Film Buff is a stylish and entertaining trivia game which is appealing to the whole family. It's original and tests the players knowledge on information about films, featuring cards with quotes & film screencaps.
The board meets the success criteria of the brief as it is under A3 paper size. Additionally, the board is a circle, which is a unique shape as opposed to the generic rectangular board, making the board game stand out compared to others on the market. It also contains playing pieces and a stylish spinner to help play the game, which all fit in with the aesthetics of the product. Although I have only looked at the prototype, it seems safe and that there is nothing hazardous about the game.
The logo and and style follow a dark colour scheme, with accents of bright colour which make the game come across as formal, but fun at the same time. The box has a creative touch of 35mm film around the edge, portraying immediately from first glance what the game is about and fitting in with the design scheme.
One piece of constructive criticism I would give is that the colour on the box is dark, as well as the text, making it slightly hard to read. This could be solved by changing the colour of the text to white or something similar in order to make it stand out and be readable.
In Interactive we had to learn about symbols and use them in our own Animate document to make an image of penguins. I drew a penguin with the brush and filled it in with the paint bucket, then used the selection tool to draw a box around the penguin to select it. Once selected, I right clicked the penguin and converted it into a symbol. Then, I was able to drag the penguin in from the library onto the stage, so I ended up with 4 penguins. Lastly I drew a background and resized the penguins to give the image perspective.
Today in Interactive Steve gave us the task of drawing a range of expressions. To have some reference, we had to take pictures of us showing these different emotions using Photo Booth, then draw a simple representation of these emotions. I used photoshop to draw with and these are my illustrations:
Create an impressive board game - In our game "FlipDeck" we featured a Tech Deck in the game as a playing piece which hadn't been done before. This is a unique selling point of the game which doubles up as a toy. Additionally we made sure that it didn't follow the usual format of a board game where a piece is moved around a board, but instead made the board a playing field. This gives a unique and fresh perspective of board games in general, and their common format.
The aim of the game is to roll a dice which gives you a trick to perform on the board, which you and all players must perform. If they fail to do it, then they get a letter, which goes on until they spell out S-K-A-T-E. This is another unique selling point of the game, as there is no limit to how many people can play. With the playing piece being a Tech Deck, it can be fixed and replaced, not to mention the opportunities for limited edition or special pieces.
We chose to aim it at a younger market, not only because it would be easier to design, but because that's who the game is most appealing to.
This is a frame by frame animation I made using Adobe Animate.
It took about 30 minutes to make which was fairly tedious, however it was satisfying to see the frames all come together into a moving gif. To speed things up a bit, I animated half of the frames for the circle shape of the head, the copied and pasted them and reversed them in the timeline to make the animation loop. I also added colour to make the gif look more interesting.
To make the frame by frame animation easier I used the full stop and comma keys to go ahead/back frames easily, and converted all of the frames in the timeline to blank keyframes. I also turned on onion skin so I could see what was drawn in the previous frame and make sure everything was in place.
The timeline in Adobe Animate is similar to any other timeline such as one in Premiere or After Effects, as it works in frames. However it can contain multiple layers of drawings and animations. This means that each layer can be dedicated to a different thing, such as one for a character, one for a background, one for an object and so on. Additionally, as well as working in frames it can contain tweens for things to move slowly without frame by frame animation. Similar to this, there are keyframes in each frame which represent what is going to happen in comparison to the previous frame. There are also different tools in the layer pane which can make a layer visible/invisible, show a layer as an outline, and lock/unlock layers. The timeline can contain drawings, symbols and audio.
In Interactive with Steve we watched this animation made in flash about Pyramid Schemes.
The video showed how to spot them and had some drawings in to help demonstrate what is being narrated. The animation looked professional and helped towards putting across a message.
A pyramid scheme is a way of making money that involves promising people payment for enrolling other people into the scheme or teaching them how to take part. The many people at the bottom of the pyramid make hardly any money whereas the few people at the top make vast amounts of money. Pyramid schemes are a form of fraud and are therefore illegal in many companies (including the UK), however by renaming them and slightly changing aspects of the scheme, many companies get away with it. One big giveaway is that it's too good to be true and one example is reselling aloe vera products. This type of scheme has been in existence for at least a century.
