Solace MK2

And my original Ident. Please note that the current one is just over a minute long and this is just 7 seconds

And the fully finished final.

I edited a couple minor things that i noticed while previewing the video, one being that the centermost ring wobbles about that i thought i had already fixed but it doesnt show up much on the low quality versions, and when the shutters change from white to black at the end there was keyframe that had gone askew.

The song used in this ‘Das Malefitz’ by the ‘Faunts’, which avid gamers might recognise from when the credits roll on Mass Effect 3. I chose this because i wanted something ambient but not particularly slow (like Brian Eno’s [Apollo]), ambience because the recurring background, a photo of mine from a place called Skyreholme in North Yorkshire, is a very ambient scene.

I spent around half an hour attempting to fix something that, as it turns out, wasnt broken. In the previous version of the video it looked like the shutters started to spin the other way (in earlier versions that was actually true as i just reversed the rotations to get the impression of what it looked like). This is because the shutter was rotating so fast it essentially became a propeller and I suppose it would be classed as an optical illusion. To remedy this I pulled back the speed of the rotations, not so that the illusion wouldnt disappear (because I find my discovery to be a happy accident) but so it would only appear briefly and would be less prevalant.

I decided to abandon the closing shutter as it was only going to cause me grief in the long run, its something that I would like to attempt next year when we come to this and I have experimented in some 3D to give it the credit it deserves, instead of the closing shutter its essentially just a spinning disk but you get to take a gander into what the disk could potentially look like inside a computer.

I’m going to try and find some appropriate music to go along with the bulk of this now (the beginning will stay as is) and then im saving up and backing away from it

Replaced the opening with an actual video. The camera quality is naff as I used my camcorder which for reasons only known by electronic engineers my phone can pump out 720p while my camera is stuck in the early naughties, but picture quality isnt everything and I will hopefully upgrade my DSLR in a couple weeks and sell off my camcorder for its all powerful 1080p video stuff (FYI anyone want a Nikon D3000 body only give me a shout). Still need to work out how im going to do the shutters opening and closing and a few other things to go with it

Fixed the shutter, although now a ring thinks its a hula hoop (not the crisp)

Second test. The shutter symbol is supposed to spin around speeding up gradually untill it reaches a propeller like state where the image will stabilise become something like a zoetrope with the shutters opening and closing. Something I found out from this is that the shutters lack of symmetry becomes more apparent. This was because when I designed the thing I wasn’t using intelligence at the time (i blame either lack of tea of too much lager)

Probably not going to use this in favour of an recording of an actual disk tray but it gets the general idea of the start of my ident