Animation

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ta7VHKGuoJY&feature=featured

Watch that video for a fantastic piece of animation by Aardman.

Final Version: Girls

Finaly! After 3 painful weeks of renaming, filtering, re-filtering, rerenaming and nameing and refiltering and putting together and taking apart and adapting and moving and cutting and squashing, I can now unveil the final version for my pixilation animation project!!

This dance mix of "Girls" by the Sugababes is an excellent track to experiement with pixilation effects. I took an original remix and cut it down to about 6 minutes and then decided to add into it all the filtered photos as well as utilising the originals. The outcome is a pretty sweet dance video that's fun to watch and keeps the pace up.

There's no real meaning behind the video other than a journey, and it's deffinatly been an eventful one through the creating of this video! So sit back and enjoy, while i go nurse my throbing headache!

I know what!

As usual, the best ideas smack me in the face just as it's too late!!

Just listening to Sam Sparro's album, there's a track called Recycle It! and it's given me such vision to do the pixilation project on recycling. I could've made a really funky and cool video about recycling things which would address today's concerns in society about recycling and making an effort towards C02. Damn!

I may do this as part of my next project instead, or film it anyway as a video to add to my collection.

Pixilation Project: Another Version

I was never fully happy with my first attempt at my pixilation project and tried to find a way of improving it. I decided to film more of the train, and include our group work. I've now made a second version, using the song "They" by Jem. I feel this version has more of a spiritual feel to it. It's more about finding out who you are, why we do things and where we want to head in the future.

I also applied a "warm" colouring to the original outside photographs which is clearly evident in comparison to the Bright Idea video. I felt that its given the new video a more colourful feel, and makes the video seem more optimistic and fun, rather than gloomy and depressing, which didn't really match the Bright Idea song.

In total, the new version took me over 12 hours to produce using over 4,000 photos.
Hopefully, I'll try and make another video, using a more prominant filter on the photographs.

Pixilation Project Progression

Due to difficulties in my private life, ive not been able to update my blog as much as I wanted. But that doesn't mean I've stopped thinging about my project.

Having put together the first draft of my video, no sound, it seems really hard to watch as the camera's moving all over the place and it gives you a headache fairly quickly. I found myself really stuck as to what to do, then my mum suggested that I filmed a model train set. Showing it started at the shed and working through the track and arriving at a station.

I decided to integrate the two ideas and add the Orson song, Bright Idea. The video now represents the hectic student life, the hustle and bustle of a new city with the direction of trying to find your way back home and to some familiarity. I chose Bright Idea as it's a perfect song to kick start my portfolio at Uni as you can relate it to all the Bright Idea's Multimedia students will have and their creativity that'll be expressed.

In other words, it's very relevent to now and looking forward to the future to come.

Pixilation Project Thought

My first thoughts for the video were to go from my room in halls and take photos of the entire journey back home to my room in Derby.

I've finished the shooting for it and I'm just putting together the "prototype" now. After a motivating lecture today, I'm wondering whether or not to scrap that idea and focus on another idea of mine involving stationary and create more of an advert for NTU or even focus on creating words with socks and promote an advert for Primark or something.

Lots to think about, maybe i'll just do all those ideas and see which looks best!

Still wondering what sound to use though, a song isn't really creative enough, however i'm a bit limited as to what I can create audiowise as I don't have much background knowledge with it.

Time to whip out Dance Ejay!

Pixilation Project

A projet for us to work on has come at a good time. I was beginning to feel a bit lost, a bit lathargic with Multimedia. We hadn't really started anything and I looked ahead at the assignment and thought "what the hell is it asking me to do?!". I even showed my mum, who works at Derby Uni and she was unsure. Since my lecture today, I was pleased to hear we'd be given more guidance in future lectures, which was very welcome news!

Putting my anxieties aside, the pixilation project sounds like fun! We began shooting it today. Me and two other guys, Tom and Nick went outside and filmed various shots on the grass, no real aim or story to it, which at first made me a bit apprehensive, but using this as a starting base, I will take it, utilise it, and progress with an idea of my own, with a bit of an idea from Nick. Using my own camera, ill take my journey from my halls, all the way home to Derby, sort of documenting the journey, focusing on things I see and notice as I walk through the two cities. Hopefully this will be a good introduction into animation and multimedia as I will be introducing myself through the journey from Uni to Home and using a modern song (currently undecided) which I like, to express myself.

We'll see how it goes, at least this idea has more of a focus and structure to it, and of course, ill be using bits of the already filmed stuff along the way!

Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy

Family Guy creator, Seth MacFarlane, has crashed into the advertising world with his brand new short clip comedy sketches.

Written and produced in the same style as the hit TV show, Family Guy, MacFarlane has managed to tackle the advertising world head on and has made adverts seem fun and exciting through the use of pure humour.

Not all of MacFarlane's videos will appeal to everyone, but if you "get" Family Guy, you'll no doubt love and enjoy his short comedic sketches, including characters such as Mr and Mrs Sticknipples and an Angry Scottsman.

I think the appeal of the videos is that the comedy is so "normal". In many of the sketches, you can imagine having the same conversation, but it's just because MacFarlane takes these situations a step further that they really become entertainment, and if these situations are so normal, surely we're just laughing at ourselves?

http://www.sethcomedy.com/

Whiteboards

Using a white board, we had to produce a stop-motion video of about 120 frames for 10 seconds of footage. The principle was to get a box from the left hand side of a house, to the other side, by drawing each frame as it happened.

I found this fun and exciting to see our creation come together and to work with other people to share their thoughts on how to move the box. A very time consuming process which is physically draining, but the end result will look great!

The box opens up, and lets out a few balloons, the house's roof cracks open and a stick man climbs out of it and a tree grows at the side where a bird takes rest and smokes a cigarette and lays an egg, which then hatches into another box.

I've experimented with stop-motion video before using, quite simply, my bedroom carpet and a few trucks and blobs of blu-tak to create the scene of an airport. Very simple stuff, but was invaluable to see how stop-motion pictures work.