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.