E4 Evaluation

E4 Sting Evaluation

For our assignment we worked in groups to produce a 10 second e4 sting. Me Vicky and Connie worked in a group of three, we each made individual storyboards with our own ideas of what we could do. We showed each other our ideas and chose the overall best idea; however we changed it so we all inputted ideas. The task was set just before Christmas time so we chose to do a seasonal sting and based it around Christmas and the new years. We also used the information from our questionnaires to give us a rough idea of what our target audience would want to see in a sting. Our original idea was to have a large party popper that we had made and have someone coming out of it holding an e4 logo. We looked at the resources we had and decided that to make a big party popper would be hard in the time we had, so we kept the idea similar and chose to change it to an e4 logo on a stick coming out of the party popper.

Connie changed groups; me and Vicky worked in a pair; I feel that we worked well together and we chose to share the responsibilities, we are able to sit down and just get on with our work because we were both clear about what we had to do. We communicated well together and listened to each other’s ideas on how to make the sting better. This made the production of the sting quicker because we both had the same idea in mind. When we were taking the pictures we both took the pictures and moved the props, this was fair because we both got a chance to do all of the job roles. The only separate job roles was editing the sting, I put the pictures together and added any effects to the pictures whereas Vicky was editing the music so it fit the sting and also adding in any effects to the sound.  However when adding the pictures into flash the programme kept on freezing and the sting was looking like it was impossible to make, however we found out that if we reduced the image size then the files wouldn’t be too big and flash would work, after that flash worked fine.

When we showed the animation to the class we got positive feedback saying it was good and clear that it was about e4 and based around the party season, we also got some feedback about how we could improve our sound, others in the class said that the quality of the sound could be better and if we made the sound louder and maybe a bit slower the sting would be better. If we had more time to do the project I would of taken more time and effort in taking the pictures, because we only had a short space of time we didn’t take as many as we would of liked to. Taking more pictures would have made the animation look more effective as the movement of the objects would have looked less obvious and made them look more in motion. I feel that if we planned out sting out better before we started the project then we would of had enough time to take more pictures, we spent a lot of time on making the props and also with a member of the group moving to another group the two of us had more work to do between us.

I feel that we worked good as a pair and we produced a good sting for e4, the feedback was positive, we feel that the main improvement we could of made was to manage our time more effectively and plan out what we were going to do each lesson.

E4 Sting Blog

Week one

During the first two lessons me, Connie and Vicky all made 3 small storyboards each for ideas for our animation. We came up with our final idea of having an e4 logo coming out of a party popper. We then made a large storyboard explaining what would happen in the animation and started to think about who would do what throughout the animation. We created a production log with jobs including the director, camera and lighting, chief animator and the chief editor. However due to some changes and someone leaving the group we had to change the production log.

I and Vicky both chose to share the responsibilities that were in the production log as we were only a small group. We are going to shoot the animation in the classroom or anywhere where there is good natural lighting. The camera will be on a tripod facing down at the animation at a bird’s eye view so the props are easy to move. Taking the pictures will over all take us about half an hour to take. We are going to make are props from scratch and try to make them look professional.

Week two

This week we started to make our props, we made our e4 logo out of a card background and then we stuck small balls of tissue paper in purple and white colours to make the e4 logo stand out so it’s clear that the animation is based on e4. As you can see:

During week two due to some problems Connie left our group so it was just me and Vicky

We also made a large party popper out of cardboard and painted it bright red and white so the purple e4 logo would stand out.

However this lesson we tried out some practice shots and the party popper appeared to be too big and made it difficult to take pictures. So we made a new smaller party popper out of card.

After we done some practice shots with the new party popper and the pictures looked much better.

Week three

This week we set up the background for the sting out of white paper and we stuck the paper on the wall so the background was plain. We took the pictures at my house, we put the camera on a tripod, so that the camera wouldn’t move and the position of the party popper would be the same all the time. We each took time in moving the props and taking the pictures, when we added the confetti into the sting one of us were taking the pictures whilst the other person threw confetti in front of the camera lens to make it look like the party popper had exploded. We did the first set of pictures that we took and noticed that the camera had been moving and the party popper wasn’t in the same position on every picture so we secured the tripod and started again because we wanted the sting to be effective. After taking 20 pictures we checked the pictures again and they were in the same position this time.

Week Four

This week we had all of the pictures done and we had chosen our audio. We spent most of the three hours putting the pictures together. At first flash kept on freezing and we couldn’t put the sting together, but we found out the image sizes were too large and that is what was making flash freeze and close down, so we made all of the image sizes smaller and started in flash again and it worked perfectly fine, after sorting out that hitch, we got the pictures together in 20 minutes, whilst i was editing the pictures in Photoshop to make them look slightly better  Vicky was editing the sound to make it fit the length of the sting and to also make it fade out at the end, she played around with the music in audio software and the final result was good and perfect for our sting, we put the audio with the animation in flash and we added in some text at the end and our sting was finished.

This is the end of our e4 sting.

This is the link to our sting on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwW4gIb8_Fg