Digital Media foundations

Programs used in my stop motion were Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premier, these were very useful as they allowed my partner and I to re-side images and convert all the files from Canon (raw) into JPegs. From this we were able to merge the pictures and organise them into one folder and save them.

Some of the programs I potentially wanted to use in the editing process was ‘Adobe Animate, Adobe After Effects. After having done some research of what programmes worked best, it was a case of just practising them at home and learning while on go. Before having decided what type of animation we would be filming, my partner and I looked at different films in order to get a solid idea of the main animation. We chose stop motion.

The final piece of work we did, we managed to get some great feedback from the class and our lecturer during the presentation that we did. Some comments we received concerning the piece, was that, adding sound to every movement as it would add a better effect and allow the audience to engage more with the story. I agreed with this comment as watching the movie without any type of music or sound just made it look odd, also with sound the audience is made to feel what the character is feeling.

I think as a group we worked very hard and I feel that this type of work should be shown in Social media, because social media allows people’s gifts and talents to be appreciated and depending on how many likes the movie gets, it may become a viral video. 

Some of the problems faced whilst in the process of creating the movie was:

Conflicting ideas

My group was originally a group of three. However we were not able to come to a conclusion as to what we wanted out stop motion to be on; which resulted with one member of our group leaving. Even though we lost one member as a pair we were able to agree on one idea which allowed us to progress with the project.

Leadership:

Originally as a group of three, we decided that we would not have a leader as we all wanted to make sure everyone was comfortable with one idea. However this was challenging as one group member would take charge as a leader and begin to decide on matters that were meant to be agreed with the whole group. This was overcome by good communication and compromise because i think this was the most challenging part we struggled on. Moreover we managed to overcome this obstacle.

Budgeting:

Money became an issue because some equipment were pricey. Though the camera and camera stand we were able to borrow from the University. The rest of the equipment we had to buy and split the money in half. This did not become a big issue as we decided that we’d each refund each other the money based on the most expensive objects.

The presentation we have each been assigned to do is based on the research that we conducted during the time we had to blog. However the presentation is not about what is written on the blogs but rather the RESEARCH process of it. The Presentation can be presented in  Prezi, or PPT but no later than 6 minutes and 40 seconds.One of the recommended websites to use for this was Pecha Kucha. This website allows users to create their own presentation for example if the user has 20 slides, they’re allowed 20 seconds per slide. 

Bibliography:Museum of brands, packaging & advertising, London (2016) Available at: http://www.secretearth.com/attractions/1504-museum-of-brands-packaging-and-advertising (Accessed: 9 December 2016).In-line Citation:(Museum of brands, packaging & advertising, London, 2016)

Recently a class trip was organised to visit the museum of brands. This was due to the fact that there was a formative assessment that was based on the topic of branding and how it started.. one thing I enjoyed about the whole day was learning how photography in advertising changed throughout the years.

Photography in advertising:

Photography began to play a big part in print advertising in the 1920′s and 1930′s. By 1950′s colour became more dominant in the photographic adverts. I was really fascinated to know this because being born in the late 90′s children of the 21st century start to believe that color pictures were always around. Not realising the struggle and the gradual effort that it took many people in order to put colour in advertising as well as newspapers.Kids in 2016 take a lot of things such as: having color in the TV, having games on the computer’ clear and audible music on the radio for granted. The impact of color in advertising is very big! Especially because it’s the main reason that attracts people to buy a picture, a toy and also electronics, if something doesn’t look attractive consumers won’t spend money. Which means businesses and organisations will not grow.

“Color is powerful because it can change our mood – the mood of potential customers. If a website improves our state of mind, our relationship with a brand will deepen and the probability of a return will increase. Advertisers and designers are well aware of that. We are not guided entirely by logic when making purchases. We tend to be driven by less identifiable factors such as emotions. Successful brands like Harley Davidson don’t sell motorcycles, they sell a lifestyle.”

Materials needed:

1. Video Camera 

2. Open doll room

3. Wooden doll

4. Joker Card

5. Toy bed

(These Images are not an exact reflection of the actual props,but rather just rough outlines)

References:

Bibliography:Amazon (1996) Simple Flix slick digital video camera. Available at: https://www.amazon.com/Simple-Slick-Digital-Video-Camera/dp/B002YTPNVG (Accessed: 8 December 2016).In-line Citation:(Amazon, 1996)

Bibliography:Dolls’ house shop (no date) Available at: http://www.simonchadwick.net/dollshouse/ (Accessed: 8 December 2016).In-line Citation:(Dolls’ house shop, no date)

Bibliography:Wayne (2013) The pose-able wooden artist doll has come a long way, baby. - come Blog with FolioAcademy.Com. Available at: http://blog.folioacademy.com/meet-the-new-model-set-to-make-manga-artists-lives-a-whole-lot-easier-or-sfbt-3-artist-mannequin-figure-review/ (Accessed: 8 December 2016).In-line Citation:(Wayne, 2013)

Bibliography:Etsy (2016) Antique doll bed – Etsy UK. Available at: https://www.etsy.com/uk/search?q=antique+doll+bed (Accessed: 8 December 2016).In-line Citation:(Etsy, 2016)

I have to admit there was a point where I felt like changing our story. This was mainly because of the research that i did; i realised that there were many other good story ideas we could incorporate into our scary story. Keeping in mind that it was too late to make big changes of the story my group and I met up and spoke over the matter and decided that we may just change some props being used in the story. Though these changes will not have an effect on the character or the plot of the story; but rather will enhance some scenes of the story.

