Filming for my Final Piece

For my final piece I have to have an introduction for each of my characters  - I have now made all the shapes for each of my characters backgrounds and have now filmed on my own camera each of my characters introductions. I first of all filmed 2 of my characters, (Helen and Amber),  separately to the other two characters, (Sophie and Rashi), and then did the group of them together when doing the second session of shots with Sophie and Rashi were being done. This was a mistake for me  - as this now meant that Helen and Amber are wearing different clothes to when they were shot for their individual introductions. This is not good as I need to show continuity and by having them wearing different clothing in my final piece it will be too obvious that the filming was not done at the same time - showing it to be unprofessional. To solve this I can either when uploading the film onto a mac - I can zoom in further into all of the faces of my characters so therefore you can no longer see what they are wearing anymore or will have to re-shoot. I think re-shooting is my best option - I can still try and zoom in on the footage I already have, but at least if that doesn't work, I still have a back up plan. This I will also have to do as soon as possible as I need to keep to my deadline.

Rough Cut Process

To make my rough cut I had to create all the shapes that were going to be in my rough cut that would then be organised into 3 different sections as they had to be associated with the 3 different characters that will be in my final product as film, as seen in my mock idea blog. Then I had to set out where the objects were going to be on a flat surface with a white paper background. I had to make sure that I moved each object a little bit at a time and each movement counted towards 2 photos. In total I took 146 photos to make my rough cut. 

When putting it together though, I realised that this doesn't seem to be enough to make an average length opening, my rough cut is about 11 seconds, whilst a children's TV drama is about 30 - 40 seconds long. I think this was because and when looking at my rough cut you can see, that I seemed to have concentrated a lot on sophie's part of the opening, it is at the length that each of the characters should have, but Amber and Helen's parts are a lot shorter, especially Helen's. This is my fault, as I made the movements a lot more drastic than slowly getting to where they need to be, therefore making it a lot shorter. I also think that if I had more objects to move in Helen's shot, I would have therefore more duration, so when doing my final cut, I need to make more shapes to be added where can be fitted in the shot.

Additionally, I am going to add another female character in my piece from a different cultural background, this will add more time to my piece and will branch out more to a wider target audience. I also did not add the titles into my rough cut, meaning the actual title and that it was created by me. This is because I am indecisive about whether to add the titles in from after effects on the mac, or to make my own titles to the theme of my opening. I think making my own would be better for my piece. I think also, I need to make sure the quality of camera I use is good enough, as when looking at my rough cut in full screen, the quality becomes blurry, although this happened in the editing process, before this the quality was fine, but camera change might avoid this problem.

Overall I am happy with my rough cut and I have learnt a lot from it in terms of knowing what improvements I need to make from it to make my final piece the best I can make it.

Rough Cut

Animatic

This is my animatic of my idea. I have story boarded my idea down into images that is a rough example of how I want my idea to turn out. As I am using stop framing for my idea, I realised story boarding this is extremely difficult to do, as to show each movement that would happen in the production of my real product, there would be a lot of unnecessary story boarding, so instead of this I tried to show the drastic movements so that people will have an idea of what is happening. Before presenting my animatic to the class, I showed my mock up video so that the people in my class would have a better understanding of my idea.  

My animatic has no camera angle changes, a midshot of the person in the circle will be there the whole time, including the time at the end when you see the whole group together. The objects will change depending on the person in the circle, the objects will be specific to their personalities. I have done my idea on a gang of girls, each one of them with different personalities, one who is girly, another who is creative and another who is into sport. I chose to do this as in my research I found that children expect there to be stereotypes, this way they can relate to the characters on screen. 

Feedback I got from when I presented my work was;

• With characters, maybe add another to make the opening longer, also make it so that there are multi cultural characters as this is a typical convention of a Children's TV drama that I haven't included yet. 
• Add diegetic sound, which I'd already planned on doing, but make sure that when I do add the diegetic sound that it doesn't interfere too much with the backing track I have used, they need to be in sync with each other.
• Good idea, having objects that will be associated to each characters personality will be good for targeting my specific audience. 
• When the person in the circle is moving, make sure that they will do movements that will also be specific to their personalities.

These comments I will have to take on and this should help me know how to make a good final product.   

In my AS project, the group and I didn't make a realistic storyboard, meaning our shots were much too difficult to do with the little experience we had when it came to filming. So I made sure when storyboarding my animatic and with the overviewing of my idea, that I knew, that what I wanted to do was what I was capable to do. After creating my mock up idea, I knew that the idea I had would be something I could do and do well, and so by doing that it made it easier to make my animatic and to have realistic ideas about what I wanted in my piece. This should make it more simple to create in the long run, as in my AS project, because we weren't too sure on the shots we used and our idea changed so much, this I believe was our downfall.  

List of Possible Objects to use in my Piece.

Doodling on page??
Sunshine?
Painting from a paint pallet, paint a smiley face.
Musical instruments, keyboard that when gets played a musical note will appear above it?
Football - being kicked by a cartoon foot? flies across screen into a goal on the other end - sound of cheers in background.
Drawing of scissors on paper, cuts out paper doll chain - gets stretched out onto screen - could be at end where I could have a gang photo of my characters and the name of the program on the paper chain dolls.
Stars - layering
Hearts - layering of them
Flowers for the more girly girl in the group
Glasses for the brainy girl
Books that are layered
Skateboard for a tomboy type character?

Idea Changes.

For my piece, I decided that I felt my target audience needed to be streteched out further to a slightly younger audience, but from looking at children's TV programmes, there are no TV dramas that are aimed at children younger than the age I have already researched (7-12 year olds). I thought about doing it at a younger audience as after doing my mock up idea, i thought that my idea would be more suited to a younger audience than the audience I had originally targeted. This was because of the bright colours and simple shapes I had used in my mock up, I didn't think that a 12 year old would be appealed to watching a program with what looks like quite a childish theme to it. So I decided to aim my piece at a younger target audience - youngest being 5 or 6 years old and the oldest being 9 or 10 years old. I will still use the same idea as in my mock up, but instead will theme the objects - I will base it on a girl gang of friends and so will use objects that can be associated with each of their different interests and roles in the group, for example one can be brainy and shy, another quite outgoing and into music and another into art. Letters can then move onto the screen when the characters are shown to show their names. This also doesn't limit me with where it needs to be set to film my characters, as the gang could be at school together or live near eachother etc. I so I can decide this. I believe this will make it more significant to my target audience. I will also give my piece a comedic effect, I'd like to make my programme a comedy drama for kids, as I beleive that from my research, this is the most appealing type of Children's TV drama.

Mock up idea

To test my initial idea 2 - my preferred idea - I made a short stop frame animation in the style I potentially will use in my final piece. To do this I had to cut up shapes specific to what would appeal to my target audience and then set up a still camera on a tripod. I then gradually moved each shape I had made and with each movement I would take 2 pictures. After this, I imported the stills onto the computer using imovie, and then exported the footage into Adobe After Effects where I green screened footage of a character I had filmed earlier. This effect didn't work well because some of the green showed through, so as an alternative I created a vector mask - which is a square shape that cuts a hole in the top layer of footage to reveal the footage of the actress underneath.