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. 

Reflection of the Logo: Photoshop skills

While working on my final logo I utilized a much more simple method than I should have done and that has resulted in a complete yet unsatisfactory logo. We are advised to use Photoshop yet I thought it would be interesting to combine both Microsoft Word and Paint to complete the task. I had realized that there were a lot less options to manipulate the text and the design. Therefore I have decided to focus more on Photoshop in Lynda.com.

Logo

This image consists of my final logo for my project that I have been undertaking in the past few weeks. There were certain decisions made which resulted to this final piece.
The reason for the smudged yet perfected lined arrows aiming in the same direction is because it is a metaphor of life being continuous as well as resulting in some issues during the way.
The idea of having a clock as a background is the reason of it demonstrating your life just going by time and every good or sad moment just slips on by and the next event occurs.
The L.O.A stands for 'Life Of A'. I manipulated the bold text for it to jump out to the audience as well as using the same yet opposite style of the actual star-burst logo.
 Then of course I used the actual star-burst title to give credit to the sweet company.

Materials needed for the scene

Progress on the Project witht he group

This week we would have had all our sweet bought.
The two lamps and the two A3 pieces of paper would be ready.
We would start taking the stop motion pictures this week and hopefully finish with all the pictures.
Therefore we would be ready to edit the pictures using a variety of different programs.
The following week we would be putting it on Premier- Pro and editing it the final piece.