In film, the Three Act Structure is used in screenwriting to split a narrative into 3 parts - The Setup, Confrontation and Resolution.
The 2016 film 'Swiss Army Man' follows this structure to portray the story in an effective way. I have written a brief summary of each act in the film.
Act 1
Introduced to Hank who is stuck on a desert island alone, about to end his life. He sees a body washed up on shore and starts speaking to him because he's gone slightly mad from being marooned for so long. He names the body 'Manny' and is able to use it like a jetski to ride across the ocean. Later that night the corpse is able to speak to him as well as do other useful things like provide him with water. Manny has no recollection of his past life and has a child like mind.
Act 2
Hank tells Manny about his past life and teaches him about aspects of life as they try and make their way back to civilisation. Hank uses litter and plants to demonstrate these aspects of life such as movies, partying and eating out. During this, Hank leads Manny to believe that Manny is in love with a woman named Sarah, who rides the bus alone every day. Manny falls in love with Sarah, and it is this love that motivates him to try and find civilization with Hank. In reality, Hank is very much in love with Sarah, having seen her riding the bus every day but never talking to her due to his own shyness. He has a photo of her that he took secretly while on the bus set as the wallpaper on his phone and follows her on social media. As he looks through photos, it is revealed that Sarah is happily married and has a child. Manny and Hank have a falling out after Hank reveals that Manny never knew Sarah during his life.
Act 3
Hank and Manny make it back to civilisation finally and arrive in Sarah's back garden, however Manny turns back into a corpse which Hank doesn't believe and tries to prove to everyone how he's a real person. Finally, by the ocean with a news team, Hank, Hank's Father, and Sarah's Family, Manny begins violently farting until he floats back into the ocean and skims quickly away, propelled by his own flatulence. Manny and Hank share one last smile.
In filmmaking, the 180° rule is a guideline that means the action should be all shot from one side. The diagram below helps explain this:
As shown by the diagram, the actors are connected by a line (the line of action). The rule means that all cameras must stay on one side of this line (green cameras are in the right place, whereas the red one is wrongly placed). If a shot from a green camera cut to a shot from the red camera, the rule would be broken and the scene would look unnatrual because the characters would swap places on screen.
We made a short video breaking the rule to learn about it and to demonstrate what it looks like when it's broken:
In Steve's lesson this week, we learnt about a program called 'Adobe Animate' (previously Adobe Flash). He gave us a brief idea of how the program works. It has a timeline which is made up of frames which can be drawn on. I learnt that a lot of big companies start out in this program or programs similar to it, which helped me realise that it can be very complex, despite being easy to use for simple frame by frame animation. Programs such as 'The Amazing World of Gumball' are animated using Adobe Animate.
After we had learnt a little bit about the program, we were allowed to have a mess about on the program ourselves. I had used this program before to make a short animation for my entertainment, so I knew some things about it already. As we were short for time, I used motion tweens to make different background layers move to create perspective, instead of drawing them repeatedly for each frame. I also drew a character that looked uncannily like a dorito which I converted to a symbol so I could move it with a motion tween too. I animated it for 3 frames and looped it so that it gave the effect of him wobbling around. This is the .gif I made:
For this task we were asked to make a short case study infographic on a product, company or person that has been rebranded. We had the choice to either use Photoshop or an online tool called Piktochart to make it, and had to research about the rebrand using the internet. I chose Microsoft as they rebranded quite recently and it was a very different style to what they had before. Here is the infographic I made:
Adverts are an effective way of getting a message to a wide audience. In most cases, they're paid for by an organization to market a product of service. The time and platform they're shown on is decided very carefully in order to reach the intended audience. This particular television advert aims to sell a product: Heinz Tomato Ketchup.
