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.

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.

The new footage of our film!

On Friday the footage was shot at hannahs cousins house as we used her cousin for our film. All the footage had come out better than the first time we shot it as the lighting was better and brighter and the actual act was good too. Unfortunalety, me n becky tried to upload it today but it wouldnt work. The Mac wouldnt let us upload the footage and plus the film was very pixelised and most of the recording had disapeared. Only a small part at the end was left. Even that was getting very fuzzy and cutting. I think the tape that we used was very old and dodgy. There was a lot of things already on it which may have been the cause of this. This means that we will have to go and film the same footage again on to a new tape. But this will have to be done very quickly as we are running out of time. Dealines around the corner.....we need to get it done!!!!!!

Thinking about the music once again!!!!

Again we are stuck because of the music!!! We were suppose get Kirsty to compose the music for up animation, but she had to compose her own so she got caught up in that. We spoke to Nina about our music and she suggested Ian Elmslie for us as he makes his own music. So, FINALY we will have some composed music to add to our film which means we will be nearly finished. But before this we will have to speak to Ian himself and show him the film ourselves so he can analise and note down what kind of music he will have to compose. We would still like it to be soft and girly, or something twinkly.

How to improve...

we have been discussin ways in which to improve our animation. We have been planning times to sort it out. Hopefully it wont take us that long as we only need to add a few things to it. As you know, we are still searching for music to go with our animation. We still have to speak to Ian about this as he composes his own music and will help us compose ours. We will do this today and then hopefully he will be able to find us a peice of music that would go and play behind our animation of Laylas star. We were also thinking about adding a few more pictures to the animation to make it last abit longer and making the animation flow more. Overall the first thing that we need to concentrate on at the moment is the filming of the little girl at the beginging. Once we get that done we will be able to work on the rest of the animation.

Improving Improving Improving

We are in the middle of improving and adding things to our unfinished, first animated film. We were thinking of adding more pictures in to the film but we're still not entirely sure if we are going to do this because there are other things that are slighty imprtant than this. Such as finding the right music to go with the animation and also filming a very small footage (30 secs) to go at the beggining of the animation. This would help make the sequence alot more sense and add a sense of realism in to it. The music is stil another big issue which we need to sort out. We have to find someonewho can make a peice of music for us very quickly. We can show them the film and once they've seen it for themselves, I'm sure they will be able to compose the perfect music for our animated film production.

The Crit!!!

In mondays lesson I was a bit late so unfortunately I missed showing our film to the class. As i heard from Hannah and Rebacca, our film didnt look too good on big screen. There were alot of changes that we need to make andalot of thinsg to add.

Firts of all we need to go back and add some more pictures to our animation for every scene. As I've said before the I dont think the animation flows too well. There are alot of scenes where the film just jumps and its doesnt look very professional even though I know this is our first go at animation. In some parts, I dont think the story that we are trying to tell is clear enough. But this can be imprved by adding mor pictures. I know we only have three weeks but if we try out hardest we will be able to get all the extra pictures that we went in to it and make it up a to a much better animation. Parts like when Layla cries could do with a few more pictures.

Another problem that needs to be sorted out is the music. Like I mentioned before that last week we did try to look for music but we coudnt get the right kind of track we are looking for. We only have some sounds effects in the film whihc we probably will still keep once we get the music done. These sound alright but they sound a bit random because theres no other sounds in it, and then suddenly theres a tiny bit of sounds. During the nect three weeks this is a very important thing to do because once we have got music for it, the film will make so much more sense.

The other thing that we will have to do is hold the titles for a bit longer. Im not sure if we will be able to reduce the speed of only some omages and keep the rest normal or iff we will have to slow everything down. If we cant hold certain images for longer on the mac, we will have to add that same picture a few more times so it keeps the titles on for longer. If none of this works (which i doubt) then we wil have to leave this the way it is and try and make the other parts extra good!!!!! Something else we were told to do was make a small footage (about 30 secs) to add at the begining of the film. This was our original idea and we did actualy film the footage but there were a few problems with it. One of them was teh lighting. It wa staken in Beckies room but it was filmed at night so the lighting was quite bad and very low. We decided not to put this in to our film. If we do this again we will have to look for a girl who is around the age of Layla which is 6 and also think deeper about the lighting, time, and location of the shooting. These are basically all the thigns that we willl be working on, over the next three weeks. Hopefuly we will have them all sorted and the animation will be worth watching.

last things...

In Thursdays lessons we went through our title seqeunce. First we couldnt find it but thanks to Gerry he found it for us and we checked right the way through it to see if everything made sense and was stil the way we left it. Everything was fine so we started looking for music. We were searching on the itunes on the mac but coudlnt fin anything. So, Ellis told us a website where you can download free music which are not copyrighted. so we went to this website and search for music. We could type in any words that we wanted and music that went with that word was shown to us. Eg we type in twinke and soft music was shown to us which consisted of intrumenst like saxophones and tangerines. We looked for ages but still coudnt find anything so i Geuss we'll have to leave it without music. This is bit of shame because the animation would look alot better with music and sound effects because it would make it easier to understand the story.

...MUSIC!!!!!!

We have been thinking about our music once again as this was not done. We have been thinking baout different types of music that we could use and we have been askingaround to see what other people suggest too. We all think that something soft and twinkly would go. So hopefuly in Thursdays lesson we will be able to go on to the interent and search for music and just use that because we have run out of time to create our own.

