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Photography has a huge influence on our daily lives in this generation as it captures a certain moment that could never be created again. In this video it explains this exactly and how the invention of cameras have changed our perception in life. With advertisements and social media constantly feeding us information on how to think or how to live our life it is using the manipulation of photography as there are angles and light taken into consideration. This links to our project as it conveys that without these images, there would not be the effective advertisements there are to this day, then with this aspect taken into consideration there would not be this 'normal stereotyped lifestyle'. It all links together and this is what inspired us to mock this ideology using star-bursts with this important element in life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZhJjP8kiqE&hd=1

Cog (The metaphor of our project)

The cog 

This object in a watch appeared to be the metaphor of our project as it is the compartment that causes the watch to work. Therefore relating to our project of mocking the stereotypical normal lifestyle the cog appears to be the media in a sense as it is the element that creates these 'perfect and normal' lifestyles. Without the media, this lifestyle would not necessarily be the preferred one. Just like if the watch did not have the cog, the watch would not function.

Ways of seeing John Berger (1)

"In the cities in which we live, all of us see hundreds of publicity images every day of our lives". (John Berger) This quote most definitely relates to the project my group and I have put together. The reason being that it focuses on the idea that advertisements on social media, television and music videos enforce us to think in a certain way. We based our project on the theme of advertising causing us to believe we should not only think in a certain way but live in a certain way. As it appears on the media that if you don't go to school, go to university and get a well paid job you are a minority. Although this isn't true people still feel obliged to go by these tasks in life and the quote that was mentioned before conveys that images bombard our lifestyle and cause us to believe that if you don't complete all of these things in life you won't be accepted. Which is why we wanted to make a project out of this using sweets to mock this ideology. 

Our final project

This was to convey the difficulties of uploading this video and the struggles with technology that our group and I encountered. Overall this is a representation of the extreme problems we had with the computers and putting this project together.

Presenting our final product

There were difficulties when putting this video on this blog therefore I thought of alternative places to upload it so the rest of the public could see it such as:
Youtube
Facebook
and the pictures of us creating the project on Instgram.
The reason why we are choosing these places to upload it is because we could get recognized for our creativity and social network sites are a great way to communicated different ideas to one another in this generation.

To crop the video we used this tutorial to help us

Commentry on the use of CD's

Positive aspect of using a CD for the final Product
- Having a hard copy
- It is cheap to buy a blank CD

Negative aspects of using a CD for the final product
- Difficult to put the project on the CD
- The CD can get scratched
- People can overwrite the CD with something else and therefore the project would be lost
- Some videos work very slowly on the CD
- It takes a great deal of time for it to get copied on a CD

I personally found it a bad idea to put our final project on a CD as it seemed very ironic to do so considering we do digital media foundations as a course yet we are using a very old way to turn in our work. I personally think for the future it should be uploaded online.

Choosing the sound for the Project

While creating the project we came across some difficulties choosing what sounds we wanted for our project. The reason for this being that are group decided on different things. As I wanted to just use one song for the entire project as it would be easier and it wouldn't be choppy for childish although the rest of the group thought otherwise. They decided to have a mixture of a songs and sound effects, as it would appear that we tried different sounds and experimented with the sounds, I finally agreed with their reasons to have a mixture and ended up doing it for our final piece.

For Primary School Scene: Children talking and playing
University: Older voices talking over each other
Getting her first job: Cars going by and beeping
Falling in love: A cheesy song
Getting married: The wedding song
Dying: The sound of a heartbeat going faster and faster
The funeral: Morbid bells playing

Art Collaboration

Our group and I went through a process to choose the most suitable backgrounds for the different scenes. We began with the idea of utilizing a variety of sweets as mentioned in my previous blog posts but that turned out to be too financially difficult and impractical to create. The second method was to pick cartoon styled images from the internet for the different stages of lives for the multiple scenes. Although this appeared to very easy and there was a lack of a challenge to complete it for our project. We therefore finally chose to do a collaboration with an art student, we asked them to do an illustrated style of drawing for the different scenes. The reason for this being that the project aimed to be fictional and this added to the theme of the project. The images turned out to be very effective and it was interesting working with someone (Chloe Farrar) as she is from a different course, therefore gaining more knowledge about the project.

Evaluation

My group and I decided to focus on a stop motion animation video using star-bursts as the characters and hand-made drawings for the different scenes. Our aim was to convey a stereotypical ‘normal’ lifestyle, that we are all expected to live by. This storyline would be effective because we have been forced to believe that this certain lifestyle is the right one to live by due to the different advertisements that bombard us everyday on social media networks, television and music videos. My group and I created a storyline consisting of typical major life checkpoints.

This project motivated me as its purpose was mocking the idea of a ‘normal’ lifestyle. There were various ideas that were explored to get to the final product. It was a decision between doing a makeover on a girl to make them look like they don’t have any imperfections using technology, or using sweets to create a storyline. Either way, we were convinced in following the theme of advertisements causing us to think and live in a certain way. When we came to the final decision of utilizing sweets, there was an idea to use an assortment of sweets for each scene. The group and I wanted to do a trial run of the stop motion images with different sweets but we realized that this was impractical due to financial reasons. The next logical step was to use images off the internet. It was recognized by the group that the images off the internet did not achieve the attended effect. A collaboration with a Fine Art student, Chloe Farrar, appeared to be beneficial for our project as she drew the different scenes in a cartoon style to add more impact to the fictional element of the project.

We used YouTube as a resource medium to find effective stop motion animations. There were a great deal of successful videos although the fictional elements tended to have more of an impression, hence us choosing to use candy to create a storyline.

When choosing the sounds for the video we tried to relate it to the aim of the product, to entertain the audience. Therefore we decided to combine sound effects as well as humorous songs for the different scenes.

We came across some difficult situations during this project, such as technical problems due to the lack of knowledge on using Premier Pro. There was also a lack of communication within the group which made it a struggle to complete basic tasks.

Finally we would present this post on the popular social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to increase the popularity of the video. Doing this project in this present time is effective as technology users are at its highest and so more people have a chance to watch it.

This video met our aims although we could have benefited from starting earlier as the pictures could have been edited more effectively.