Billy Liddle by Billy liddle

Initial research and experimentation

Billyliddle — 2015-09-24 14:50:55 UTC

Over the last few weeks i have researching different types on idents so i can create my own ident for the Essex Local Offer to complete my assignment. I have been testing out different types of animation and looking at the pioneers and contemporary animators to help me in my research. I enjoy doing this because it allows me to make videos that are not physically possible to do. Also this can help me to achieve my dream job which is to become my a voice actor and be my own character.

The areas i need to improve is practicing with the animation software and make my animations look more fluent and smooth instead of jumpy.

For the local offer I have to make a 15-20 second ident to help publicise the EssexLocalOffer and how they help people of all ages to find their local facilities that can help them if they have any learning difficulties.

Production diary

Billyliddle — 2015-10-09 14:51:29 UTC

production roles; job allocation; task definitions and deadlines;agreed content outline within proposal; preliminary and regular team meetings; agendas and minutes; proposed schedules; logistics, eg personnel,equipment; contingency, eg resources backup, logistics backup; risk assessments

Myself and Lauren gave each other roles to do for the pre-production. the way we decided this is by telling each other our strengths and weaknesses and telling each other what we would be best at in our pre-production process. For me i one of my strengths was i was creative when it comes to creating sound effects so we decided that i will go home and record different sound effects that we needed four our ident and Lauren will draw up and cut out the small cut outs that we were going to use for our stop motion animation for the Essex Local Offer. We agreed to have both the sound effects and the cut-outs ready for when we started filming to make sure we could utilise out time as best as possible.

2/10/15

Today my partner and I practised and played around with our idea and practised animating it. First of all we started off trying to animate using a white board and pen and using different drawings to try and animate it. however it proved difficult as we not confident enough and skilled enough to keep the drawings similar. However we decided to use claymation as its easier to make small movements and the character stays the same.

9/10/15

Our idea is for a character to be confused whilst trying to read a book, however the character is confused they have a educational disablility so the Essex Local Offer representative comes into shot from the left and takes the confused character to the Essex Local Offer website to reassure them that there is help for them if they need it and to show them where to find it.

13/10/15

Today me and my partner worked together to finish our team mind map. We put all of our ideas and what we're going to use onto a mind map. we were able to figure out our final idea but we put a few potential ideas that could go into out final idea but they may not as it might not fit out ident.

14/10/15

I was able to make a budget and put down all the costs of the equipment, materials and staff we need to hep us make our Ident. I managed to figure out the cost of a contingency plan also just incase our first idea did not work out. The contingency plan is always more than the first budget total because its better to be over prepared than under prepared money wise. Also i was able to gather some feedback on our ident idea by having a focus group with people who are within out age group. This was useful as our target audience is ranged from 16-24 so getting feedback from this age group was very useful.

Today me and my partner used an iPad to create the animation for our ident. However the camera did show the edges of the iPad which was not good but it can be removed in post production editing. Also i learnt how to make a dope sheet and i made 72 frames ( 3 seconds) of planning. For our final animation, we are debating to either use, cut outs or claymation and we will decide this after we practice using each one and deciding which technique looks better. Our experimental animation today (15/10/15) was a success as we now know that we're going to use the screen of the IPad to animate, however we're going to the sketches that were made on the iPad in our final animation.

The John Lewis advert influenced me and my parter to use cut outs with a steady base so we can make it easy and our animation to look professional. It also influenced us to make many different cut outs instead of using one cut out and changing the movements of a singular cut out. As we have decided to use many different cut outs it makes it easier to show movements and the animation to look very smooth and professional. I have used the influence from the John Lewis animation by labelling my cut outs to make it easy to know which order they go in. Also i will use a scalpel to cut out my characters to get a very fine and smooth precise cut to make my characters look up to a professional standard.

22/10/15

me and my team mate had our team meeting and decided what we are going to include in our powerpoint for our proposal. We also created a minutes of meeting document where we recorded our team meeting. team meetings are useful because it allowed me and my partner to discuss what we wanted to achieve by the end of the day.

After this we went into the animation room and we improved on our animating skills. We noticed that our characters were casting shadows so to fix this we placed lights on either side of our set so we didn't have the shadows on our characters. We also added a few seconds not our animation and finished shooting our first scene of our animated ident.

Production diary

Billyliddle — 2015-11-12 15:49:19 UTC

5/11/15

Today me and my parter finished our presentation power points and combined them together to create our final presentation which is now ready for our proposal for the Essex Local Offer members.

Today me and my parter finished our presentation power points and combined them together to create our final presentation which is now ready for our proposal for the Essex Local Offer members. we have notes that we have placed at the bottom of each slide so we have a script to read off of so we could fully explain each slide to the client. When presenting our pitch, the clients acknowledged our ideas by me keeping eye contact with the client and they nodded to show they agreed with our idea and were listening to pitch. At the end of our pitch, the clients both agreed that our idea is the clearest they've heard and the understanding and the message of our ident fits the criteria of what they're looking for. strengths and weaknesses to help identify which roles we should both undertake to make this production to the highest standard possible. I have 6 jobs that i needed to do for the production and Lauren also had 6 and some of the the jobs we assigned both of us to so we could work together on certain things. For example the audience responses and the focus groups, we did them both together so we could both have a better understanding of what responses we got. The risk assessment was based around the animation room because thats where there are the highest amount of risks. We had to identify all of these risks to make sure we did not come across any problems that we did not plan for.