This advert makes use of the slogan "Bring food to life" and features some very clever visual effects which gives the illusion of food being invisible and suddenly appearing when it's brought into contact with ketchup. These unique visual traits of the advert help to make it memorable and bring more impact to the slogan. As the brand is already incredibly popular and well known, viewers will be familiar with the bottle and sauce, which is shown frequently in the advertisement. This is done in order to show that it's a well known and reliable brand. I think that this advert is aimed at familes and would be shown in the daytime and evening, where familes will be watching tv together or when parents will be watching.
I thought that this was a very creative animation. I liked the use of string to make characters because of how unique it was and how it was made to fit in with the story. The animation was effective however in my opinion the faces of the characters looked a little childish and creepy, but this didn't affect the film much.
One thing which I thought was really clever was the story and use of numbers to represent the status of a character. It's clever because it can be related to our lives and be seen as an extended metaphor. I also liked how by putting two O's together, the "zero's" make a "∞", the highest number. This gave the dark story a happy and feel good ending. Overall I think that the story was moving and effective in putting across the message not to judge people by how they look/come across.
The technique of using string to animate is too fiddly for me to try out myself, however it does look good so I might try something similar if I end up doing stop motion animation again at some point. My favourite thing about this video was the use of numbers to represent status, and my least favourite thing was the strange faces of the characters.
How Will You Die?
This was very different from the first film we were shown, the biggest difference being that it was made digitally using computer animation. I thought that it conveyed the public health message effectively and was fairly comedic in doing so. The animation was colourful which is eye catching and used a cartoon style character to represent a human. The film used a scratchy grunge texture for the background which I thought looked a bit out of place and scruffy, but apart from this I thought it looked good. It used repetition and comparisons for comedic effect and to further emphasise the message of the film that people are dying because of things which are seen as luxuries in richer parts of the world. One last thing which made me appreciate the film more was that it was quick and to the point, which made it more pleasurable to watch.
If I were commissioned to do this project, I would take a similar approach and use cartoon characters that aren't very human like to represent humans, so that the film isn't too realistic and saddening. One thing I'd do differently however would be to give it a sleeker more professional look, as I thought the film we were shown looked quite scruffy and homemade.
When making a film, there's a massive amount of different roles that need to be taken on by a crew. Below is a diagram which represents this, showing how each role is working for a higher role leading up to the executive producer.
The entire process of the filmmaking is made easier because of this hierarchical format, which splits the operations and tasks into small groups so each professional can do their job efficiently and smoothly. Depending on the popularity and genre of film, the crew can range in size from hundreds to thousands of individuals, each with different responsibilities and roles to adhere to. The roles are not only useful on set however. Different roles will have tasks to do at different stages of production (pre-production, production, post-production and distribution). It all starts with an executive producer.
In the past 2 weeks with Steve we've been focusing on animation. When I first found this out I was pleased because I find stopmotion fun and quite nostalgic as I used to watch a lot of Wallace and Gromit, Morph and Shaun the Sheep. As well as this, I used to do some stopmotion myself with lego, but when we came to do the tasks I was a little rusty.
In lessons we watched some animated shorts which I enjoyed a lot as they were all quite different from each other and looked visually engaging to me. The variety in each animation showed us how stopmotion is a creative artform and doesn't have many boundaries. For example we watched Svankmejers "Darkness, Light, Darkness" which used plasticine and meat/body parts to animate with - an interesting technique I'd never seen anything like before. In contrast to this, we watched "The Fat Cat" which used wax as an animating medium.
Overall, the past two weeks have been intreguing and have helped us explore into the world of stopmotion in depth. I went on to watch more of Svankmejer's shorts and other less popular Aardman shorts after these lessons. We also had a go at doing stopmotion ourselves which proved time consuming, but the end result is appealing to watch as you can see the characters you've created move by themselves in an environment you've created. Below is a very short stopmotion me and Max made on the theme of winter.
