The visual style that my group members and I were trying to achieve was a fun, party, teenager feel ident that would appeal to young people. We decided to produce an ident for MTV, which we felt was suitable for the target audience we were wanting to aim for. We originally had the idea of a large group of people, each dancing in their own frames, which we would then slot together to make it look like a 'party'.
Overall, the animation in itself i think was succesful. The animation flows smoothly, almost looking like it was a video, which is what we were trying to achieve. As we were planning, we thought of the idea of drawing our own snowflakes falling down. We originally had the idea of drawing them on a whiteboard, then erasing them and replacing them with new ones, to then look like the snowflakes were falling. We gave it a go, but soon found out it was taking too long, and that it didn't look as good as we initially wanted it to. So, instead we cut out circles in a blue pen, then placed them on a peice of paper, and took each photo of them slowely going down, to form an MTV sign in snow. I think this turned out realy well, although it took a couple hours to photograph, I think it looks efficient. Out of the two techniques we used which were drawing our own animation and using people, photographing people was the easier and quickest option, and turned out really good.
I had many different strengths and weaknesses throughout this project, some of which my group and I shared. Firstly, all of my group members, including myself already had the knowledge of previous idents, as we all watched television almost everyday. I feel like I had that extra knowledge as I am a regular MTV viewer, and had all the idents I had seen in my head. I found that this knowledge really helped us throughout the process, and boosted our thoughts and ideas. My weakness of the group was our time management and working together. My group and I didn't communicate as much as we should have, causing us to fall behind and rush our work. This isn't at all what I was wanting to happen, but as other things got in the way, I felt we let this project slide. But I am happy with how it all turned out, we all worked together in the end to produce a great channel ident.
When planning what our ident was going to be about and what we wanting to include, my group members and I were all fond of the idea of MTV and an ident. From the beginning we knew roughly what we wanted to do and what we wanted to show. We then began to plan the characters, set, along with the soundtrack. Throughout the process of planning, we changed a lot of our initial ideas, due to the fact of poor time management. We were told that a green screen was an option for using, we really liked the idea of using a green screen, we then planned to use it, but then last minute changed our minds as we thought it would be too fidly. Looking back, if we had more time I think we would have used the green screen.
We tried to make our animation look professional, by doing this we did a lot of research on stop motion animation genres and formats. We discovered idents and advertisements that we took inspiration from. One of which was the Nokia advertisement of the largest stop motion animation in the world. We loved this, and couldn't believe the amount of time it must have taken. Obviously we couldn't produce anything close to this, but we loved the fact that there was so much going on and had a storyline to it. We also researched previous MTV idents which we really loved, there were so many different kinds, all with great music and all using animation.
In comparison to previous stop motion videos I have created, I do think this isn't one of our best. In some elements of the video I do think turned out really well, and is completed to a professional standard for example the part where the stereo "appears" in the models hands. This is my favourite part, and would compare it to previous stop motions that I have seen on television, but overall, I do think our final video could be improved a lot to achieve the professionalism that the project warrented. Before we planned our channel ident task, my group and I created a short stop motion, experimenting with different ideas and shots, by doing this it helped as it gave us a practice, and helped us to get the hang of the whole processing. Although the animators I studied mostly created stop motion using clays, I think our style of stop motion is most similar to the style of Aardman. Similarly, the flow of the animation was very close to what we aimed to achieve. What we wanted was for our video to look as close to a video as possible, and I believe this is what Aardman wanted aswell.
Overall, I think our ident turned out really well, although it does need a lot of improvements. I feel we could've worked much better as a group and communicated better. Next time I will be more better at organising the schedule, for example filming dates and editing dates. By doing this project I have learnt a lot about stop motion, and I have added to my knowledge, and I feel like I could create many more short films using stop motion animation in the future.
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