World culture day activity prep: Anime
13:21

I'm not very good with Art but have agreed to help out with any part I can on the anime day activity session. I am comfortable in Photoshop etc and can be creative using that platform. As we have access to many computers I feel it would be a shame to let these go to waste and not make proper use of the software we have access to.

Perhaps if participants were to create a wire frame design of what they hope to do, and then scan this to the computer and later colour this in using Adobe Photoshop then this would be a great way of finishing a piece.

I found a great website with a tutorial on this here http://photoshoptutorials.ws/photoshop-tutorials/drawing/how-to-create-an-anime-artwork-in-photoshop.html
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Ident Review
10:42

In March this year, I was assigned a project to create an ident for Park Hall Academy's media department. I worked in a group for the production process of this project and I worked with Daniel Gregory, Jack Moon & Jordan Knight. As a group we worked well and were all able to take advantage of our strengths and weaknesses in the project, allowing each member of the group to show their creativity and flair towards the project.

In the later stages of this project, after all pre production and all production work besides editing was completed, then we all began independent work which involved each group member editing their own individual ident from the footage we had all collectively produced. This allowed for four different revisions of the project, giving the client a lot of choice by producing four very different idents with the same purpose and needs suited to the client.

My finished ident was based on the theme of surprise, I had three characters; two of these were penguins which played on the animation cartoon theme of the childrens television programme, Pingu and the third character was 'Morph' whom is also an animated television character from the popular childrens programme, SMART. By combining these popular children characters we allowed the target audiences (12-18 years, secondary: 35 - 55) to connect with their childhoods.

I feel that all the idents produced were of high standards and met the client needs. I felt all work produced was to a near professional standard and we were all very proud of our completed works.

In my ident I liked the title scenes which consisted of around 90 still shots which I created individually using Adobe Photoshop. I felt that if I could have everything in the complete production using stop motion animation. I was able to include multiple motion graphics on the frame with the use of super imposing the motions. I done this by creating different things seperately and layered all of the motions using Power Director 6.

Weaknesses in the project mainly consisted of time constraints. As using stop motion animation involves using seperate frames constantly, this took a lot of time and a lot of revisions as we had to set an ideal frames per second and had to then deliver all of these frames, altogether spending a lot of time in the photography process of this.

Strengths in the group was the use of team work. We were all able to excel in different areas of the project, we had some clashes on what people wanted to do but this was more of a good thing allowing the group to benefit a lot more. An example of this is that both Jack and Jordan wanted to work on the creation of the characters which allowed them to both work on this process thus speeding up that process and finishing with good quality characters.

After we felt our idents were all completed, we created a survey and asked our peers to complete this. The video which accompanied the survey was my ident. The sample of all the people whom we surveyed werebetween the ages of sixteen to eighteen, all students and mostly male. Our second question was asking people what they thought of the ident and we had one person say Very Bad whilst we had 9 say Good and 4 saying Very Good. This was a very good result, however the set of results lowered expectations some what. The next question was "Do you think this could be the winning Media Department ident?" and we had an almost split result if it wasn't for one vote saying yes. 8 people said that this could be the winning ident, where six people said this couldn't. We were expecting more people to lean to saying this could be the winning ident as per the previous question, the audience seemed to like the ident.

We were later surprised again with our last set of results when we asked "Can the ident be improved?" where we had two people say no but 12 people said that the ident can be improved. This was quite damaging to our expectations as we were thinking with most people saying the ident could be improved yet 13 out of the 14 people surveyed said the ident was good o above.

Issues we concluded upon ith the sample after we had surveyed, is that all of the sample are fellow media students, also competing for the winning idents. This meant that our sample may not have been fair as they could be damaging other results in the hope that their idents would shine in the review stage. However, with the sample all being media students, perhaps all of the sample have really high standards which we may not have met for them as they are all working on this and may have felt that the group could have done more.

I would say that my completed ident was of good, near professional standards in terms of the use of editing (using super imposed footage across multiple layers) and the standard of the edited footage (such as the titles) whilst using industry standard editing plaatforms such as Adobe Photoshop and Power Director.
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Animation Questionnaire Results
10:13

Animation Questionnaire Results

The sample we asked were all media students of Park Hall Academy sixth form between the ages of sixteen to eighteen. The sample are all included in the target audience but a factor that must be stressed is that these are all our peers and are all also competing for their ident to be the winning ident for the Park Hall Academy Media ident project.
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Improving my music video & Twitter
14:58

Our Media Studies group are using Twitter to communicate and give feedback on one another's work. My Twitter username is @GaryMedia & on feedback concerning my music video I was tweeted at by Mrs Lewis. The tweet read:
Gary. Gd Wk. M4. Follow up on idea of using animation and metaphors to convey meaning of the track
 To improve my Music Video I would like to be able to include an area of animation and test this out through using different technologies.

An option I could take, could be creating the animation part of this through the technology I have used before on the course, start stop animation where seperate camera shots are all used to create a motion scene; The items in each frame are slowly moved and in between the shots, the human brain fills in the movement between these shots and gives the impression of a motion movie.

I would like to test out some more technical ways of doing this, I have found an app on the iPad app store called Animation Desk. Below is a result of my testing. It is just a very basic example of how the software works.


I feel Animation Desk is very difficult to get use to and us quite difficult to use on a touch screen without a stylus. I feel, perhaps if I spend a little more time getting use to the software then I may be able to get some better results from using the software. Below is a print screen of the app in use.

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