Evaluation

Right from the start this project drew a huge amount of interest for me. I believe recycling and sustainability are important issues, which we can all help with. From start to finish I have worked enthusiastically producing relevant idea's and showing improvements in skills such as my organisation.
The initial stages of filtering through many ideas to find something to suit me and my client were very time consuming and thorough. From the word 'go' recycling in my head was all about turning something which would grow old in a landfill to something new. Looking at lots of companies and methods of recycling opened my eyes to the fact that things don’t always need to be recycled but can be reused. This idea intrigued me which was part of the reason I chose Scrapstore.
When exploring ideas around recycling I came up with a lot of ideas and contributed well to discussions and mind maps. It was fairly easy to take these ideas and expand on them however sometimes I found I came to a dead end in that not all of the ideas were possible what with time and budget constrictions.
To help me I researched lots of artists, the one most relevant to my project was Jeff Pigott and Julia Warin, who did a spaceship project involving building a spaceship similar to the one I had planned. I found that through email I could get loads of specific information which could help me in my project.
Before we met with the partners I thought of questions I wasted to ask before and what I wanted to get from the meeting. I used the internet to find background information about the different companies. I found this quite effective and a way to get specific information from the meeting. I found I could use this information later on and taking notes was very effective for brainstorming ideas later in the project.
After writing down lots of idea's I made a decision on who I wanted to work for. I chose Scrapstore as they seemed extremely creative and experimental and I thought I would be able to work well with them. I wrote down all my ideas and after arranging another meeting I presented these idea's to John. I found this very effective as the feedback was extremely helpful in narrowing down my idea's.
The communication between my partner and I, I feel were very good. I think email was the most effective and convenient was for both John and I.
During our time in class I found it very productive to experiment with materials which can and can't be recycled to explore possibilities around what they could be used for. I made objects from card and experimented with techniques of folding paper. I liked the weaving technique the best so decided to use this for something which can't be recycled to create a new material which was flexible and easy to manipulate. I also experimented with origami and found this a charming way to use paper rather than throwing it away. After having an idea that I wanted to use animation I started to experiment with my own animation. I already had a good background knowledge of animation so just needed to experiment. I have already tried 2D animation and so I bought some plastercine to experiment with. Although this was fun I didn't end up using any of this.
Tim Burton is one of the animators I looked at, especially his 'Vincent Price'. I like Tim Burton's animations, poetry and creativity and this was the film I liked the best. It had a narrator reading a poem which I thought was very good as it reminded me of being read to as a child. I expanded from this trying to think of nursery rhymes which work well but I found I preferred to write my own poem. The first draft of my poem was extremely long and ambitious, I found I needed to change it in the end to fit in with the film I shot. If I did this again I would certainly swap this doing the filming first, especially as the children were very unpredictable.
I knew I needed some backgrounds for my film and found inspiration for these from various artists such as Van Gogh. For instance I used his 'Starry night' as inspiration for my sky theme. I used different types of paint to get nice effects and then manipulated the image on Photoshop. I found this fairly easy to do but I didn’t actually use this in the end as the part of the poem it was for was cut. Another artist I took inspiration from was Henri Rosseau, I particularly liked them and tried to mimic his style with my own twist. I found using programs such as Coral Painter and Photoshop fairly easy to use to manipulate my images.
Before shooting my film I needed permission from my friend to borrow her children, this all went smoothly although as I found out on that very difficult day is that children are a handful, unpredictable but charming and I think their personalities shine through on the film. I would definitely need help if I did this again as I struggled with supervising the children as I have not had an awful lot of experience keeping them entertained and happy. At first I had an idea in my head of what I wanted them to do but I found I just had to let them be creative in their own way and how they felt comfortable as this is when they were truly happy and I wanted this to be obvious in my film.
I planned my film well getting everything I needed such as scrap and camera's in plenty of time.
The animation of my backgrounds went quite well but I should have planned my time a little better as I spent more time on some than others and I think this shows. The editing of my film went well and fairly smooth. I felt the sound effects and voice over enhanced it and made an overall nice video.
Feedback from my partner was good. He said that the film I made was very positive and cheerful. He said it was aimed at the right people and the content was very reminiscent and childlike. He liked the artwork included in it and said it gave the film personality and charm. He said that he would liked to have seen some more of the scrap in a before and after way, or actually being made because this would show a deeper meaning of how the scrap is used. John enjoyed the use of sound effects and narration although the narration was a little quiet. And the titles at the end were very clear easy to read and didn’t drag on for too long.
Overall I am very happy with this project and my film and I think I did well considering I possibly bit off more than I could chew. If I worked with children or filming equipment again I would definitely get someone to help me and work alongside someone else so I could get lots more feedback and a combination of skills. I enjoyed working with the children but I definitely could have had some help. I think the research went well although sometimes I was too busy looking at one artist to notice another which was also relevant. I think I learned from this that I should listen to general advice given to me and I should have researched more thoroughly.

Final version

transitions

I didn't use many transitions, I inserted channel map to show progression from one verse to another, I also used fading. I also decided to enter some sounds such as jungle and spaceship sounds. I looked through the library of royalty free sounds and chose some which were relevant to save to my desktop. I found a whoosh sound, children cheering, jungle day and various other sounds. I added them to my film and faded them in and out or kept the decibels very low so it didn't interfere with the voice over and added the correct effect to my film.

Budgeting mock up

Costs
Travel- £60
Materials- £30
Labour- £40
Rental of equipment- £100
Total- £230

I would also nee to consider filming on private property and in the public and informing the neighbors of my actions. I slipped a note through the doors on my street to let them know I may be filming in the house and garden.

scrap!

