Evaluation

In this project I had to produce a short stop motion animation using my own idea, I decided to do mine with skittles, I wanted to make a fun, short and new animation to bring back a sense that skittles are still aimed at children. So I decided I was going to use all the colours to create something that is good to look at and is quirky and fun.

In the project I did a lot of research into skittles and into other videos and stop motions that had been made I gathered a lot of information and videos from YouTube to help me come up with a brand new idea to intrigue the children.

I had to decide if I was going to make a viral video or one for TV I wanted to do one for TV but I decided that viral would get me more feedback and a better response from the audiences.
Even though the target audience was aimed at children elder people can still watch it and enjoy it.

Throughout this project I kept a blog about the happenings and how I felt about each lesson that occurred it allowed to me keep up to date with things that were outstanding and allowed me to make notes for the following lessons on what I needed to do. It helped me keep on track and keep to the schedule that I had already set myself at the beginning of the project.
I believe I am good at managing my time and like to keep to all deadlines that are set, I think having a schedule and blog helped me do this.

While doing this project we had group meetings to analyse our productions and to plan out what we were going to do as a group, the meetings consisted of planning and keeping time schedules, each person having their opinions on time management and their own productions, before each production the leader would give out their orders and job roles in a friendly manor and at the end we would analyse what happened, what went wrong and what we could do to prevent any problems from happening again.

Some problems that occurred during the project were that the timetable we originally created as a group had a few errors we had not realised that one of the Mondays after the half term was a bank holiday which left us behind a week, but I took control and managed to sort out the weeks between us and get back on track with production.
In production the camera positioning was the most important thing but keeping it steady without moving it was hard, the camera ended up moving and some of my images were out of place meaning I needed to spend more time in post production which is not what we had aimed for as a group.
Another problem that I had was I was supposed to be Antony’s assistant for his production but unfortunately I hurt my finger outside of production hours and I did not want to be a liability to his project so I managed the camera instead.
Also nobody had set the camera settings to the settings it needed to be to shoot and upload properly to the computer, which meant with me being the first production that all my images were packed together and would not work on the pc, giving me a back log of work and left me behind slightly as they had to be edited one by one which was a long process, once the images were given back to me I made sure that the other 2 in the group knew about this happening so that it could be prevented from happening to them, I managed to get my images back and edit them at a fast pace to get back on track by the next lesson.

Parts in the project such as the timescale of productions went really well, we gave ourselves 2 weeks of production time and we all managed to get them done in 1 day, which meant we had extra time for postproduction.
The fixing together of the animation went really well, the batch processing, editing and cropping was really quick and then developing in Premier was easy, adding in the music, credits and titles and then screening the animation to an audience for feedback.
All these things went really well and the animation was finished on time and on schedule.


This feedback told me that generally most people liked the animation but if it was even shorter and titles and credits were animated they would have enjoyed it more. I think the feedback is acceptable and I would defiantly change these errors to make an animation that the audience loves.
I also asked a fellow student to upload it to their YouTube channel to get some more feedback which stated that I could do with making the lighting better with some people commenting saying it was poor quality and others that it was “awesome” and saying that I could “double the frame count” I think that this feedback is acceptable and I would put these opinions into order.


In conclusion I think this project has been really exciting and fun and I have really enjoyed working on my own as well as in a group being able to share each others work is great knowing that you have helped someone create something really good.
The whole project has been smooth running and easy to keep up with and has run to the schedule in time and the deadline has been met.

I think if I had the opportunity do this project again I would change the effects that was mentioned in the feedback and I would also try and use some more ideas I had previous to make it more interesting.
I had fun being able to have a free project where I could choose the brief for myself it allows me to express my personality and gives me more of a chance to show what I can do.
Overall the project was a success and I would love the opportunity to do it again.

Post Production- Rendering and Exporting - Part 2

Today I have rendered out my video and exported it using Premier encoder, this allows me to choose the formats and quality that I want the video to be, I did the first render as a .avi file which can be played on the TV, the peer that is uploading my video to YouTube told me that the file had to be an .avi and needed to be rather small to be uploaded.
When I informed my tutor she said that the .avi would be suitable for both the TV and the YouTube so instead of 2 different exports I only had to do 1 which saved me some time.

I then went on to analyse my finished video by watching it with headphones and making sure it was perfect, it was really good and the beats of the music fit with the video.

Then I had to do my feedback form so that I am able to hand them out in lesson tomorrow when peers will be watching all 3 of our animations to give us feedback.

I made sure that I asked relevant questions to give me accurate feedback that I can analyse and use for further reference; I gave easy and short questions so that the feedback can be quick and simple as the other animations will need feedback as well.

I then updated my action plan and added extra to my blog.

Next lesson: Prepare for animation viewing and feedback, print out feedback forms and get animation ready for screen.
Blog update and Action plan.

Post Production- Rendering and Exporting- Part 1

Today I need to finalise my video and render it out, then export it into 2 different formats for TV and YouTube so that I will be able to get feedback from both.

I need to decide the formats best for the quality of the video and make sure everything else is up to date,

I then need to make a action plan for tomorrow where I will be showing my video to my peers and getting feedback.

Post Production - Editing in Premier and adding effects

Today I took my video into Adobe Premier, first I imported it in and started to add some extra effects such as fade ins and transitions, I then added in a title at the beginning of the video to introduce it.

Next I wanted to make the end of the animation slightly longer so that the face I have made at the end is on screen for more time as it is quite fast at the end and it Is quite a cute part to the animation and I want this to be noticed by the audience as it is a reflection on the target audience of my animation.
So I brought in a still image of the last frame and added it to the end of the animation.

Then I had to search for my song as I wanted a more upbeat one to go with the pace of the music.
I looked at many different songs ones such as Olly Murs, Black eyed peas, Lady GaGa, Bruno Mars and Ellie Goulding. To make sure I got the right song I had to test them with my video so I opened it up in the background whislt I played the song this gave me a rough idea of what the song would sound like with the video and if the beat was right with the movements.

After finding my music I then imported into Premier and started to edit it to fit the animation, it was a perfect fit so I then moved onto another title at the end of the animation before the credits, just to say thank you to the people who watched the animation. I added this and then the credits which I made fade out at the end with the music.

Next lesson: finalise and render video and export in 2 different formats, 1 for tv and 1 for YouTube.
Action Plan.
Feedback Form.

Post Production- Editing images and making movie.

Today I took one of my main images into Photoshop and tried to make a few changes to the images to brighten it up, I added a Gaussian blur and a photo filter of a light blue shade, which made the image lighter straight away.
I then did a batch process on all of my images, I then added the images into the animation bar and tested the pictures as a animation, I exported it as a QuickTime movie and watched to see where I could make the movie better, some parts of the animation were very fast so I had to alter the seconds between the frames to give the animation a bit more of a slow pace so that the audience would be able to see all aspects of the animation.

I made five different movies with the different seconds and experimented with the frames to make sure that while watching the animation it was perfect timing and was not too fast for any audience type.

I then narrowed it down to one final version of the animation, which I thought was the best out of the five.

Next lesson: take animation into premier to edit and add effects, working at fast pace and in time to get finished for the deadline.

Keep up to date with blog and action plans.