Friday 3 April 2009

EVALUATION!!!






A title sequence is suppose to daw in the attention of a certain audience , wanting them to carry on and watch the rest of the film. It usualy sets the time, place, and period of the film and gives a simple narrative. By these things it shoud create enigmas. They are often made differently to make it unique from others and more attractive, These could be animated using cutouts of card and paper like Saul Bass has done or they could be normal footage where they show the setting and have simple fonts to show the names. each designer tries their best to make it attractive for the audience they are aiming for. In our media product the audience is children and we set ourself a challenge to create an animation title sequence.

we started of by researching and looking at different animated title sequences such as 'Juno' and 'Catch me if you can'. The first time we watched the Juno sequence we thought it would be great to do a similiar peice like that where we go out and take lots of pictures, which we could of then photocopied or played with colour and size. Juno also inspired us with another thing which was the way her image carries on all the way throughout the sequence. Our eyes just follow her all the way through which makes her, 'the object in the frame' contineous.Par of our star idea was from here as we thought we'd animate a star which will be flowing throughout the whole of the sequence. We also looked 'Catch me if you can' which was also another kind of inspiration. That title sequence almost tells us the story but in a very simple way. This is by using silhouettes which also look like they are being continued and followed throughout the sequence. Each scene has something to follow from which the next scene continues from. So again, this was another link to the animation in our film.




Layla is represnted in a very stereotypical way. She is a small quite girl who lives in this world of fantacies. Before I came up with this character, I researched and looked at other characters and there different features such as noses, eyes, ears and costumes so i could come up with my own. Followed after this research, I started drawing out my own images. I tried out different styles of hair and eyes and then finally I found Layla! I decided to dress her in a pink and lilac, printed nightsuit which is something most little girls will own. I gave her quite short, lightbrown hair with a little fringe which is another thing alot of little girls have. She was made to be an imaginative young girl who lives in a dream world of adventurous happenings; such as the star. So when other people watched this title they would be able to indentify her and recognise her as a common young girl. The bedroom which we gave her is also very identifiable because we got these ideas from other girl films and books so its something that people would alreday be familiar with. Especialy by seeing the toys in her room and the teddies on her bed.




There are alot of media insitutions who distrubute a variety of different films. As we done animation the right type of instustion which may have distribued our film would have been somebody like 'warner bros', 'sony pictures', 'universal' or 'Aardman animations. Warner bros have produced a wide range of childrens films characters such as: the powerpuff girls, Taz, Tweety and Scooby-Doo. They have distributed titles like: Tom an Jerry tales, Scooby-Doo2, The Flinstones, Pokemon, spacejam and Happy feet. I think they would be a good company to distribute out film. They are well known for these childrens films and well known animations like these. Sony pictures dont realy distribute titles but t hey have done TV dramas such as 'Astro boy'. To distribute a film like this would be goood for them as they dont realy do animation films but then it might not go with what they are known for. Because they have distributed films like: The pink panther 2, The terminater and Obsessed. So distrubuting a title like this would not be the right thing. Someone like Universal could be a good company because they have done titles like 'The tale of the despereaux' and 'The simpsons Ride'. They havent realy done many where they have got a specific audience and such as realy young children or for girls. Aardman animation sounds like it would be a very good comany. They started of by selling a 20 second animation on BBC which had a superhero in it callled 'Aardman'. They slowly started making one minute animation using real voice demonstrating how there voices could be charcterised with insight, humour and sensitivity. The sucess of the plasticine carachter in 'Take Hart' went on playing a carachter in the childrens series 'The amazing adventures of Morph'. From the begining david and Peter wanted to make their animation appeal to all ages. Using this style of cararchters, they produced Wallace and Gromit films and then in 2000, Chicken run. So having made a variaety of different films like these, laylas Star would be an interesting film to distribute. Evene thought the age group wouldnt appeal to all ages but the stlye of the film where theres alot of simple movement I think they would be a good Media institution for our title.


With a Film title like this it would be a good idea to gather money by getting sponsered. I think alot of people would donate money towards this film, espcialy parents of young children. A film like this would would be quite insteresting for little children see, espeically girls as it is aimed at them.
There are many genres for childrens films too. There can be action, which would be films like pokemon, the animated version of transformers and Kung Fu Panda. Comedy films will consist of things like Tom and Gerry, Garfield and other Looney tune films. An andevture film for children would be films like Cat In The Hat because thats not realy realistic and shows there adventure with that cat. Other films would be Finding Nemo, where they show they show a diffreent world to normal films and show how fish live and perhaps Scoob-Doo too because in there films they always have unrealistic happenings, which are seen to be adventurtous. The different types of romanctic films would be Cinderella, Snow White, Sleeping beauty and Shrek where they often show the story of the man (mostly the prince) and his romantic journey to finding his beloved wife (princess).
The audience for our Media product is mainly for little girls. It would be suitable for all types of social class. Because most girls like similiar stuff and think alike when they are little. I guess the children may have to be slightly imaginative as they often have this dream about a certain bedroom or an ideal frined. Alot of little kids often have some sought of imaginative freind that always stays with them. And in this case it is the Star. Girl who like playing with lots of little toys and teddies and have an interest in adventures would be suitable to watch this media product.
Most little children have there favourite TV show or are normaly a fan of a certain channel such a s Cbeebies or Nickolodeon. So, to be an audience of this title, alot of the children may be fans of CBeebies becuase they show more playful programes which atract younger shildren. Where as Nick show slightly different programmes which are not as playful for little children.