10-11th/11/15

During both of these days New heights were filming their final edition of the ident stop motion animation. We had 60 different cut outs to use in our ident as it is a cut out. First we set up all of our lighting for our set and used a blank whiteboard to use as our background so the focus on the screen is our cut out characters. Half way through shooting our ident we discovered a problem that one of our shots was the wrong way round. after discussing this problem with my parter we decided that we will continue to shoot the rest of our ident but when it comes to the editing we will mirror the image so it looks like it has not moved and is on the right side of the screen.

12/11/15

today is when Me and lauren (new heights) began our post-production process and started editing our ident to add found effects and to put all of our clips together. First of all we started by importing all of our clips into Final Cut pro and arranging them in chronological order. Next we had mirror one of our clips as when filming we made an error and to correct the error we had to flip one of our clips so it fit into our ident. After doing this we added in our theme tune which was made using an iPad App so it is royalty free which means we can not get called up for copyright. Also we did this with our sound effects so they are all made by either me or Lauren so they belong to us. After adding in our sound effect and theme tune we added the credits and finalised any changes we needed to do. Lauren took the final edit home as we discovered a problem with the resolution of one of our last shots. We changed it so the final shot of the logo was in high resolution and it was easier to identify

Final

Billyliddle — 2015-11-19 12:16:37 UTC

LL 4/12/15 Unit 4 Managing production

llove — 2015-12-04 15:05:55 UTC

Billy you have written up a range of elements that you have contributed towards.. however there are many aspects that you have not reviewed in any detail... you need to review your assignment brief and discuss how you contributed to the planning and production management in all aspects.

Billy you have evidenced your contribution on certain elements of the production process. However your diary log does not fully describe and explain how you have MANAGED THE PRODUCTION PROCESS PLEASE CHECK YOU HAVE COVERED ALL AREAS BELOW:

Planning:agreed production roles; job allocation; task definitions and deadlines;agreed content outline within proposal; preliminary and regular team meetings; agendas and minutes; proposed schedules; logistics, eg personnel,equipment; contingency, eg resources backup, logistics backup; risk assessments
Production management:
pre-production phase ; production phase; post-production phase; project
management techniques, eg spreadsheet, scrums; team and individual performance; contingency plans for staffing and resources; monitoring and reviewing; problem solving; prioritisation; crisis management; quality control; meeting submission dates; modifications after completion
Product:
technical and aesthetic qualities; realisation of proposal; fitness for
purpose, eg audience, client

ADDED WORK!

Billyliddle — 2016-06-10 14:11:00 UTC

Communicating ideas to a non-visual audience - This method is used in indents to make the audience instantly recognise their indents by sound. For example, the BBC one indents have unique background music so people who are not able to see the ident will instantly recognise the sound and know what channel they're watching. Also continuity announcers read out a short summary of what was just seen on the show and they can announce which shows are coming up next.

Analouge and digital - Analouge is having physical copy of a picture or a film reel, this is what people used to use when the technology was not good enough for broadcasting to send binary code to TV's. Digital is whats seen on TV, broadcasters send binary codes to TVs that then show up on the tv in the form of moving images. The binary code is very tiny numbers of 1 and 0 but the numbers are so small that they're not noticeable so when they are all broadcasted together it creates a picture instead of numbers.

ADDED WORK

Billyliddle — 2016-06-13 15:41:50 UTC

Production management:
pre-production phase ; production phase; post-production phase; project
management techniques, eg spreadsheet, scrums; team and individual performance; contingency plans for staffing and resources; monitoring and reviewing; problem solving; prioritisation; crisis management; quality control; meeting submission dates; modifications after completion

To manage our time efficiently as possible Myself and Lauren decided to arrange the best time for us both to start out production so we made a production schedule that we both agreed to stick to so we could create our ident and have enough time for editing and filming to meet out deadline. We would have team meeting and both discuss what we was going to do that day and we both made sure that we would have our work for that day completed so we did not fall behind and we could start filming as soon as possible. We had a contingency plan for filming our ident, we decided to have extra cut-outs for our character just in case we lost one or one was ruined we have an exact copy to use as a back up so filming could continue. If we did not have this contingency plan then we would lose time filming making more cut-outs and we would fall behind on filming and meeting the deadline. For both days of filming we would film for 2-3 hours then take a lunch break then film again afterwards till the end of the day to utilise the time we had in the animation studio to get as many shots and film as much of our ident as we could. After two days of repeating this process we finish all of our filming for our ident so we was now ready to start our post-production process and start editing our ident and adding sound effects and background music. To meet the submission date we agreed to make sure we had extra time after completing everything so we could look over it all and make any changes or fill in any gaps we may have missed before the submission date. After completing out editing we noticed that the shot of the Essex Local Offer was blurry so we had to go back and change the resolution of the image to make is clear and professional for us to present to the members of the Essex Local Offer