Our project was about making an animation advert. The advert was advertising a cake. Our brief expressed that the advert can only be 30 seconds long.

As a group we had to do pre-production, production and post-production. During pre-production we had to create an idea with drafts and do a storyboard. I made a storyboard, which Ryan improved on. And I drew how our characters originally going to look like. We also made food out of clay for the video such as eggs and flour. We also had to make a piece of cardboard into our adverts background. I made eggs, helped paint the background, make pieces of the set and made sugar.

During production we used stop-motion software on the computer and a camera on a tripod faced down at out set. Usually one person would be on camera while the other is handling the stop motion software except for cases when both of us were on camera and one of had to reach over to the computer while still on camera.

Later we edited the video using adobe premier. Ryan put the composition together while I made a graphic for the end. We also searched though a hard drive and the Internet together looking for sound effects suitable for the advert. We had a few problems through out the creation of our project. Such as we had to change the style of our advert so we would be able to make it sufficiently. Also I was ill a few times throughout the production of the advert but Ryan carried on gracefully. Also we had trouble making a clay cake so we resorted to buying a real cake instead.

In conclusion I think the project came out well. The animation was smooth and the music worked nicely with it. The production stages went though smoothly.

This is my evaluation for the advert that I created with my partner, Joel Thomas, for unit 33 of our media course. During this evaluation I will comprehensively explain and discuss our development, my personal progress, our group’s progress as a whole and also how I think the advert ultimately turned out.

The development of our advert was very good to begin with, as we worked our way through various pieces of research on stop-motion animation and also on adverts to decide what style of stop-motion we would use, and what our advert would be about. We finally decided to make an advert on a food product before choosing a cake. We also decided that we would like to include ourselves in the stop-motion, as it would be an element unique to our group’s film. We worked our way through the pre-production stage at an effective pace and then created the set for our stop-motion. We encountered some problems with how to create a bowl for a side-on view, however some quick thinking from myself allowed us to simply cut the bowl in half. This was much easier said than done.

We moved onto the production stage and we worked together very coherently to get the footage filmed using an application called Stop Motion Pro, but I did encounter a problem during the production stage that is personal to me. The problem was my partner Joel. He was ill during this stage of our project that meant I had to film around 80% of the footage myself, which is extremely difficult when trying to operate a camera and move pieces at the same time. I did persevere however, and managed to complete the filming just as Joel regained his health and joined me for the final stage, post-production.

Post-production was finished rather easily as our footage had been so well planned out and filmed to the highest standards. We gathered sound clips and edited the film together with little setbacks. However, rendering the film was seemingly impossible as every time we did in the required format of .mp3, our rendered advert continuously flashed green whilst playing. To prevent this we had to render our film in the format of .mp4 and uploaded it to the site youtube.com in it’s finished form. With that, Joel and myself completed the advert first in our group, and all of our work was finished to a high standard.

I believe my personal progress has been very good as I have had to work for effectively 1/3 of the project without a partner, and because of this I had to devise various ways of working and multitasking by myself. I also edited 1/2 of our footage to a high quality of work and all of my pre-production work has been scanned in high quality and annotated accordingly. My blog has also been created with in-depth descriptions to all of my work and has been formatted in an effective way. Our progress as a group has been relatively good, although we haven’t been without our drawbacks. Joel being ill really put a lot of pressure on myself to finish an amount of tasks meant for two individuals. However, we I was with Joel we worked to the best of our abilities and produced some excellent pieces of work, including our finished advert.

The final outcome of our work is a sublimely edited and smooth looking piece of stop-motion animation that I feel could be shown as an advert on television. Everything from the music to the editing oozes fun whilst also looking very effective. I am very proud to say I have created this production alongside Joel, as it has been a fun, educational experience with the outcome being a fantastic advert that I will remember as one of my favourite productions.

These are some screenshots of our Animation Advert whilst we were in the editing stage. We used Adobe Premier Pro to edit our production on, and took sound clips for the advert from various sources on the internet, including shadowville.com and soundbible.com. The main music we have used for our production is Eileen Barton's "Bake a cake".

The advert was edited in just under 3 hours. During this time, we encountered some problems such as loss of sound and the rendered film flashing green and white. However, we were able to overcome these slight drawbacks to complete the advert with time to spare.

This is the post that will hold all of our Storyboard slides, as well as annotate each screen with appropriate information, such as camera angles, what is happening, etc.

