Ollie's Evaluation

From the start of the music video project i have felt that doing an animation was the best way to go in order to maximize our marks, i also felt that an animation would be the best way to display the talents of our group with each individual contributing their own style and ideas to the overall finished product.

From the start we had known that an animation would be a challenge but it wasn't until we had started to film that we realized what we were undertaking. Our song of choice is Sweet Tangerine by a band called The Hush Sound and this song is roughly 3 minutes long, each picture taken for our animation in final cut is one tenth of a second or 0.1 of a second, this means that we would have to take around 1800 individual stills pictures in order to complete our finished product. The amount of stills we needed to take coupled with the fact that after each still we would need to make minute movements to the character involved built in to a huge workload. So far i feel that we have coped well with this workload and the time constraints put upon us however i feel that with better planning and more efficient camera and prop work that we would have been better organized and at a more complete stage than we are at now.

The filming i feel has gone well with the exception of a few minor problems such as hands being caught in the stills shots and the constant lighting changes. We have been working on a few pieces of discarded footage in final cut to see if we could rectify these problems and have found that the lighting can be adjusted easily and to a good standard using different filter and editing options.

We found the first lesson of filming difficult as even though we had a storyboard dictating where all the props should go we were unfamiliar with using i stop motion. We have used it previoulsy in our AS course at Long road but we had only be experimenting and had not yet fully utilized it to its full potential. However we found that after a short amount of playing around with i stop motion and the props we had made that we soon became better at using it. The first lessons filming went slowly however after this filming became faster and we started to make real headway in to our project.

One of the biggest problems we have faced through out the project is getting the continuity right with the footage matching the beat of the music and the song lyrics. We found that with only minor editing adjustments and constant referral to our timings sheet that the footage did in fact fit with the music in both beat and lyrics, an example of this is 'crept through the curtains' at which point the main male character flies though the curtains (this occurs during the main body of the filming in his dream sequence), another example is 'slowly explore the room where you sleep' at which point the female character enters and begins to explore the lead male characters room and kicks a pair of discarded shorts out of her way and out of shot.

We have only recently finished all of the filming necessary to complete our project and have begun to edit this film in to the correct order and match it with the appropriate timings, overall looking at what is very close to the finished piece and comparing this to other groups both past and present who have done animation i feel that we have achieved a very good piece of work.

The tasks for us still to do are editing the shades on final cut and trimming the shots not in length (time) but in the sizes of the shots in the frame as in some of the shots there have been incidents where the table had been showing around the edges of the paper we have been filming on.