Watching everyone's Animation in Seminar!

I thought it was a brilliant idea us all getting together to present our animations to the rest of the group. We were able to see everyones creative ideas, exchange message and even gain messages. Each video was different and left specific emotional thoughts and feelings with myself, some of them were really over powering and took my breath back within such a short clip.

As for mine and Charlottes video I felt it went rather well, it did make the audience laugh as well as take in the essential information. We wanted something that would be much more enjoyable as we were aiming our animation on younger children, therefore we didn't want anything that was too difficult for them to grasp. Whilst presenting the video we did notice a few errors and found clips we wish we had done differently but after recieving feedback from the rest of the group it seemed to be that we were just finding faults that we could identify because of the making of the video.

Another issue which I noticed with mostly everyones videos including ours was the lighting on the making of the video. This is because we were filming it throughout different parts of the day the light would change causing flashing images throughout the video, nevertheless this did not have a big impact on the aminations as you were still able to view the video perfectly clear.

Overall I was rather proud of our animation video, even though it was time consuming it was worthwhile in the end.

Just to add

Animation Project

Just to add...
The one thing Charlotte and I decided to aviod when completing the video was to add too many different sound clips that were not relevant, we just wanted short and sweet voices from the characters to make it more personal for us and the children. We also decided to use our own voices and change the pitch and speed through Audacity, but doing it this way it was all produced by ourselves.

I also want to critically analyses what tips we would need for the future, but I think I want to wait until the presentation is done tomorrow and I will reflect on what I felt went wrong, what we could have changed and what was in need of improvement.
Hopefully tomorrow though it will all go well :)!!

Animation Project- March 14th

After two long days and the occasional updates we kept doing when we had the chance we were nearly done with the video

To complete all the recording we used Audacity and exported them onto the video.

On March the 14th in preperation for the presentation on Wednesday 16th March, Charlotte and I got together to update the video, get rid of any hickups and ammend anything we were unhappy with.

We came across some teething problems with Audacity and uploading the specific clips on, when we were changing the pitch and speed we couldn't get it quiet right! But we got there in the end! Today made us critise what we wasnt happy with basically and complete it to the best standards we could!

As a team I felt Charlotte and I worked very well together, we both took on different roles and put as much effort in as one another! We found out information seperately and expressed our own ideas with each other, also notify any mistakes we felt were necessary.
On a positive side, I really enjoyed making the animation and it was good experience to use Zuplo and Audacity. It gave us a good insight to what making a video would involve, how important a short advertise is and how much impact something so short and simple can have on young children.

Nevertheless, on the negative side we didnt really have enough time to complete it within the two days we had book in for IT. It would have been nice to have had a full week, where we were able to access the equipment for a longer length of time and alot more planning could have been put in place rather than rushing it within the two sessions.

Animation Project- 22nd February

The following week we had another It/d & t day where we gather our thoughts and ideas and bring the video together. Charlotte and I had already discussed in the week that Healthy Eating was a ver well choosen topic and we researched a little on what school children would enjoy most.
We felt it would be boring for them to just watch a video saying Eat Healthy !...We wanted something that would stick in their minds, make them laugh, excitement, bring characters to life and use imagination.

This is when we came up with the idea that we would bring the food groups to life!...
At first we got carried away and started writing down different types of foods we could use and trying to find popular names for the fruit for the children to recognise.
We realised that as we only had to do a short video introducing all these characters would take up too much time and be rather pointless, therefore in the end we ended up with 4 characters, 2 which were healthy food and 2 which were unhealthy foods.

We named the characters:

• Charlie the Carrot
• Chunk the Chip
• Sally the Strawberry
• Beefy the Burger

We wanted names that would humour the children and have a slight meaning. We decided when the foods were to introduce themselves they would say a short message that had some kind of rhythm to it! This would make it more enjoyable!! :)

So the plan from here was to action plan what our video was planning to looking like.

• Scene 1: Was going to be recorded in the kitchen, with small pieces of food on the table with Alfie ( the little boy who doesnt know what to eat for food for his race in school) looking at the foods and wondering what he could have to eat!
• Then all of a sudden all the food rolls off the table and comes to life!
• They will then introduce themselves one by one
• They then tell Alfie that he must follow them to the food race!
• Scene 2: In shock Alfie goes to watch the food race where there are loads of other people cheering!
• At the end the healthy foods Win!
• The unhealthy foods are lying on the floor unable to move!
• Scene 3: Alfie has finally made his mind up! And is looking forward to his school race!

After all the characters were names and we had planned and what the video would involve we began to make our characters,
We had so much fun trying out different things with the clay, making the foods out of clay and making them look human, giving them eyes, hair and teeth! We really wanted the children to look at them and use their imagination and let these characters stick in their mind in order for the video to have an affect.

The conflict for our character is having is that he has a school race to attend and he really wants to win but doesnt know what will make him fit, strong and healthy for it. The video then helps his to overcome this by the food characters coming to life and explaining what they do as a food group and taking him to the food race. At the end of the video Alfies conflict is overcome as he knows the healthy food is best for him especiallly if he is about to take part in a race!

We decided not to use music throughout the video, as the little boy will be talking to himself, the characters will be introducing themselves and there will be alot of cheering for the race. When the little boy speaks he is really thinking aloud. The only part we added music on was while the foods were having a race to make it sound more realistic, this was the only background music we decided to use!

Amination Project Continued!

Charlotte and I decided to work together for the project as we both work well together and come up with great ideas. We talked about the different topics that we could possibly do and what would be interesting compared to the others, we weighed up the pros and cons and analysed whether there was enough information to get the message across and whether it was time consuming. What we hope to do was choose a topic that someone else in the class hadnt chosen. After researching online we narrowed it down to a few which were:

• Poverty
• Smoking
• Healthy Eating
• Bullying
• SEN

Finally we came to the decision that as Healthy Eating is one of the biggest topics in school now it would be a nice message to send to the children in Primary Schools.

Even though we had chosen our topic there was still loads more planning to do. We had to figure what our message would be?, what our amination would be ? How our storyboard would follow, what kind of characters we would hve. We also had to decide whether it was going to be a serious type of animation and intense or whether it was going to be funny and eye catching.

Animation Project

Had a full day in University today to begin my Animation Project for design and technology and ICT. When we arrived at the seminer Suzie and Mandy went through some relevant information about different animation and showed some videos. Suzie talked about the school she has recently worked with completing an animation alongside a poem with a class of year 5 and 6. The video was fabulous and really touching to see how well the children worked for such a young age.
We also watched a popular video called 'Dot' that was a piece of animation work for that took up alot of time and effort.

After we had recieve some knowledge and background information on Animation Suzie and Mandy placed A3 pieces of paper around the classroom with different topics on and our task was to move around the classroom and jot down ideas realting to the topic too see what infortmation we can gather together to decide on our choose topic and message for our amination!