This title would also be admirable for people who just go out for a treat to watch a film. Its different and would be attractive for them. For exapmle if it was a dughters birthday they could treat her and take her out to watch a girly film like this. Or then it could be a film for people who are fanatical about film and go out to watch movies like this all the time. Even if they are not like this, being fanatical about film its fine. Overall the type of person for this film for me would be a small, quiet, shy litle girl who is freindly and emotional. I'd say emotional because for a little kid they might find the ending of it sad where she lets her star go, and Layla is also shown to be quite shy which also matches with her. Its a dreamy films for a freindly little girl.
We had alot of problems going through this long process, expecialy technical problems. There were alot of times where we had too many photos to upload on to the Mac which messed that up and times where the pictures were jumping and not flowing. But, a great thanks to Gerry who helped us solve these problems!!! He helped us eveyrtime we were stuck and needed help so through this process we did learn a few ways of solving the jumpy pictures and what to do when the memorys full. The jumpy pictures were due to the format they were saved under so that was pretty easy. Apart from the bad things we also learnt how to use the Macs properly. Hannah and Becy had used them before but I had never used one so to me it was all new. We used imovieHD and I dont think anyone had done animation on it before. But it was all quite simple because it was the same as inserting clips and cutting them but instead we used images which we slowed down and fastened the speed of. We learnt how to add effects, write different fonts and add sound and music to the films too. I would also thank Nina too who helped us alot throughout this process and gave us some very good feedback along with Lian.
As a whole, this project has been very fun and challenging to do. It's been a mission trying to find music which was the worst part because we all got so bored of it and just wanted to give up. But obviously we couldnt do that so we carried on slowly each week taking it a step higher. I must say I have learnt alot because we got to use a camera to film footage (even thought we didnt need it at the end) and use different angles and shots but at the same time we had a very good expreience of animating and drawing. The drawings were not that hard for me to do, it was only when we used to upload the pictures to photoshop to colour in and improve becuae they took realy long to do and even one litle mistkae or movement would destroy the whole look!!! Like i said the task has been an excellent experience for all of us. Im not sure about Hannah and Becky, but I would try animation again to make it even better but I would NEVER criticise a peice of animation on televison again!!!

Uploaded Podcast!!!

This is our podcast for our animation, Laylas star. In this you will hear myself, Hannah Moore and Rebecca Hammond. We discussed our process of creating this animation and all the ups and downs that we had during it. We have talked through our first ideas, filming the footage, editing and the music which took us the longest to complete.

Podcast!

We are having some trouble uploading our podcast for our animated title sequence but its on its way!!!

Perfecting the music.

After the editing we spent some time gtting the music right. Before we got this peice of music we had added in sound effects from the Mac to give it some sort of sound and excitement to it! These sounds were added when it changes from day to night and the bird is flying across the sky. We had added these whistling sound sof birds singing. Another part was when layla is in her room crying. We got a splash effect so when her tear hit the floor it would create a 'splash' sound. This worked very well even though it didnt sound very realistic. Normal tears are never that load when they drop on the floor but Laylas tear was special and extra load. We kept this in anyway but when we added the music we were not sure whether it would still sound the same or not. Anyway, we added the soundtrack and watched the film to see what it looked like and how much difference it made to the animation. It worked WONDERFULY!!!! And the sound effects made it sound even more dramatic. We just had to make it sound rigth by fading it out at the end when it finishes.

Editing...for the last time!!!


Today we went back and watched the film and edited the footage and all the other edits that had not been cut out yet. There were parts in the animation where we had to make the images carry out for longer and and places where we had to add more pictures and remove others. Obviously as Ian composed the wonderful music, we had to add his name in the titles at some point. We decided to do this on the star on the floor when it cracks. The name and picture weas done but when it came to adding this on to the Mac's, each image kept on jumping and began zooming in and out. We went back and tried saving these on different memory sticks and tried saving it under a different format such as JPEG but when we went back to add these, they still didnt work. So we decided to delete these and add his name at the end by doing it on the Mac as we knew it would definately work. Once we had sorted this out, we went back once again and checked for any mistakes or any new changes that could have been made to the animation. We found a few sound effects that had to be moved around but that was it. So thankfuly, we saved the animation and moved on to perfecting the music.

Finished Footage!!!


We finally got the footage done and it all turned out very good. The lighting turned out very good in it too as teher was alot of natural light coming from the windows outside in the house. All we have to do now is upload this on to the Mac's and add it too the animation. It was worth the wait after all this time and all this struggle that we went through trying to film and get it right.

Monday 30 March 2009

Filming..Hopefully for the last time!!!!


As you know the first footage that we filmed didnt come out right which means we will have to film once again! hopefulyl this time will be the last time we film. It will all be exactly the same as what we filmed first but only this time we are hoping that the tape wont mess up and the film will come out clear and not fuzzy.