The work for this project goes all the way to the beginning of April with the post 'THE START OF FMP'

Context, Rationale and Brief

Context:

Medical centres are not the most interesting of places or the nicest due to the nature of them (people are generally not happy who go as they are not well). There is also a lot of waiting around in medical centres, therefore to keep the customers entertained and educated at the same time adverts and information are placed on the TV screens. Customers do tend to read it as they don’t tend to talk to other people. A good way of educating about these issues is through visually watching as they don’t have to actually do anything themselves such as read.

A health problem I have come across, personally and from talking to friends living away from home on a budget is the problem of healthy eating. Many people find it difficult to eat healthily whilst at university for the simple fact of little money and the time and effort to make food. Although many students are aware that they do need to try and eat healthily, thinking and actually acting upon this are two different things. Furthermore, moving to university gives you a new found freedom to do what you want, therefore at times you need to re-evaluate your lifestyle, and change to make it more healthier. Although there is a lot of information on the internet on healthy eating, it takes a while to read through it therefore many people can’t be bothered or miss out certain aspects of information, when really they need to know it all.

Brief:

To create a short stop motion animation that is light hearted and aesthetically appealing to students. It should attract the audience to watch it to make students aware of simple ways to eat healthily.

Rationale

To create a short stop motion animation that is light hearted and aesthetically appealing to students. It should attract the audience to watch it to make students aware of simple ways to eat healthily.

Key research findings:

·         Look at the human body and its movements closely when creating your stop motion.

·         Have a clear, structured story behind your stop motion

·         Students know what healthy eating is it is achieving it that is the problem.

·         The students don’t want to sit for a long time watching the same thing, therefore keep it short.

I will approach the brief with a clear aim of learning a new skill for myself, yet also engaging with my audience constantly to make sure what I am doing is effective and useful, therefore fulfilling the brief. I am going to research through experimentation as to what medium I am going to use for my stop motion, this is the main decision I need to make. Another decision I need to make is also what information is going to be included in my stop motion.

As I have approximately nine weeks to complete this brief, I am planning on for the first three weeks thoroughly investigating through experimentation different mediums to use for my stop motion. Alongside this I will continue to talk to my audience to find out what information they want to know to place in the stop motion. If I feel I am confident with a number of different ways to produce my stop motion I may give my audience the opportunity to have a say into the most suitable medium, however I feel as I have never created a piece of stop motion before it shall be me who makes this decision. Once I have this information I will then narrow it down if needs be to a reasonable amount of information to put into my stop motion. Meanwhile I will create a thoroughly detailed story board. Again consulting my audience all the time through the process into whether they think the information is suitable in terms of content and size.

Evaluation

My final piece consisted of a stop motion animation showing how to eat healthily. After the research of ‘What is Vis Com’ I then decided to research further into healthy eating by looking at medical websites, the NHS, in particular the part ‘Change 4 life’. This looked at ‘swapping’ foods. I also sent out questionnaires to my target audience about healthy eating, from this I found that people wanted as little information as possible, just what is good for them and showing the ease of how to healthy eat. I feel I did get enough information about eating healthily for me to create a piece on how to healthy eat.

In the beginning I started to create very short stop motions with plastercine and a camera. They were very basic and they didn’t flow very well as the camera was not at the same angle all the time. I then got a tripod, which allowed me to create stop motions that were less wobbly. One thing I got from these stop motions was that they were humorous and people really liked them because they were light hearted. I then decided that this was the route to go down with my animations as I felt it would work well with the ease part of the healthy eating.

Although I had experimented with plastercine I also wanted to include paper animations too and after seeing the peg stop motion on YouTube I was inspired to include a person into my stop motion. Also after struggling of thinking of a way to show the ‘swap’ of foods I felt including a person would create a humorous and clever way to swap the foods.

After an induction into the AV room and the stop motion equipment I began by creating paper animations. I really liked the effect of these, and after a crit I discovered that a good way of creating my animation would be in a low tech way. Therefore my people that I cut out were in black and white as the colours of the paper pieces were quite muted. I also decided to keep the background white as I felt that this looked simplistic, which was the overall feel of the piece.

Whilst creating my paper animations I accidently got my hand caught in a shot. I felt that this combined with the photo paper pieces and the drawings was a really nice all over effect and allowed me to move smoothly from one part of the animation to another.

After I had all of my animation together and sequenced correctly I then had to add sound to it. At first I was going to add music, however after my final crit it became apparent that the only effective way of adding sound to it was to add sound effects. As I have never used sound effects before I found it really difficult to do. I firstly recorded some sounds of my own, however when I put them into final cut I realized that they were too quiet, and then I couldn’t find many good sound effects on the internet, therefore I had to raise the volume of my recorded sounds and the sounds I found on the internet I had to lower. All in all it meant that my sound for my animation is very quiet, which is not ideal. However I think that parts of the sounds do sound good and effective. All in all though I am not pleased with the sound and I feel that in a way it spoils my animation. I feel I would also have been able to improve the sound a bit more if I had had time, however as in the com tech project I managed to delete all the work I had done on final cut twice.

In the future I am definitely going to try to use  after effects as I tried to use them in this project however I just didn’t understand how to do it, even though I had had a very detailed induction into it. In addition in the future I will probably try and write down a step by step instruction on how to save in final cut as it wasted a lot of time by loosing it.

All in all though I am extremely pleased with the animation itself, I feel I managed to create it how I wanted it to look, however I definitely feel that the sound I have added has let it down.

final piece

I knew I had got my idea for using people from somewere...and today I figured it out...the juno opening credits.
I have already posted this video in november time...even before I was interested in animation.

these took SOOO long to do...for so little time...but personally really worth it. exactly the result i wanted!

First attempt in AV room

Ben Tallon

I want to include drawings of the food ie. coca cola...i really like the style of Ben tallons work, and feel that this style would work really well in stop motion.

Pavel Koutsky

emma rios

victoria ball

Su Blackwell

i really like this stop motion. I feel that a person like this in my stop motion could be the narrator. and move around...

I have been looking for animations about healthy eating and i found this one which just happens to be stop motion. its exactly what i dont want to do in my stop motion. it tells you to cut out sugars yet it doesnt show how.people no they need to do this need to be shown how to do it. I also dont like how the stop motionmoves the food about to create letters as it doesnt do it in an even order so its really difficult to read and at times you have to read it backwards.

i have been looking at healthy eating videos on youtube and many of them tell you lots of information on how to eat healthily, why you want to, whats it easy to do blah blah blah...everyone knows what is easy to do what they want is straight information.what is easy. EASE.
I have decided for my animation  'ease' is going to be the subject. after looking on the 'change 4 life' website and various other food/healthy eating websites...the easiest and simplest way i could see for people to change is by swapping foods. ie. swap a packet of crisps for an apple. its so simple and putting it like that shows that it doesnt involve buying LOADSS of ingrediants to eat healthily. its just simple.
After browsing the internet and alot of cook books i have come up with a list of foods to swap for. I have also asked a few people about their meals they eat now to get an idea of what people actually so when i do swap they can actually relate to it.