Peer Review

After watching everyone's final projects on Wednesday, we were asked to review an animation of our choice. I have decided to review the animation "The Circle of Life" by Caitlin, Lois and Caroline. The girls unfortunately couldn't get the music or sounds to play on their video on the day and were understandably saddened by this. However, they tackled this issue and overcame it. They had the music playing through their phone as their animation was shown on screen. Although background noise could be heard on their sound clip, it was barely noticeable. 

On the opening sequence, a popular song could be heard; this was 'Send me on my way' by Rusted Root. I love this song and it made me excited for the animation to start. After the title sequence we saw the first and main character of the animation. It was a baby crawling across the floor of the screen and out of shot, a little boy then returned playing football and I could see straight away what the animation would entail. We saw the boy going through all stages of his life, meeting his wife, having a baby, growing old and passing away. It then showed his son and prompted the circle of his life too.

My only critique of the animation is that although the story is clear, the contemporary issue doesn't seem to be. However, it is clear that a lot of planning, time and effort went into this animation and I think it paid off as it stuck in my head.

The animation is available to watch here: http://k33nlbk.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/the-circle-of-life.html

Self Evaluation

Our group was made up of two people, Emily and myself. We didn't have specific roles because we decided that it would be best for us to work together as neither of us felt we excelled in any particular role within the project as we both admitted that neither of us are particularly creative people. We started working with clay straight away which was a mistake as we should have tried other options such as paper or toys like other people in our class did. We also decided to film our animation using an application called Stop Motion Studio as we both agreed we found it was better suited to us as opposed to Zu3D. 
Here is the app: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/stop-motion-studio/id441651297?mt=8 

Our concept was a story of a homeless man. We would show him sleeping rough throughout the year. We decided that we would show this by having the seasons of the year change. This is where our title "Four Seasons" came from. As the final scene is played, it is raining and a stranger walks up to our homeless character and offers him shelter under him umbrella. The contemporary issue we are trying to portray is obviously homelessness and the moral of our story is that we should all try to help each other out in times of need and even the smallest of kind gestures matter.  

There are two characters in our animation; one being the homeless man and one being the kind stranger. The homeless man was easy to handle has he was flat on the floor and didn't move throughout the animation however, the kind stranger had to walk onto the set which was rather difficult to get him to stand up but I realised that if I put bigger shoes on his feet he would stand with ease and he did. Another problem that we encountered was that we made the figures and decided to start filming the next day. This proved to be challenging because although the characters were easy to mould, by the time we got around to filming they had hardened which made them fall apart when we tried moving them.

Our set was pretty basic. We wanted to concentrate more on the seasons changing so we figured that if we kept our background the same, the weather would be the focal point. A problem we encountered with our set was that it wasn't as wide as the camera shot so a background was visible behind our set. After presenting our animation, we were tackled on this and I explained the issue. However, one of my peers pointed out that they liked the fact the background was visible outside of our set and that they would have believed that it was purposely done.  



The conflict involved in our animation was the issue of homelessness. We felt that this is a big issue in Wales, especially in Swansea. We did some research on this and found some evidence to back up this idea. These are some graphs I found on http://www.poverty.org.uk. 

(Palmer, G. 2012)

(Palmer, G. 2012)

Towards the end of our animation, we aimed to show there was some resolution to this conflict. We wanted to show that although we can't fully resolve the issue of homelessness, we can show others some compassion and even the smallest of kind gestures matter. I am a firm believer in helping those less fortunate and have often provided food and drinks for the homeless people of Swansea and they have always been extremely thankful. 

Although sound effects are a great way of conveying action, we didn't provide any sound effects as we didn't feel that it worked well with our animation in particular. We did however use background music. Initially we used a song by Bastille called 'Things we lost in the fire'. Although this is an emotional song, we didn't think that it worked very well with our animation. Eventually we decided that an instrumental song would be best suited to us because we figured that if there are no lyrics, people will concentrate on the animation itself rather than the song that's playing in the background. However, we still wanted the background music to convey emotion so we went with an instrumental version of the song 'Somewhere only we know' by the band Keane. I think this music worked really well with our animation and I'm very happy with the outcome.

Things to avoid when completing this assignment include:

• Bad time keeping. I think that Emily and I definitely underestimated how time consuming this project would be and we ended up getting very stressed out as we were running out of time but luckily we completed it in time.
• Checking up with what your peers are doing. I think that this kind of project should be different from your peers and I found that when I heard what other people were doing, I thought about changing up what we were doing but it's important to stick with your own instincts and ideas.
• Taking pictures at different times of the day. Lighting was a big issue for a lot of our peers. Some people took pictures in the daytime, took a break then went on to take some more pictures but by the time they got around to this, the sun had gone down which gave the pictures a darkness that wasn't there beforehand. This made the animations flow with less ease. 

Some tips when completing this assignment are:

• Take a break when needed. This is extremely important in my opinion. It is a very stressful project so if you feel like you need to take some time out for a lunch or tv break, do it. You'll end up burning out otherwise and your end project will not be as good as it could have been. 
• Patience. You need patience with this project. Don't expect to get it done within one day, or in one sitting. It will take time and a lot of effort (and mistakes).
• If using a smart phone to take pictures, use earphones to take the pictures. Emily and I were having trouble with the phone moving position with each shot we took due to us touching the screen to take the picture. I came up with the idea of using the button on the earphones to take each shot, that way the phone could stay in the same position throughout our animation. It worked great!
• Using a tripod is a good idea. Hardly anyone has a steady enough hand to hold a camera in place throughout the process of creating an animation so buying or making a tripod is the best idea. We built ours using books and clay to hold the phone in place.
• Using a lamp close to the set. If you can't take pictures at the same time everyday (and even if you can, the weather is unpredictable), using a lamp or light close to your set when taking pictures is helpful as you'll get the same lighting throughout your shots. this is a picture of how we provided our lighting.
  

Overall, I really enjoyed creating this animation as it is unlike any project I have done before. There were a lot of hurdles to overcome but I am happy with our ending animation.

References

Palmer, G. (2012). Homelessness. Available: http://www.poverty.org.uk . Last accessed 28/01/2015.

Our final Stop-Motion Animation

This is the final take of our stop-motion animation "Four Seasons".

First draft of our stop-motion animation

We decided to run through our claymation to see how it worked and this was the outcome. We picked up on many mistakes which is visible in this short video such as props moving when we didn't want them to, my leg coming into the shot and the length of the video was too short. We used these mistakes to improve our final project. 
I will point out what we decided to change in my evaluation post. 

Initial Assignment decisions

We were told that we had to create an animation of our choice. Me and Emily James decided that we would work together as a group because we live together so we felt it would be be beneficial as we could work on it at home. We went with using clay to create our own claymation.

We spent a lot of time trying to come up with a story but eventually decided on "Four Seasons". This was a title we came up with for a story of a homeless man who spends all four seasons outdoors until a kind stranger shows simple a act of compassion.

We decided that this would be an important theme to go with due to the issue of homelessness, especially in Swansea. Our message is that these gestures of kindness are important, no matter how small they are.