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Filming
Filming was the most difficult during the process of creating the ident. Although we had the 'staging' set up well, it was difficult because we had the camera set up on a stand facing down on a white board. This meant that we had to find a way to have our character walking without falling flat. There were other difficulties swell such as the plasticine melting because the temperature was so warm. In order to prevent this we made sure that the heat lights weren't too close to our creations made out of plasticine and if they did start to melt we always had a couple of fans available if needed. My job during production was the hand gestures and moving the character sometimes. This was a hard job because i had to keep my arm very still even when we wasn't capturing the film otherwise it would have gone wrong, this was hard because my arm was aching lots however i could not rest it and therefore it was very uncomfortable. Another problem during filming was the close-ups, due to the camera quality showing all the small details and marks on the plasticine such as out of place colours and fingermarks etc. But this was fixed by making sure all fixable marks went away and that we were light when handling it. Although the filming was very long to shoot, the more we dragged it out and so the more shots we had - the better because then it would make it smoother, more realistic and longer.

Editing

The editing was surprisingly easy as the shots were fairly simple and straight forward. The harder part was fitting it in with the voice overs and having it all fit together. However, due to me and Charlie (the narrator) recorded so many different takes and so some were long and others were slower which helped us choose ones that fittest perfectly. However the main difficulty was making the volumes of the different sounds mixing well as we did have music as well as voice overs. In the end we made the music very low so that there was at least something but not silent and so it gave it a much better effect. Due to the computers crashing, we did lost our work 3 times and keep having to re-do it but luckily it didn't slow us down or make us behind.

Audience feedback
There was a lot of different responses from the audiences that we had showed our project to, mainly positive which is really good. When showed to peers and family, the ident was loved, lots of people were very fond of the character and the were impressed by how it was made and our motivation and why we chose to have 3 different types of animation. However, the feedback from the client wasn't quite as positive as we had hoped due to confusion of the plot and they felt we were sending out a different message to the one their company promotes when the hand saves the character - however, our aim for that was more about the feeling of being saved rather than actually being saved which caused confusion which we took into consideration because then we realised that we need to be much clearer when it comes to following a client's brief and that it is important to make the message as clear as possible when there is not much explanation in text or narration.

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Todays lesson is more of a catch up lesson preparing for the clients pitch which is on thursday and the filming which is starting next week. Todays lesson (as well as tomorrow most likely) will be making sure that all the pre-production work has been completed as well as proposals and that we are confident in our pitches - especially the timing. The preproduction does seem like it has been completed as well as my team and i can see. Today i have completed a quick equipment list that we will be needing while filming and have been going through proofreading my proposal and pitch.
Although today has not been very practical and had accomplished a lot of activities and tasks considering i have already looked at and completed those unfinished. i feel that this lesson was very useful as it gave me a lot of spare time to prepare and practise which is a key focus at this stage of the project. i was very focused on getting the first part of my targets completed fairly quickly so that i had enough time for the evening.

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In todays lesson, my team and I focussed on the music and sound of the project. We downloaded the app 'garageband' and started experimenting. As I have not a lot of knowledge and experience in creating music, James took most of the control in the music as i finished off previous documents for the group that had not been finished. In the end there were 2 different instrumentals produced, 1 slow and 1 upbeat, this is good because then we have 2 completely different types and it will go well with the contrasts of the film.

Another thing we done today was go down to the animation room to practise. Because one of our team members wasn't in and they are holding onto our cut out objects like trees and such it was difficult to practise with the background moving, so instead we decided to practise the part where a hand catches our character. This practise was much needed as it is the most difficult part our ident. The more we practise it the more we are getting better, however, we do need to make the hand gesture more realistic as the character lands and give it more of a bounce. But with practise i believe by the time of our filming we would have got much better.

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08/11/2016 Today i really wanted to focus on the organisation and practising the presentation because i want to be as prepared as possible when it comes to pitching to our clients as it is a major activity within the project. i have started preparing my main notes that i will be taking into the pitch with me that will help me. i feel that my powerpoint and notes are good, however, my main worry when it comes to this pitch will be my timing as i feel that i will forget about having one minute per pitch (like i have planned with my notes and set-up) and will end up going overtime. Overall, during the practising, i feel that i have added enough detail for it to stay interesting and includes information but at the same time as little as possible so that it doesn't drag on and look like it has too much text.

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03/11/2016 The tasks I set myself today was to prepare focus group questions, the team and me came up with 5 questions asking the public their views and opinions on our ident ideas and whether they believe it will be successful and what they believe should be improved and how. At 11:30, the group went to the animation studio and practised a bit more so that we are gaining more experience. After lunch, I did more pre-production work for the team such as sound research. I felt my work was at satisfactory because although I done all my work, more could have been completed.

