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)
