Flash Interactive

The aim of the Flash brief was to create an Interactive Narrative.

I wanted to keep the narrative personal to me (hobbies, likes, dislikes etc). I came up with a few ideas, although when investaged and roughly drawn on paper it was clear that i would not be able to complete them fully. This ment i would have to keep it simple. To do this i created a simple quiz.

The quiz is on the teams of the NFL; during the quiz you will have to guess which team the helmet belongs to. If correct you carry on, if wrong you will be told, and made to start again.

I found working on flash very difficult, and at times very frustrating. I often found myself fiddling about to complete certain actions not 100% if what i was doing was right. The template that was provided was incredibly helpfull. I was able to change the script and allow the frames to appear in the order that i prefered.

One Shot Film Evaluation

The one shot movie was originally planned as a group project. As a group we filmed, and then indivually, we edited and created our own films, using our own story ideas.

At first the group found it hard to come up with ideas, although after watching the different examples given on the seminar sheets, they were soon flowing.
There were many different ideas, such as anti suicide, street crime awareness, a story about a heartbroken man. Although all the ideas where feasible, there were obviously ideas which would have been more difficult to film. I would like to investigate these ideas further in the future, if time permits.

I felt that the anti suicide film, could be a complicated one but for a more indivual feeling i felt that with the right editing a simple film could possibly be more effective. I.e. with less action; the viewer is able to have more time to think about what they are seeing, rather than being told.
I would have liked to have spent more time researching and finding more styles of this type of video. But searches online gave very limited results. This fact also helped to motivate me into creating a anti suicide film – to spread a greater awareness.

Overall i believe that filming went well, and although i feel that the final outcome of the video could be improved upon the message and emotion is still obvious in the film.

The music i feel works, although it could be a little too obvious as to the song meaning. However i like the fact the film is focused at students and the artist is known amongst people of an average student age. This i believe would help keep their attention throughout the video.
I would have liked to create an original soundtrack, but found it hard to build something that fitted as well as the lil wayne track i feel like dying. If my time management was improved on in the future this is an issue which i would like to make sure i don’t come up against again. With more time spread equally between the stages i could have maybe created a more suitable soundtrack.

It would have been interesting to add lens’s onto the camera – such as wide angle lens for different effects. Also we did not use lighting, due to the fact we were trying to create a dark somber atmosphere, but i believe that if used they would have been an aid, even if only used as a background light.

I enjoyed filming and editing the film using the adobe packages available, and i feel that this is something that i would happily spent more time working on to achieve a higher standard of result. I also feel that if we as a group filmed more scenes in different places there would have been a greater chance of creating a film with more emotion and feeling.

In conclusion, i am happy with the overall outcome of my video (taking all aspects into consideration – film, feeling, music etc), but i believe that a better result could be achieved.

Oneshot Influence

This is one of the videos that i used when looking for research for my oneshot film. This film although not directly linked raises some very good issues in a way that makes the viewer sit up and take notice. This is what i hope to have achieved in my film.

Smack My Bitch Up Video

The Prodigy - Smack my bitch up.

This is the video that was the main influence for the stopmotion animation. I really think the way it is filmed is very unique and adds a good perspective to the video.

When comparing the two, i feel that although my animation follows the same line it does not 'rip off' the video in anyway.

One Shot Movie

This is the final version of my anti suicide oneshot film. I'm relatively happy with the outcome, although i think with a little more thought and time invested, the final outcome could have been improved.

I added a fact about student suicide to, almost use shock like tatics to make the viewer sit up and take notice.

One Shot Movie

For the oneshot film my group had a few different ideas about a direction we could follow. I personally chose to create a movie similiar to that of anti bullying/anti smoking adverts but for anti suicide. This is something that when researching video content i could not find many examples of. If possibile i could try an advert like feeling, i think this would have to be considered when filming (ie angles etc..).

The idea behind my video is to show a dark, empty room (bare walls, shelves etc...). Then the 'actor' walks in looking very upset, sad. I thought that the throwing of the items of clothing helps to add to the unhappy feeling portrayed in the video (at least i tried to achieve!).

This is the first version of the footage, unedited....more will follow.

Stopmotion Final Animation

My final version of the stop motion animation.

For this version a original soundtrack was created, and also different filters where added.

Stopmotion Animation

"Stop motion (or frame-by-frame) animation is a general term for an animation technique which makes a physically manipulated object appear to move. The object is moved by very small amounts between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_motion

With our pixilation we were influenced quite heaverly by the Prodigy's Smack My Bitch up video. We thought that by taking the images from a first person perspective may add something 'different' to the final animation.

Due to the length requirments of our animation we decieded to mainly focus on events happening at the beggining of the video(smack my bitch up).

Using photoshop i was able to change the image size (720x576) and apply filters to the images using the autobatch feature. I then imported the images and music track into Adobe Premier. From here is where the animation was brought together.