Questionnaires

Last Monday, I made our groups' questionnaires to research our target audience, I aimed to find out about gambling habits of the participants we asked the questions to. I also asked whether the participants were employed or not at that time, I asked this as we all believed that the amount of times that people gamble relates to their employment status. After we had altered some of the questions after input from Lorraine, we printed 15 copies and went to ask our audience to complete them, we thought that getting our target audience to complete them would be problematic, but we were proved to be wrong, as all 15 were completed before two o'clock. The results we accumulated were not entirely surprising, for example, being the middle of the day, we believed that most of the people we asked would be unemployed, however only 20% were, with 47% being in work. However, we thought that less people would have gambled before, but 73% of people we asked had gambled before. 


Creating these questionnaires have helped us with the research of our audience, with this data that we had collected and collated, we can alter our advert to cater to the audience more than what we had initially planned it for. 

Script + Storyboard

Last Thursday we illustrated our storyboards, I began by producing a script for the advert, after we had our meeting in the morning with the rest of the team, we discussed what we would include in the script, and the order of events in more detail than before, we also agreed what we were going to illustrate in the storyboard. After we returned from break, I started work on the script, once that was complete, we had a lighting workshop with Brendan, where we practiced the final part of our advert where a shadow engulfs the main character, after he trips over a log. This turned out very successfully, with the footage we captured we had worked out how we would create the intended appearance in the final video. After we had finished our experimentation with the lighting, we had to complete our storyboards, we split up the advert and each of us in our team illustrated and annotated three key frames of our advert, I did the opening three scenes.

Proposal

Today we created our advert proposal for our client, as a team, we delegated the parts of the proposal we would each create. I had produced a few project proposals in the past, so I was confident of how I would arrange my part of the proposal. We decided that as I was the member of the group that wrote the narrative outline and who imagined the initial idea that we have chosen to follow through with, I would be the one who produced the management, format and story outline in the proposal, this would ensure that the narrative outline would be explained to the client in most detail. 

Animation Styles

At the beginning of term we were introduced to the basics of animation, including some different styles or techniques. For me, the most relevant aspect of this was learning about the style of animation, time lapse. At the time, I knew what time lapse was, but I was not an expert on the history of it, this task taught me about the development of it. This is due to the research Harry and I conducted into the history of time lapse and pixilation, we then created and presented a presentation to the rest of the class. I have significantly developed my knowledge of the technique.

Animation Experimentation

A few weeks ago we began experimenting with the stop motion capture software, we began with a talk from Brendan giving telling us the basics or the software, we then used a movement template and some coins to get us used to the level of  movement we would have to use when making our advert. For me, the most important element was learning what resulted from moving the coin too quickly. At first I realised that the coin would have to move very subtly to make it appear smooth in playback. This could be explained by saying that the software only captures images a few frames a time, with 24 frames per second, the coin would have to move 24 times in a second using '1s' to make it seem somewhat realistic. This also demonstrates the phrases 'shooting in 1s and 2s', this simply means, how many frames are captured before the next movement. Having practiced using the software, I now know how to make our final advert when we get to it, using this software. I have significantly developed my ability to make a stop motion animation, as I had not had any experience in animation before. 

Flash...ahhhh!

We started to learn how to use Flash, Brendan told us the basics and we went about our business, experimenting with the features and just generally getting comfortable with it. I had not used it before, so it was a new experience for me, after using key frames and the paint tools, Michael and I made a 2 part animated video, where a footballer on his screen would kick a ball off the 'stage' which would then appear on mine and my character would kick it back, I was very proud of it.