Bibliography:(No Date) Available at: https://youtu.be/aqK4AA_3hvE (Accessed: 9 December 2016).In-line Citation:([CSL STYLE ERROR: reference with no printed form.])

Whilst looking for some other ideas on how our group could improve our stop motion animation. I came across an old TV series that i used to watch when i was a child. OOglies is a stop-motion animated children's television series produced by BBC Scotland for CBBC. The show involves short humorous sketches with household items and food, virtually all of which have googly eyes stuck on, hence the show's title. 

I recently watched a movie by the name; Suicide squad. There is no doubt this movie kept me glued to the screen the whole time. Overall the acting was great nothing short of outstanding AKA Will Smith no doubt took my breath away again. But the two main characters that i found very interesting were The joker and his girlfriend Harley quin. These two were the ultimate evil couple; it was interesting to see how the Harley quin before meeting the joker was a normal boring secretary but after trying to help the joker be better, she ends up falling in love with him and becoming evil.

On the other hand the joker from the dark knight was also a great character and I took into account the way in which he manipulated people around him in order to get his way. In our Short story we included an element of surprise and shock inspired by the Joker from these two great movies.

Bibliography:Driver, M. (2016) The Joker wallpaper dark knight. Available at: http://wallpapersafari.com/the-joker-wallpaper-dark-knight/ (Accessed: 9 December 2016).In-line Citation:(Driver, 2016)

Within my group we talked about what the story should be about and where it should be set, as we didn’t want to make it similar to any other type of scary story. After a long while of research, agreeing and disagreeing with each other we came up with this rough outline of our story:

                                              THAT NIGHT

In the moonlit bedroom, the protagonist tries to sleep but he is quite restless, looks at the clock and then turns back and forth as he is muddled by the raining and thunder sounds. When he looks at the clock, the time is half past 10, seeing this, he utters few non-lexical fillers in an annoyed manner. But he takes the motive  to  sleep  and  closes  his  eyes.  The  camera  then  focuses  on  the  clock, indicating  the  time  has  passed  and  he  has  slept.  Suddenly,  hears  a  crashing sound from  the  stair case  but  ignores  it and  closes  his eyes again. After few seconds, hears the same sound from the staircase, therefore he decides to wake up and have a look. As he reaches the stairs, he observes a metal box (fallen from stairs) near to his feet and a card lying outside. He picks up the card and reads “DON’T BE AFRAID, YOU ARE NOT ALONE”, the moment he finishes the reading, hears a knocking sound on the  main door. He drops the card down, slowly walks towards the door with fear (gnashes teeth, eyeballs moving side to side). While walking to the front room, he is isolated and the atmosphere is in perfect  silence.  He  refuses  to  open  the  door  but  finally  he  opens  and  sees nothing other than raining. Instantly, he is pushed back by the strong wind with the cards flying and the door gets closed automatically. As he fell, later when he opens  and  wakes  but  realises  it  was  just  his  imagination  as  the  room  looks normal. Seeing this he gives a relieved feeling and walks to the bedroom and then tries to put on the light but it does not work. However, goes to the bed and as he sits on, the door harshly closes itself, the light gets on and off, again on and off (slowly), again on and off (slightly increases), again on and off (quickly). Finally the light is on, the camera focuses on the protagonist as he checks under the bed but sees nothing, turns behind but again sees nothing and when turns front, the film ends with the evil clown with the card standing in front of him (laughing, drooling and saying “YOU ARE NOT ALONE”).

Immersion/ Stimulation:

I found this lecture very insightful and interesting. Especially with the movies of this day and age film makers are always looking to immerse the audience into the movie in order to make them feel as though they’re part of it. On the other hand stimulation is the assumption or the imitation of a false image or form.

This was my first time using Adobe Photoshop to create something, mainly because I don’t have Mac computer.Though I have some experience with Mac computers but I’m not an expert in using the applications on there, and I must admit that it was quite complicated and so i needed some help with the layering and copying and pasting content onto the page.

In this session of the workshop, we focused on creating a moving image effect using layers and copying and pasting. The teacher was helped us with a step by step guide on how to correctly get the effects we needed. Though this was not related to the Stop motion project my group and I were doing, This session helped us to understand how to use Photoshop in case we wanted to use in the project. 

While others chose different images to add effects to, I decided to use, the picture I used was of a running horse; so, I had different small pictures of the horse moving, I had to cut and layer the copy of the image. After doing this I made sure I had enough images that looked like the horse was running; I then had to merge the small images together and then export them in order to achieve the running effect.

In Today’s Lecture and Workshop there were two main topics of discussion. These are: Photography and Documentation.

Photography:

‘Photos are just representation of reality’ I agree with this statement as in 2016 the most popular thing is #goals and these come from people posing in a picture. People have become so deceived by pictures that when a couple take a picture smiling it’s automatically classified as #relationship goals, when in reality the two individuals may be biting each other’s head offs. another example of media and photography taking control over people’s lives is the use of ‘selfies’ and ‘videos’. People are more interesting in taking a picture of an event instead of actually taking part in the event. There are three key periods of time when Photography was booming; these are late 1830′s (Realism) this age was better known as the age of mimesis, during this time period the first photograph was taken (1816) by Joseph Nicephore Niepce. Though it was very blurry it paved the pathway to other photos and pictures.

Documentation: