Animation Soundtrack Reflection

Here is my final animation about time keeping with the soundtrack applied. I created the soundtrack using samples from logic as well as sound clips from online and sounds I recorded myself. I put the sounds together in logic to create a draft soundtrack that I could adjust and add to the animation when it was complete.

Once the animation and soundtrack were complete, I put both the visual and the audio into premier and cut the soundtrack so that it fitted with my animation.



In this reflection podcast I answer questions that another class member wanted to ask after watching my animation.




In this reflection podcast my peers discuss what they thought of my animation and how the soundtrack worked with it.

Happy Easter

Animation Further Progress

Today I did some practice on making a symbol on Flash. Too show a way of time keeping I decided to create a calendar, crossing out each date to a deadline. I drew the calendar using a combination of shapes, lines, the text tool and the brush tool. As each individual part of the calendar was separate it meant that when I moved one part of it, only that part would move and that wasn't what I wanted as I wanted the whole calendar to gradually come onto the screen. 

I highlighted the whole calendar then right clicked and chose 'create symbol' then I name the symbol Calendar. Now the calendar is a symbol it means that every part of it is just one shape, so it all moves together.

I think that I am on track to be able to finish my animation today as after the calendar I just want to insert an end card that says 'Time Keeping Is Important' just to make it clear what the message of my animation is. 

Here is my finished animation as a GIF, I am happy with how it turned out overall. There are a few bits that could do with some perfecting for example tidying up around the edge of the calendar, but the overall animation makes the small mistakes less important.

Initially when I began creating the animation I was unsure that I would be able to make it long enough, or add any interesting aspects. I have surprised myself with what I have done as I like the different scenes e.g. the bedroom, the alarm clock and the calendar.

Animation Progress

After creating my storyboard idea for my short informative animation I began to develop it on Flash. To help build up my Flash skills, I decided to simplify my idea slightly so that I could get used to a few skills and be happy that I can do them fairly well rather than struggle with trying to do too many new things.

I find that creating new layers is very helpful to make sure everything is running smoothly as it allows me to separate different parts of the animation and work on new things without ruining parts that I've made previously.

Here is what I've developed so far using mainly hand drawn illustrations, classic tweens, layers and keyframes.

I am happy with the progress but I would like to work on adding:

• More fluid movement, looking at what I learnt from the walk sequence.
• Applying the soundtrack I created in Tom's lesson to this animation.
• Making sure my message 'Time keeping is important' is clear.

My Chronicle Week- Day 5

Today was the last day of working with The Bath Chronicle. It was a day of finishing off all of the projects so Alex can decide what to do with them.

I completed my music article and sent it to Alex, he told me that he would get it up on the Chronicle website within the next few days which will be a great oppurtunity for me but also a good oppurtunity for the students I interviewed to get their names heard.

Ben and I completed our article to support the Vox Pop video. Alex managed to get hold of some opinions from local candidates about what they think about 16 year olds being able to vote, we included their unedited words in our article to expand it more.

Jake finished edtiting the video so the article and video are now complete to support eachtoher on the website as Alex seems kean to post our work.

Ben was lucky and talented enough to have one of his press release articles published in the Chronicle newspaper!

Alex was very pleased with the work we did.

My music article was later published on the Bath Chronicles website!

http://www.bathchronicle.co.uk/follow-Laura-Doggett-City-Bath-College-music-star/story-26160782-detail/story.html

My Chronicle Week- Day 4

Now all of the Vox Pop interviews have been collected, the task was to watch the footage through and rough cut it so that we had 1-2 minutes worth of clear, helpful footage that will give the public and ourselves an idea about what the public think about 16 year olds voting and the interest in politics. 

Here is the draft edit of the video:


Along with the video that we hope will be displayed on the website, I felt it would be a good idea to write a short article including some of the facts I had researched previously so that there would be some statistics alongside the opinions. The facts I included were based on the Scottish referendum as 16 year olds were given the right to vote on that and it turned out to be successful.

As well as the facts about the referendum, I included the fact I found about more young people voting on the X-Factor than the general election. When I presented this fact to Alex, he thought it would be a good idea to include it as even people who don't have an interest in politics will be able to relate to this fact, it could potentially make the article more exciting.

I drafted the article that could potentially introduce the video on the website:

After showing Ben the article we decided to make a couple changes so that it was slightly more concise and we swapped the paragraphs around so that there weren't three paragraphs in a row all with rhetorical questions. We also altered the headline to make it slightly more snappy.

As the political video idea is starting to look more solid. I decided to try and produce my own article linked to my own interests and also the interest of lots of teenagers. I have a mean interest in music, and as Laura Doggett, a previous Bath college students who is making it in the music industry visited the college recently, I thought it would be good to do a follow up to find out what current students expect to get from the course. Also I want to find out what the lecturers aim to lead the students towards.

I have made an outline of some questions that I intend to ask the students and lecturers so I can use their answers as quotes in my article.

Student questions:

- What made you want to study music?

- What opportunities does the course give you to help you in the music industry?

- Does the success of Laura Doggett and Gabrielle Aplin make you feel as though you have an equal chance?

- What do you expect the course to lead you towards in the future?

Lecturer questions: 

- Is your aim as a lecturer to try and make every student famous in the music business?

- Do you feel as though the students wan to follow in Laura and Gabrielle's footsteps or are they more independent?

- Do you have hope that many students will turn out like Laura and Gabrielle?

- What would be your three top tips to your students to develop their success?

I made a phone call to the music department at college and they were more than happy to get some students and a lecturer involved in answering some questions.

Then I went ahead and asked some of the students and one of the lecturers the questions and recorded their answers as voice recordings. They were all really helpful and I used their responses are a basis for my article.

Alex was very impressed with my article and gave me some feedback on how to make it compete. He also said that our group was the most enthusiastic he's had so far which is great news!

My Chronicle Week- Day 3

This morning, Alex sent the group and email showing an example of something a newspaper in Hull reported on, the top 10 inventions that came from Hull. He said that he would like two members of the group to recreate this article for Bath and for the other pair to make a list of the top books and authors that come from Bath.

Something interesting that Alex told us is that people are more likely to click on a list that has an odd number of points than a list with an even amount of points. Therefore, Ben and I created a list for the top 11 books and authors from Bath.

Ben researched authors from Bath and I researched books that are wholly or partly set in Bath, we then put our ideas together and created a list of the top 11. Alex gave us some advice on how to improve our orginal list:

Here is the final list:

After creating this list, I began to put together some questions that we could use for Vox Pops. We wanted to find out about peoples interest in politics and mainly whether they think 16 and 17 year olds should be able to vote. We took out questions around college and out into Bath and collected our footage.

My Chronicle Week- Day 2

The day began with another meeting with Alex. He set the group up with our own individual press releases to turn into a story. After having done a similar task on Friday I felt as though it was good practise to do another one and this time I could make improvements based on the feedback I was given.

After writing the outline for my press release about a First World War exhibition in Bath postal museum, Alex gave me some helpful style tips.

Here is my finished, altered press release:

I decided to do some research in the affect of young people voting and what people think about it. I look online and produced some notes which I find helpful as I now have more of an idea about whether more people are for or against 16-17 year olds voting.

My Chronicle Week- Day 1

At the beginning of my first day working with the Bath Chronicle, I went to visit the head quarters to find out what my position would be and to find out some more about what the Chronicle do. Alex, the head of content, gave the rest of the group and I a tour of the news room, explaining everyones jobs such as the sports editors, weather reporters, advertising, events organising and layout designers. After finding out a bit about what everyones role is with the paper, Alex set the first task.

A press release was given to me to turn into a story. I was given a word count of 100-120 and told to include pictures so that the story would be fit for The Chronicles website.

After writing my story using the information I was given, Alex gave me some advice on how I could alter it to make it more similar to the Chronicle's writing style. I took on board his very helpful advice and altered my story.

During the second part of the day, as a team we worked together to develop the topic we'd be producing content on for the Chronicle. As there's a general election coming up in March, Alex thought it would be a good idea for us to focus on a politics based story. To attract a younger audience as well as the chronicles traditional audience we thought it would be good to focus on the question 'should to legal voting age be lowered to 16?'.

As a group we mind mapped some ideas to start developing and creating our article idea. We discussed subjects we could base an article on, decided who we would need to contact to gather all the information we'll need, drafted questions that we could ask in an interview and we thought of different ways of presenting the content such as video or a written article.

By the end of the day we managed to collect some interview footage from students around college to get a brief idea about their interest in politics and thoughts on teenagers voting.

Here is the press release I did at the beginning of the day: 

Self Analysis- Political Film

Pre-Production

Before starting my pre-production work, I planned out everything that would need to be done in order for my film to go to plan, the mind map shows everything I had to think about planning.
I didn't want to make an extremely specific plan about the storyline for my film but after looking at the brief I decided I wanted the story to be based on a sibling rivalry. Also I decided that I didn't want the PI element to be extremely unrealistic and spy like, so my final idea was for two sisters who are no longer in contact to both be participating in the same election without each others knowledge. What one of the sisters is also unaware of is that their father is secretly rigging the election so that her distant sister who doesn't speak to the family will be the winner of the election. Therefore the father is the PI character in the film. 
For my pre-production I created a treatment, wrote a script that I annotated and finally locked, did recces along with a scouting report, drew detailed storyboards, made a shot list and planned and justified the sounds I would be using in the film which included finding royalty free sounds for my film that would definitely be clear.
I feel as though I completed this pre-production work to a good standard that clearly created a pathway to my film production.
The bits that were more of a struggle and took the longest to finalise were my script writing and storyboarding. The script took me a long time to lock as I had to finalise my plot line in such a way that I would be able to film with ease, if I was to be overly imaginative there would have been no way I would've been able to access the locations or tools to film. However I finally locked my script and was happy with the final draft. As I had to alter my script quite a lot, this also meant I had to alter my storyboards, as well as having to alter the story on the storyboards I was also learning as I went along the style in which I wanted to draw my storyboards making sure they were clear but not overly time consuming. When my storyboards were complete they were easy to follow and also very helpful for me to visualise what I wanted the camera to capture.

Production

In terms of recording my film, I didn't want to go straight out with extremely minimal knowledge as to how to use the camera and  set it up to get the best lighting and shot angles possible, so with Ed's help I developed my camera knowledge and skills so that the outcome of how my film looked visually would be up to a good standard.
After practicing some basic shots around the college and putting them together, I created my filming schedule and made sure everyone in my group was available when I needed to be and everywhere I wanted to film would be accessible for us all. I got all of my footage filmed over two days and everything went to plan as I followed my script, shot list and storyboards. With help from the other members of my group we set up the shots in a way that I was happy with and also I altered some shots from how I originally planned them to look in a way that actually looked more effective when captured.
The only problem that occurred was that when I was filming my car park scene there was some loud, building noise in the background. I was able to overcome this though by deciding to use a Rode mic directed straight at the characters who would be speaking, as well as making sure the mic was as close to them as possible without getting it in shot. When I watched the footage back the building noise wasn't a problem which I am happy about as it would've slightly ruined the final outcome of my film. 

Post-Production

After sorting through all of the footage I filmed, I imported the footage I was happy with to Abobe Premier Pro to edit and complete the final film. My editing process consisted of a lot of learning as I went along to see what looked best and what didn't work so well. I am confident with cutting and putting the footage together in chronological order so that it flows without dodgy cuts and obvious mistakes. One of the more time consuming parts of the editing process was syncing, cutting and muting the audio in the correct places. By putting an effective soundtrack over the top of my film I was able to mask any slight mistakes in the audio without being at all obvious. I am very happy with the royalty free soundtrack I managed to find online and now I know where I can access royalty free audio when I need it again. 
My final film will be posted publicly on Youtube so anyone will be able to access and watch it. I will share the link to my film with my peers in order to get some feedback on how they feel my final product turned out, I will get this feedback through Youtube comments that I can look at so I know which areas I need to look at improving in the future.

