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.