The marketing team from Arts University Bournemouth (AUB) sought out the talents of its own students when looking to create a new ident. Students were invited to submit their design ideas with the winning design receiving a commission and professional support to produce the ident.
An ident, or sting, is a short video clip that starts and finishes TV programmes, often showing the company logo, but treated in a playful way that brings the brand to life.
"For marketing AUB, we produce dozens of animations and videos each year for use on our own website and social media channels, as well as third party sites and socials too," comments Simon Pride, Head of Brand, Marketing, and Future Students at AUB. "We wanted to really make these really pop with a super creative top and tail, and who better to design this than our own talented students."
The winning students, BA (Hons) Illustration third-years George Garry and Louise Furley, who worked together on a stop motion animation ident for the University. George explains the creative process behind the winning entry:
"I’m a stop motion animator, so it was always going down that route for me. Louise is more of a traditional artist, so they brought a different perspective and set of skills to the project. We’ve wanted to collaborate for ages; I’m into horror and Louise is more whimsical, and we couldn’t wait to mix our styles to see what happened."
George and Louise worked with Mark Sephton, Creative Director at Creative Forager, an award-winning UK creative studio and advertising agency, who guided them through the finishing stages for the product to be ready for use.
Louise says, "It was really interesting working on this as a live brief; we got to see what it was like having the back-and-forth with a client and learning how to compromise too. We really wanted to incorporate as many different artistic styles as possible to express the breadth and range of AUB, and there was also a fair amount of the ident that was just us being weird!
"We both love mixed media and using real-life everyday materials so there’s a lot of that in there. We really wanted food to be involved, and we absolutely knew we needed Alphabetti spaghetti to star in it! We used the beach as it’s synonymous with AUB’s location, and then we used our friend’s leg hair, because, why not?! It’s a lot of oddball; it’s weird, it’s wonderful, it’s us and our fellow students. It’s a bit of AUB."
"We’re thrilled with the finished idents," adds Simon. "They perfectly capture the spirit of AUB. We’re all about diversity, individuality, collaboration, creativity, making and community, and George and Louise’s ident says all of that beautifully.
"It was great to see how well the students worked on the live brief and with Creative Forager, one of our industry partners. We’re very grateful to Mark and his team for their continued support of AUB and we’re very proud to be using this fantastic ident to showcase both AUB and the excellent work produced by our students."
To see more of their work, visit George and Louise on Instagram.