Outlining My Animation

The topic for my animation is 'Time keeping is important' I will use Flash to make a short public information film to present the message.

Some ideas I'd like to include

• Multiple clocks of all different sizes and styles entering the screen at different speeds with different transitions, getting faster as the character in the animation starts to speed up and rush around.
• The character pressing the snooze button on their alarm multiple times and each time they press it we will get a closer view of the phone to emphasise their action. 
• Hands on the clock flying round at a fast speed to show time passing at super speed, the clock would then grow wings and fly away- 'time flies'.
• Teacher receiving a message from the student saying 'I'm going to be slightly late, sorry!' the teacher increasingly turns bright red.
• Student arrives late to find everyone just finishing off eating cookies and looking smug.
• Text at the end making it sound like even being just a couple minutes late will make you miss out on something very crucial. 

Thumbnails And Design

In terms of the layout of my magazine, I have designed some thumbnail images to experiment with different design set ups to see what works best when I come to hand rendering some larger thumbnails and making design outlines on InDesign. These small thumbnails show layout designs for the front cover, inside spread for my main article and the contents page.

As another step forwards to making my layout designs closer to how the final product may look, I used InDesign to create some blockout thumbnails. Using the small hand drawn thumbnails, I created similar layouts by creating columns of placeholder text and blocks that represent the titles, images and block quotes.

Blue- Titles

Pink- Images

Green- Block quotes

Here are my hand rendered designs for my cover, contents and spreads with notes on how I intend to develop each ones, these are just a guide to help with the layout style.

Researching Public Information Films

This is a public information encouraging people to make more complex passwords that are simple to remember. The voice over is enthusiastic and clear and starts by telling the viewer the simple facts about the common mistakes people make when creating a password. The voice over doesn't use any jargon therefore the video reaches out to a very broad audience, even school aged children would be able to understand the video and learn from it. 

It isn't dark and brutally shocking like a lot of videos on internet safety as I find a lot of internet safety videos try and scare you and put you off of using the internet making you feel as though nothing is safe. This video however uses simple tactics that just hint the problems that you may face, for example, a credit card belonging to 'Penny Less' which is a clever pun that will make the audience think and figure out the point that is trying to be put across. 

A positive attitude is enforced by this video through it's bright colours, simply designed animation and happy characters. Repetition is used to make the storyline clear and easy to follow as there is a problem in the beginning and a resolution at the end. The credit card pun was a good idea so it's repeated as the resolution at the end and the name is changed to 'Miss A O'Kaye', showing that the problem is simple and quick to alter.

As an end card to the video, the information about where to find out more about the campaign is given, for example, a website and social media links. This is helpful as people can click straight from the video to read more information and also find similar videos.

Broadening The Mind Map

With 'Young persons political article' at the centre of my mind map. I was able to expand and gain a large collection of creative words that I previously wouldn't have linked to my political magazine. I was able to suggest draft ideas that could be used as a basis for a less generic article in my magazine that aims to change young peoples views on politics and make them interested.

I came up with the idea 'Rising Stars of Politics'. This article has the potential to be a weekly feature in the magazine, each week there would be information about a young person who is becoming involved in politics, whether they're a young MP or just someone who is opening and expressing their views on what could be done to improve the future of politics. But it could also be a larger one off article that informs about multiple young politics from different parties and backgrounds. The article would contain basic information about the young person eg. their name, age, where they're from and their current state of education/employment. After a brief background is given to introduce the young person, it would go on to talk about the young persons involvements and interest in politics with a possible interview or quotes from the young person themselves. Having quotes and interviews makes an article more engaging as you get the unaltered views of the subject of the article.