Target audience

Our title sequence is a young, dreamy animation. The colours are very girly; pink, purple and other soft colours, the typography used is also very dreamy and something that will atrract young children and most probably girls aged 9-13. The story line was taken from a childrens book called laylas star which i would think to be targeted at ages 4-8. If this was a real film i think it would be eaual to films such as cinderella, snowhite and things like hannah montanna, only if that was animated too. This animation would be atrractive to small girls who are in primary school. I think it would start off around the years of reception when little girls have a very fairytail like imagination and also have there imaginary friends. I think this because the story is fairly realistic in its own way. If instead of the star it was a normal everyday object the film would be perfect for both sex's. I think this star means more to small girls than boys. Young girls see these in other girly films and books and fall in to a different world and have a different imagination.

Improving the animation

In todays lesson we were just sorting out the last few things on our animation but then we were told that the font that we used in our animation, didnt realy work with the kind of animation we were doing. The animation is very girly and pink and the font that we used for the names was 'arial bold, black'. This meant that we had to go bak to all the images that had letters on them form the animation and change it to a slightly different font. We ened up changing it to 'curlz MT'. We also used different colour font such as bright blues, yelows and purples. Just by changing this the sequence started looking alot better. I just have one more scene to do which i couldnt get done today. This was the scene in Layla's room, infront of window and the radiator. I decided to change it slighty to a plain orange background. On this I pasted the star which was made bigger. With the star I am going to make it move across thh page and swirl around and let the names slowly apear on it. After this all we have to work on is the music.

...music

For the music in our animation title sequence we have found someone who wil make some music for us. Her name is Kirtsy Mansfield and she composes her own music. She said she will help us with the music for our animation by playing the piano. So now for the animation we we have some soft music played by Kirsty Mansfield and her piano.

http://www.youtube.com/

www.6thformnoodle.blogspot.com

Music for the animation =)

Hopefuly the rest of the things to add will not take that long. Once the editing gets done we will have to concentrate on the music which we are going to use. We have been thinking of using quite soft gentle music with instruments which sound liek a harp, zilaphone, the triangle, and maybe a subtle sound of a tamberine. It sounds like a weird combination but we've beenthinking fo things that would go with an image of a star and a little girl. We thought of the song 'twinkle twinkle little star' and thought something like that would be good. These are some of the things that we have been thinking about. But we have to book a music room on Monday so we can start composing our own music, as we wil get better marks for it.

More animation...

In Mondays lesson we carried on working on our animation. We finished of the last few scenes which we had left to do. We now only have to get the filming of the real bedroom done, which Becky is going to do in her room. Once this is done, we can add it to the begining of the title sequence where its all changes to animation. We will hopefuly have it all done by this coming Thursday. There isnt much editing to do apart from arranging all the images and getting the scenes in the right order.

Working on the animation

Today we spent the whole day working on our animation. we done the first scene which is of Layla when she goes outside and picks up the star. This scene worked very well. We started on the next scene which is when Layla takes that star inside and she starts crying because the star starts to dissapear. On one of these shots, we done a close up shot of Layla when shes crying. I liked this bit alot and it took me quite long to do. I started off by making a plain close up shot and then done another few shots where her eyes got smaller and tears started to appear. Eventualy her eyes close and the tear roles down her face which is then followed by a puddle of water. I will try doing some more over the weekend and get another scene done.

Drawing the pictures =)

Over the weekend I started to draw out some thumbnails of the animation. I started off with the first scene which was when the star falls out on to the road. The scene starts off when the star slowly flows down on to the ground. The image is of the outside of the house. I thought it would be alot easier if I drew out small thumbnails for each scene to see how I will have to draw out each picture. Another reason for this was so that we can see the movement properly and see what the drawings will look like. Thats all I have done at the moment, and I will work on the proper drawings tomorrow during the lesson. I have also been looking at different cartoon characters to give me some ideas about my own little character. These are some of them.

Getting ready for the animation

Next week we have got a whole day to start working with our images and developing them on photoshop to create our animetion. Out of our group I will be doing the drawings but also with help from Hannah and Becky. Before next week we will also have to make our model room which we are going to be using as part of the animation as the opening. We will make this room out of a small box (most probably a shoe box) and we will make it look like Becky's bedroom window as she is going to be taking the picture in her bedroom. Once this model is made we can start filming it so we can add it to the beginging of the title sequence. We are also going to have to start our drawing pretty quick so they are ready for us to use on Thursday. We need to have atleast the main character and the firts scene drawn out so we can work on that.

Scene 1- Layla's star

This is our first scene for our animation film. In this part it shows the title. It starts off on the night sky with all the stars out. It carries on going up and starts to zoom in to the sky. As it goes up the main big star starts to show slowly. Eventualy the title starts to fade in slong the side.

We still have to do the very begining yet as we need to make a small model of a room. From that small room we are going to zoom in and show the window, out in to the sky and from there it will show this scene where it will change to animation.

Unfortunatley we are not going to use a real girl at the begining as it is going to be to much. It will also be alot safer to stick with animation because if we use a little child, it might make it look abit un-natural. Like this we can use any room and setting because we don have to worry about making the model room and the animation look identical to the real room we use.

Title sequence

For our title sequence, as we are working with animation we have chosen to work from a childrens book called 'Laura's star'. We have made our storyboards and have also made an animatic for it in which we have also included some sound effects. This is our anamatic.