Slide 1) Mid-shot of Ryan and Joel standing in front of a table. Both of them wave and place their arms on the table. Their individual chef hats move up the arms and onto their heads.

Slide 2) Mid-shot of Ryan and Joel throwing the ingredients up into the air, where they all fall in place. (This will be done using a green screen, thud sound effect)

Slide 3) The flour bag opens by itself and the flour flies freely into the bowl. (Pouring sound effect)

Slide 4) The sugar bag opens by itself and the sugar flies freely into the bowl. (Pouring sound effect)

Slide 5) Eggs fly into air and crack by themselves. The insides then drop into the bowl. (Cracking sound, plopping sound).

Slide 6) Butter moves along table before sliding into the bowl. it leaves a greasy trail behind it, for realism and believability. (Squashing sound, whooshing sound).

Slide 7) We wave our hands over the bowl and a cake magically rises up out of the bowl. We lift the cake in celebration and the logo appears. (Magic sound, zelda noise).

NOTICE

Since myself and Joel have begun the production, we have that there are either better options in some scenes, or that some things are too difficult. In order to save ourselves time within the project by not re-doing another storyboard, I will list the more notable changes here:

• Main music for entire film is now "Baked a Cake" by Eileen Barton.
• Myself and Joel have removed ourselves from the animation so that only our hands feature in it.
• We have removed the "throwing ingredients up" scene and have also removed the ending "holding the cake" scene.
• We have added a "stirring the bowl" scene along with a "thumbs up" scene on which the movie now ends.

This post will be dedicated to the various photo's that we have found. These images inspired us to create our initial advert ideas.

These images represent the 50's classic house wife, that stayed at home cooking and cleaning the house whilst the man went out to work. This was one of the major inspirations for us as it truly captured the essence of what a cake represents; a delicious dessert that has been made lovingly by a caring mother, whom has worked hard to create it. We really wanted to capture this essence and feeling in our advert.

This post will be dedicated to all of the ideas and sketches that we create for our Animation advert.

Ideas
We began by discussing the possible ideas that we could come up with. We began to think up several possible ideas, such as a stickmen fighting with stationary (to promote that "our" stationary brand is better by only having the stickman using our brand win the fight), dancing spoons (to promote "our" brand of tea, as the spoons are happiest being stirred in our tea), and then finally the idea of baking a cake. We thought this would be a rather good idea to do, as the idea was solid, easy to do and should look effective if we did it right. However, we decided against using clay figures for our advert for two different reasons:

1) Everyone else in our class were planning to use figures of some kind to portray their advertisement to the viewer. We simply wanted to stand out and be different from everyone else, so we decided to put ourselves into the video.

2) When using clay figures, it tends to be difficult to make the movement of the characters look fluid, and it takes a lot of practice to get to that standard of animating. We decided we would try not to use clay to represent any major movement, and instead decided to use our own bodies to "bake" the cake, albeit in a stop-motion style. 

We later decided to make of of the ingredients necessary to make a cake out of clay, as it would make it much easier to fiddle about with them, and adjust each clay model into the position we required.

Sketches
This part of the post is dedicated to all of the sketches we have created for our advert. We will also write about each of the sketches to convey what each sketch represents.

These are three of the character design sketches that Joel has drawn. These are basically drawings of myself and Joel that have been put into costume, with various details about the characters themselves annotated. The basic design for both characters were simply chefs outfits, which would be covered in various food stains of all sorts. The characters themselves would have but a single expression, a big cheesy grin, and would not blink. The characters would not walk either to keep with the stop-animation theme. Instead, they would stand up straight, and simply move about in that fashion (using stop-motion to make them move).

This is one of the sketches for our original idea of the animation set. The idea was to have myself and joel in front of a green screen, with a table in front of us. On the table would be the bowl and all the other clay models of the "ingredients' we would be using to 'bake' the cake. We were to use the green screen to allow each of the ingredients to move using special effects.

However, we decided against this as it would simply be too difficult to do within the time frame we had chosen. We decided on using an actual set instead, with the entire animation being just a close-up of the bowl (on it's new set), and also without any characters featuring in the animation. As opposed to characters, we decided to just have hands come in and do all of the 'baking'.                                                                    

This is a simply but effective sketch of all the props (ingredients and the like) we would be needing for our advert. We decided agains't making the actual cake out of clay as it just wasn't cost effective, so we instead decided to buy an actual cake, as it would be much cheaper and more time-effective. We also decided agains't using a cooker, as it would simply be too fiddly to incorporate it into our stop-motion.