I’ve always been interested by the hidden infrastructure of everyday life. This New York Times article, and before it one in the Washington Post, stand out as some the few stories that manage to capture this fascination.
Evaluation
For this project the aim was to create a 1 minute video from one of the four themes on the project brief that I was given, these were, Friends of the Earth, Professional, Time & Place and Rant.
We created a new blog and the first task we had to do on the brief was to research into different uses of video. I had to put up examples onto my blog of these. I had to have a wide variety of examples from short films to virtual reality tours. I also had to find definitions and their meanings from different words related to videos. I posted a lot of different definitions onto my blog so that I fully understood each words meanings.
After I had done this I had to choose from one of the four themes on the project brief. I decided to find various videos online of the different subjects to go into more depth for each one before I made up my mind. I also annotated these as I went along before I made any decision of what Idea and theme I wanted to do.
I created a brainstorm for each of the different themes to go into more depth and I started to decide on some ideas that I got from them. I decided to go to various websites and produce various idea generating techniques as well. I think by doing this it gave me a more clear idea on what I wanted to do as well as pick a theme to base my video on. After doing this I decided I wanted to either do a Rant or Time Lapse.
I researched into Time lapses and also Rants of various subjects. I was leaning more towards rants but I didn’t have a topic to rant about. After a lot of thought I decided to go with the subject of Bullying. Bullying is a important issue and is experienced by nearly everyone at some stage in their lives especially school children.
Basing my bullying video on a younger generation I wanted to create something a bit more fun to watch but still carry what I wanted to put across in a serious was. So I chose Lego to show bullying.
I researched lego animations on youtube and put some of the best ones I liked onto my blog as research. I wanted to do a stop-motion animation to convey bullying and this was the Idea I was going to do. I started to research into bullying and produce brainstorms to choose other words other than just bullying. I think by doing this it gave me a clearer idea on what to choose to be part of my idea and what not to choose. I think the research really helped me this way.
When I started to create my video I knew I needed an iMac, a video camera, tripod and possibly a spotlight. I also needed the software on the computer to be able to create my video. I produced a schedule and sketched of what I wanted it to look like.
My sketch shows that I wanted to have it in a plain room style like a canteen and have different lego men sat down at tables and just a girl on her own at a table. It also showed how I was going to create these tables out of paper.
I produced a story board to give me a better understanding of the different shots I wanted to have in my video - Where I needed close-ups etc.
Once I had done this I had to start to create my video. It didn’t take as long as I thought it would. I knew I had to capture about 35-40 Seconds of footages and the other sections would either be text or a voice over. I think my video started out okay. It wasn’t great at the start but I knew I needed to do editing to make it all come together. I think to improve I could of done a lot more shots to make it less jumpy in the final version. But I do like the way it turned out anyways.
I used final cut to edit my video. I learned a lot from final cut because I had only used this a few times so I didn’t know an awful lot about it. But I didn’t really have any problems and I thought editing my video wasn’t a hard task to do. I knew I had to export my video so that I could upload it to various video hosting websites to gain as much feedback as I could, I uploaded an unfinished video onto youtube and checked a few days later to find someone had commented on my video which I thought was great. I also uploaded the video and the final video on to Vimeo and Youtube again. I hope to try and uplaod my video to as many video hosting websites as possible to see if I gain any feedback from people who watched my animation video.
Overall I think this project was a good project, I liked creating my own video, I found it interesting and editing it was probably the best part. I liked the topic I decided to do because I felt it was an important topic and I liked the way I showed it in a different way - using lego. To improve I could of captured more film so that I had a lot more to edit and then maybe the final version wouldn’t of been so jumpy. But I liked my final video as it was and I thought it conveyed bullying in a different approach - which I liked best.
The codec for my final movie was in .mov which is the file extension for quicktime.
The frame rate I used for my movie was 12 fps (Frames per second)