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13/10/2016 Today, my group and me went down to the animation room to practise. For me, this was the most useful part of the day as we have had very little time in the animation room as a whole group and so this has gave us that extra experience in practising that we need. During the experiments, we realised we had a big issue with timing, as we would think we have ‘filmed’ much more seconds than we actually had – due to doing too little frames which makes the clips shorter. Next time it will be better to have bigger frames and to do smaller movement so that it will be longer.

As well as going practising animation. Rhianna and me went out to ask people of the public to complete a questionnaire that was made to help get their views on the character and their colour, gender, age, race etc. The results were very pleasing as the majority of the audience had wrote down very similar answers which tells us the popularity which helps us a lot with the research we were trying to find out.

I also completed the script after already writing out a rough copy so that we already had an idea. At first I had thought that it was too short and would not be long enough but after the practise in animation room we had realised that at the speed the narrator would be speaking it would fit in well with the length of the ident and there would be no need to take anything out.

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29/09/2016 In this lesson, I practised my animation and in groups (me, matt and alex) we created a claymation short clip.

We decided to do Claymation so we started off creating the character, as Claymation is usually quite unrealistic, we created a funny looking character that we believe people would learn to love because of the look of it as it had big frog-like eyes but wearing a bowtie and jacket (the contrast of its looks is what makes it look funny and like a typical children’s character). We decided that the set up of the clip and the ‘plot’ would be a show/concert and our character is the main star. The stage was set up as we placed a plain white board standing up as the background and we glued a wooden board (with plasticine) to use as the stage itself. This was difficult because the plasticine was not as strong as we had originally thought it would be so we had to use a lot more than expected and therefore we had less for the character and objects and we had to make sure no plasticine was poking through the stage – making it look messy and less realistic As this is just a practise animation and we still have very little knowledge about how to use it properly and make it really realistic and smooth, I believe we thought it through very well and made the best animation we could with the little equipment we had prepared – such as using a phone flashlight underneath the camera so that it looks like there is a spotlight for the stage ‘performance’ and using wooden sticks to move the character and objects around although they got in the way of the camera a lot it still ended up working out well. Of course when we have all the correct equipment needed it would look much better and neater as well as more professional which is the aim because although the idea is for it to be unrealistic, it still needs to be professional and so it would need to run smoothly and be clean and neat. Another problem we had during this hour was the sizing of the objects and characters, as we believe because the character was quite big the heaviness made it harder to control.In the end, I believe we done a really good job – especially that we are new to animating. And the finalised clip ended up really fast and only 5 seconds, but it wasn’t so quick that nothing could be seen. Next time I would like to make it a little bit longer and spend less time of preparation as we had spent 40 minutes preparing and creating the scene/characters/objects and 20 minutes making the clip

I believe that my planning, research and organisational skills have developed massively throughout the past few weeks as i have wrote down my research schedule so i know which days i am i doing what activities etc. and this also keeps me organised and well as making sure all of my research is being completed. I feel that my planning has been very well as i know exactly what want to be doing and have fitted in everything and timed it really well so that there is not too much or too little work being completed on certain days and it has been evened out neatly and well timed.

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28/09/2016

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27/09/2016 In this lesson, we needed to organise our research schedule until the 6th october. To do this, we created documents that explains which research and activities we will be doing on what days in order to be more focused on the action plan daily which will help us be more organised and make sure we don't miss anything out. After that, I started on my mind map for the Families feeling Safe lecture. In this mind map I basically put down many of the notes i gathered from the presentation and wrote down the main points i feel i needed to remember such as what they want to be included, their aim of the company, our aim for the indent, and their main themes/quotes they go by. I noted down some of my current ideas for the ident but not many since it is just the start of the project and my ideas will expand the more i research. Towards the end of the day, for an hour we went down into the animation room in groups and started practising stop motion claymation and done different types of prints such as 'falling leaf', 'bouncing ball' and 'run and crash'. This hour practise helped me a lot because now i feel i have better knowledge and experience in claymation and am more confident in doing it although it is really difficult at first.

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This week has been a preparation week for our new unit and new year. We have been looking at idents and how they are used to catch the audiences attention and why we use them and how they are created. We have also looked at and research all different types of animation and how each of them are effective in different ways and which ones are more suitable for what purposes etc. We practised our own development of stop motion animation techniques for our first try, which was difficult at first and quite unrealistic as it was our first time trying but in the end it got easier to complete. For these units, we found out our task is make an ident video for our Client 'families feeling safe'. During a lecture we found out that they are a support company for children and adults and would like an animated short clip showing the audience and viewers who they are and what they do. With this brief and task explained we needed to do some more research on this company and what they wanted, during this I found out what colour scheme they wanted, music, length, information etc. so that i can try and fit their expectations and suggestions perfectly. During our research on animation, i realised that there was so many different types of animation which means theres a wide variety of different options i could use in order to make my animation the best it could be as we found out the pros and cons of the different styles. This week has definitely been an eye opener and a quick explanation of the research and activities needed to be done in order to complete this unit so that we can get on fast and in the beginning so we have plenty of time to prepare and create it.