In terms of layout, the article would be on just one page as a feature that introduces multiple young politicians over a series of weeks, rather than bombarding the reader with information about one person in particular. The article would start with a fact file to introduce the young politician in a easy to read and non complex style. The rest of the article explaining what the young politician does in more detail would follow in columns, interrupted by block quotes to attract attention and give the audience interesting information. I would like to include an image of the young politician and if possible, a picture of them in action/working to show the contents of the article in an image form.

Here are some draft name ideas outlined using words from my mind map.

The Walk Sequence

The walk cycle is an essential sequence of movement in animation. After drawing someone in different positions of a regular walking movement you can produce frames to make your figure look as though it's walking on the spot or walking forwards or backwards.

This sequence of figures is made up of nine different positions, the more different positions you have, the more realistic the flow of the walk looks. You can use as little as four frames for your walk sequence however your walk will look less fluent. 

Using the sequence above as a template for my sequence, I created a layer for the template and another layer on top for my figure tracings. I proceeded to trace over each figure on the correct frame. Then using the lasso tool I separated each figure. 

The next stage was to create another layer called Guideline on which I drew a line as the 'floor' for my figure to walk on. I then place the first figures feet on the line and drew a dot above it's head, still on the guideline layer, to help with positioning. I inserted the guideline frame into nine frames as I had nine different figure drawings. I then locked the guideline so the only drawings that moved were the figures. 

On the Figures layer I moved each figure onto the guideline, each on a new keyframe so that the next frame didn't include the figure from the frame before. After completing this for the nine frames of each figure I deleted everything from the template layer and deleted all of the original traced images, leaving just the figure on the guideline. 

Finally I added a look to the sequence and slowed the FPS down to seven, this left me with a realistic walk sequence. 

Accessibility, Signal and Subtitles

Signal
The signal is the value of how good and clear the audio is. A good signal would mean that there is no competing background noise therefore the audio would easy to listen to without interruptions. 

Noise
A constant wave of audio that competes with audio they you are specifically trying to record, fluctuations of noise go along side an electrical signal.

Interfering Noise
These are sounds with a negative sound quality which is unpleasant to listen to. For example, when you put your phone next to your computer you hear feedback sound.

Somes location with noise issues are:

• Road side
• Busy cafe
• Building site
• Party
• Town centre at midday

Accessibility

There are different things put in place to help the accessibility of media when people have disabilities, difficulties or impediments.

Television has subtitles, audio description and sign language in the corner for some programmes to help people who have difficulties with sight and hearing.

Cinemas offer autism friendly screenings which cut adverts and show the film with a lower brightness and lower volume level. Cinemas also offer some subtitled screenings which are limited.

Radio is purely audio so there isn't a lot they can do to help with accessibility but radio presenters keep their wording as clear as simple as possible and avoid playing loud or offensive sounds.

Online videos such as YouTube have a subtile option on a lot of videos. I have looked at the subtitle settings for one of my own YouTube videos to see how it works. There is an option where YouTube makes a guess as to what the words you want to subtitle are but it isn't very reliable. I watched my video and typed the subtitles real time so that they were accurate, I then adjusted them so that they were as in sync as I could make them.

Beginning To Mind Map

As my magazine is primarily going to be aimed at teenage females with the aim of encouraging them to vote. After mind mapping some ideas and concepts about the aims of my magazine I decided I would like to include an article about the Suffragettes and the right for females to vote. Points I would focus on are:

• Who were the Suffragettes?
• Why weren't females eligible to vote?
• What did the Suffragettes do?
• When did females get the right to vote?
• Key personalities in the Suffragette movement.
• Why it's important for females to use their opportunity to vote.

Here are some images that would work well with the topic of the article as well as the style of my magazine:

As some of my magazine will be in an arty, scrapbook style I think these images would compliment the design because of their vintage look. The images are strong and biased towards making females look good which I hope will encourage teenage girls today that they too can have the same power as the Suffragettes did.