In our audio production brief, we're asked to pick one task to further develop in audio lessons out of these three:
A single camera comedy drama for Instagram, edited in Premiere
A pre-recorded 90 second news report for radio, including a musical ident
A 120 second factual film informing an identified audience about a cause or campaign
After reading these, I decided to do the second task. To research the sound aspects of this task I first looked for some examples similar to it. I found this one minute news broadcast which was helpful in me understanding the format of a news report.
The first 3 seconds open the broadcast with a musical ident, which sets the tone of the show. Then the reporter greets the listener (or watcher in this case) and makes the audience aware of the show/what they're listening to. Then the reporter reads the headlines and says a little about them, each headline and description lasting around 10 seconds. With this report, the speech is accompanied by visuals and audio to help emphasise the stories and give context however this format would still work without visuals for a short radio broadcast so I'll keep these things in mind when I go on to record and produce my own short news report.
I also found some textual information to help with my research, these two websites:
The first website gave some tips as to what to do and not do when making your own radio broadcast. Some helpful points for me to consider were to:
Be Concise
This is so that the listener doesn't lose interest, which should be relatively easy as I only have to make a 90 second report. Because of this I'm going to aim to report on 4 or 5 stories.
Record your voice in interesting places or make use of sound effects
Background noise can make a radio broadcast more interesting, however I think that recording in an interesting place could cause problems such as unexpected sound, microphone issues or inaudible speech. To make sure my broadcast isn't silent at points I will have audio in the background which relates to the story being reported or is sampled from the story if possible.
Have an effective closure
By closing off the broadcast well, the listener leaves with something to think about, reminding them of the podcast. I'll try to do this for my report.
The second website was more detailed and it said that it's important to thoroughly plan the broadcast before recording (or as the article puts it "Preparation is 90% of the game"). It also said to speak in an entertaining manner, which will make the audience more likely to appreciate the broadcast and listen to the whole thing. This also means trying to avoid saying 'um' 'uh-huh' and similar words.
Lastly, I found this video which contained examples of a range of idents. It will be helpful when I come to make my own as the video shows a simple version of an ident and how it develops, as well as talks about adaptations of idents and how they can connote certain moods and tones.
Research Statement
To research for this task, me and my team will conduct field research by going to shops and finding board games, taking photos of them, making notes, and investigating them to see what works well and what doesn't. We will also do product research online by looking at popular board games and playing online games to see how they translate to board games. We will also do secondary research by reading articles online.
In lesson, my group went to a toy shop and an art shop in search for materials for the board and blank dice in order to make the prototype. Online we found out that boards are made from thin chipboard, so we looked for this in the art shop. The closest we could find were these lino sheets which were too flimsy for a game board, so we decided we would get the chipboard or something similar online.
We searched for blank dice in a toy shop but only found these dice with symbols on which could work, but were too expensive. Therefore we decided to source these online too and write on them.
While we were in the toy shop we also investigated the price of board games to get an idea of what ours would retail at. We decided that we should price our game at around £5-10, considering games of this size (A3 board) were fairly small and priced similarly, and our game doesn't have many expensive to make components.
In Europe, stopmotion started as a means of storytelling and was seen as magic because it gave the illusion of objects moving around by themselves. The first use of stop motion was done by Albert E. Smith and J. Stuart Blackton in 1898, who made "The Humpty Dumpty Circus". The US didn't pick up on it properly until 35 years later however. As it gained popularity it was used for entertainment such as cartoons, as well as for visual effects in films and television. By the 90's, CGI got more popular so stopmotion wasn't really used anymore for professional purposes and got less popular.
Because it stopped being used much in film, it was more impressive when used as it takes a lot of time to do and looks handmade and real as opposed to computer imagery. It is a very versatile means of filmmaking which can be done with a range of different materials or techniques. One which stood out for me which I'd maybe like to pursue is stopmotion done with pictures as a sort of collage, like this video:
I like it because it looks visually appealing and bright. It also has a retro, abstract quality which I think looks unique and cool.
This scene opens with an extreme long shot to establish the setting as well as to visualise the fact that the characters are travelling in a car. It shows the audience that this is a rural area in the countryside, with nobody around as the car is isolated.