Today we used various bits of scrap to spell the word scrap, this was so all our films had something in common. My idea was to use the buttons inside plastic trays to spell out the word scrap. We filmed this and then someone in the group had the idea of sweeping it away after.

Voice over/subtitles

Today I needed to work out whether I wanted to use a voice over or enter subtitles for narration. I experimented with a voice over recording my voice and reading the poem. This proved very difficult as my voice sounded boring so I had to try and sound happy. The original plan was to get a child to read it but neither Amelia or Harry wanted to so I had to improvise. I should have thought of this earlier so I could think of something in case this happened. For now I had to find a solution. I asked my classmates if anyone could help me but everyone was too shy. I attempted to add subtitles but this confused the film a lot and feedback from my peers told me it was too complicated and you spent longer reading the subtitles than looking at the film. After experimenting with different styles of reading the poem I found if I read it with a smile this came across in my voice. After lots of trials it sounded better so I decided to use this. It was meant to sound as if I was reading for a child to fit in with the theme of my film and I hope this comes across. I could move the voice over around so it would fit in well with the way I arranged my clips.
I had to edit the sound of the clips so you could hear the voice over or fade the sounds in and out to match and work together.

In this lesson I also inserted my animations into the film. I put the castle and the spaceship animations where in the film they were relevant. When watching it through I am happy with the way it looks but wanted some differentiation between verses of the poem and film. I decided to fade in where some of the verses began to make it flow more.

Some of the film was a bit bright so I used a three way colour corrector to make the clips better exposed, after this I copied it and pasted the attributes to other similar clips which were also incorrectly exposed.

Amelia's Story

To start the film I created an image on photoshop using a photo of Amelia, the scrapstore logo and some type, I thought this would be a nice way to start the film. I kept the origional logo but used the lavendar colour as a block background rather than the splat theme. I then uploaded this to my film.

creating more backgrounds

In this lesson I focused on creating my spaceship background. To start with I experimented with filters, each creating a nice effect but not quite looking how I imagined. I decided I wanted the sky to look different and change colour the same way I made the sky background earlier. To separate the sky from the ground I rubbed it out using the rubber tool. I made the sky look more alien using the neon filter then pasted it onto the copy I had prepared. This gave a really nice effect which when the hue was changed looked very 'other worldly'. I next prepared my spaceship on photoshop, this was just a simple drawing coloured with bright colours. I pasted this onto my image of the space scene many times so I could later animate it. I positioned every new layer slightly above the other to make it look like it was taking off. To animate the sky I moved the hue by 5% and created a new layer with each different coloured sky. I opened the animate window and created enough slides to allow the rocket ship to fly out of sight. This was extremely difficult. It seemed after I positioned them perfectly and started to choose which layers should go in each frame they had moved so the animation didn't work. I discovered this was due to 'snap' which needed to be turned off. After I had arranged the layers and frames how I wanted I set the time to 0.2 of a second and the spaceship flew off as I had first wanted to. I liked the way it wasn't perfect so I decided to not use 'tweening' to keep that effect. I am very happy with this animation it was the most difficult so far and took me almost five hours but it works. To export I needed to reduce the Pixels per inch to 100 and the image size by almost half to make a smaller document which was easier to export.

Artwork for backgrounds

Today I drew some more artwork to use as a couple of backgrounds in my film. I needed to draw a castle and a horse, and a little girl. I sketched these out and scanned them in using photoshop to colour and edit them. With the castle and horse I wanted it to be like what would be in a children's story like the other backgrounds I drew. I also drew a space scene and space ship inspired by the 'forbidden planet poster'. I drew out the background from the 'Forbidden Planet' poster and separately drew a spaceship I could later animate in photoshop.

Editing my poem for narration

Some of the footage was too dark to use so I also had to edit the poem to match the footage, I wrote a new one which was shorter and in a better order which would hopefully work.

Narration

Amelia Harold is five years old
shes quiet and shy and not very bold
her favourite toy is her cuddly raddy
the head of a dog just a rag for a body.

Amelia liked to make things and play
She wanted to mess around every day
She even liked grown up things like reading
but her favourite game was pretend to be cooking

She was a bit different from her older brother harry
Who loved outer space and anything hairy
He would take his friends to the moon on a trip
and pretend to be an astronaut in his magic rocket ship.

The jungle was the place they longed to see
To swing with the monkeys in every tree
The jungle they made looked just how they wanted
But didn't expect the elephant which squirted

Amelia's dream was to live like a Queen
In a Castle of colours, silver, blue and green,
They built a fort which was fit for a King!
They wanted to stay there and never stop playing

Editing

Today I carried on editing my film, I put all the clips in order of the poem I had redone because of the change of subject matter. This was quite difficult and took a lot of improvisation and time to be satisfactory. I cut the clips down a lot so the film didn't get too long and I wanted it to stay in time with the poem, I'm not sure this will work out as planned but I am hoping I can get it right the first time. I planned to keep every 2 lines of the poem to 8 seconds.

editing my film

Today I started to edit my film using Final Cut Pro, I already knew how to use this from previous experience. I made a rough cut by selecting the areas which were good but I knew the brief wanted my film to be quite short so I had a lot to cut out.

transferring the video

Today I transferred my video onto final cut pro using log and capture. I chose the part of the film which had good content to use in my advert.

Forbidden Planet Images

I took aspects of these images as inspiration for my backgrounds.