1 (28:1) or 1:85:1 which is centred on the screen vertically between two black frames on a 16:9 screen that has no geometric distortion whilst filling the screen.

Floating images are images shown in a short sequence that are surrounded by black borders covering the edges of the screen. Televisions that have the "auto zoom" function tend to think that the black borders mean that the thing being shown needs to be a letterbox, causing the images to be zoomed in incorrectly which may make the viewer annoyed and could ruin the artistic intentions of adding the black borders.

Pillarboxed HD material can only be shown if it is acceptable with the broadcaster where it has been acquired on a medium or material that can be transferred to real HD resolution. An example is 35mm film shot at 4 perf at an aspect ratio lower than 16:9. For this to be HD, the pictures need to be framed in a 16:9 raster with no geometrical distortion.

Finally, duration. Idents are always filmed to be several minutes long so that the channel can show variation of the ident suite so as not to bore their audience with the same ident every time. Also, if the need arises, the channel can view several minutes of the ident to make up for a lot of extra time.







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