We're led onto this second long shot which shows where the car is actually travelling to, as it shows two subjects: the car (which is in focus) and an old house/farm (in the background but subject is moving towards it).
Next, a medium shot is used which continues on from the previous shot to reveal who is in the car. The shot reveals the two main characters in the foreground, another old police officer in the background, and a dog, which are all introduced.
It quickly cuts to a new location, showing an old man. A close up is used to show the character in detail while he speaks.
This medium shot shows the main characters listening to the old man, from his point of view. They are arranged symmetrically to look uniform and appealing.
Simon Pegg turns around to discuss what the man has said with the two other officers, turning his back to him. The man in still visible in the background however, to remind the audience that he is still there, and for comedic effect as he's being talked about. The shot still remains a medium shot, but it's a bit tighter.
It then cuts to a long shot as Simon Pegg replies to the old man, which reveals the setting in more detail, with the old looking chair, barricaded gate and wall separating the group from the old man.
We then cut back to this medium shot as Simon Pegg continues to reply to the old man.
Next, this medium shot is used to show the isolated old man's response, and to connote the fact that he is alone. This shot also reveals more of the location.
It then alternates between these two shots as they have a conversation, until, the old man says something shocking, which is responded by a fast dolly zoom towards Simon Peggs's face in shock, building suspense and dramatic tension before changing to the next scene.
Dolly Zoom towards Simon Pegg
The shot starts in complete darkness, then a door is opened revealing a shed, as light casts a silhouette on the interior of the shed through the door. This gives off a mysterious vibe and leads the audience the question whats inside, as it's hidden by darkness. The shot is a long shot to establish the location.
It then changes to this close up showing the old fashioned light switch suggesting more about the area, with the old mans hands turning them on, to reveal whats inside the shed. This is a suspenseful shot.
Next, lots of quick shots are cut with each other showing the lights turning on and a range of close ups of a variety of guns, to show the impressive collection. This is done to add intensity to the scene and to impress and shock the audience as it is unexpected. The shots are each under a second long and are very fast.
Next, this medium shot zooms slowly in towards Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, showing their astonished reactions to the room. By zooming in, their facial expressions are shown in more detail.
When making a film, there are a lot of roles and things that need to be considered before, during and after the film is shot (pre production, production and post production). A film as big as The Hobbit takes a lot of planning and people to make it work (not to mention money). During pre production everything needs to be worked out and tested so that it's ready for filming, such as equipment, storyboarding, casting, hiring a crew and actors and much more. After this is the actual production, where shooting takes place and depending on the film, hundreds of people are needed, which all need to eat, sleep, drink and wash, not to mention getting them all to specific locations on time. This costs a lot of money, so financial backup is usually arranged in pre production to fund the whole process. Planning in pre production is crucial, as it needs to be done thoroughly to execute the production efficiently and correctly. Lastly comes post production, where the whole film is edited and a trailer is usually cut here, as well as branding and advertising, which helps get the film out there and hyped in time for its screening.
This is the video we watched that showed a few days during the making of the Hobbit, which really gives a perspective on how important each intricate detail of making a film is, and shows how large scale the whole operation is too:
This is a table I made which shows all of the different roles/items that need to be considered at each stage of making a film:
Ident
This short video is a dark animation that follows the routine of one individual. I think it's trying to show how people put on a 'mask' in everyday life to change themselves or act in a way which is expected. It also shows other people and how they can change this 'mask'. Overall I liked the style of the animation and it was fun to watch, however it's hard to understand what it's really about as it's abstract and there's no dialogue. Darkness, Light, Darkness
This short video showed a human body slowly being made out of plasticine, by its hands. The animator used real meat in the animation which was unique and strange to look at, and overall the video was abstract but had some humour and was creative. For the whole video the setting stays the same, a small room which after a quick google search shows that it could be representing a cramped style of living or something similar. I preferred Ident to this video. My Own Stopmotion
Lastly, we worked in groups of two to have a go at making our own simple stopmotion using iMotion:
