Today we received the feedback from our client.

They are showing my risk video at one of their lectures.

Their feedback was as following:

What are your thoughts on the way the video engages with the theme of risk?

It was very visually about Risk - but I was unconvinced about the link of foreground to background (what did the house have to do with Risk?)

What do you consider to be the strengths of the video in terms of visual interest, creativity and originality?

Colourful and interesting way of attracting attention to the RISK title.

Do you consider there to any issue with the video or elements that you feel are less successful?

Link to background house not fully explained or made. As a result, the viewer was left confused.

I’m happy that they thought that my video is very visual and colourful + connected to risk.

I did not want to link the foreground to the background in a way of risk, I wanted the foreground to be somewhere not just appearing in the black.

Altogether I am very pleased that they chose to show my video.

This is the final video with the soundtrack I chose from GarageBand. In my opinion, the music fits the mood of the video really well.

I feel that this video is supporting the idea of creative risk and experimental film. I am very pleased that the soundtrack and the video fit together so well.

It was hard work to make this animation but it payed off really well.

If I would be able to change anything to my video I would make more frames so that my video is more fluid and not so jumpy. This would be very difficult to do because I would need to have the same light circumstances I had while I created the animation.

I would improve my animation by having more than one battery because while I recorded the animation I ran out of power twice. When you can see the light changes in the animation you know that I had to charge the battery and while it charged the light changed. If I had more than one battery I could just swap them while the other one is charging.

I think that this project went really well, and I enjoyed it very much.

Positive cloud tag: Colour was said seven times and every else was just said once.

Negative cloud tag: Music was said 4 times, soundtrack was said twice and everything else was only said once.

I am not surprised by the positive cloud but I am for the negative one.

I did not expect that the soundtrack and the music would be seen as negative. I personally think that the soundtrack really fits the whole animation and it feels like it is a sort of opening for a short film. It also feels like an advert with the music, and that is what I basically tried to do. Advertising RISK. I disagree to the negative cloud because I really think that the music fits to the animation.

This is the final video I made over the past three days. Every editing is done in Photoshop, each frame by frame. It was Converted and stuck together by iStopMotion.

The next thing I have to do is find or make a soundtrack that fits to this animation.

I have tomorrows day to either find or make a soundtrack, because Friday the 11th of December is the deadline for this project.

This is possible music for my animation.

The possible soundtrack for my animation should be something that fits the atmosphere as well as fitting to the action that is happening.

I had a look at http:www.jamendo.com which is a copyright free music sharing website, for music for my animation.

In today’s lesson I carried on merging two frames, in Photoshop, together.

It was very time consuming and I became a headache after being at the computer for too long.

To have a bit of a break I helped Louis, by drawing outlines of each of his frames (he his making a hand drawn animation) and my headache was gone after I finished, so I carried on merging frames together.

At Coleridge in today’s lesson I wanted to begin editing for my final animation but, Peter and I could not figure out how to get two pictures into Photoshop and merge them together, so that they would be one picture with two objects (e.g. the flower and the wind).

We looked for tutorials on the internet, but could not find anything that would have got us any further, so I decided to ask Steve or Nick when we are back at college, and just improve on my blog for the first two lessons.

When we were in Long Road Nick showed me how to do it and it was very simple.

You import the two pictures into Photoshop, layer them over each other and set the layer option to ‘Lighten’.

I then carried on doing that with each frame and got about 15 finished.

I have to continue to do the same thing I did in today’s lesson, tomorrow and on Thursday if necessary.

Over this weekend I made my animation. It took me over 4 hours (from approximately 11pm to 3am) to produce this animation. My big brother helped me by making the photos. I drew every single frame you can see in this animation. I made about 100 photos in total but only used about 50 in the rough cut.

I had different lights so I used the green one for the flower (R), the blue one for the wind (I), the red one for the S, the bright white one for the man (K), and the not so bright white one for the outline.

The first thing I did was looking for a suitable location. Because we live right in front of a big green, I thought that I could animate the animation there.

Here is a picture of the location as well as the black clothing I wore so that the light does not reflect on me, and a limb telling me where to position myself:

After I found a good location I positioned the camera at a good angle and did set it to the right settings. The settings are as following:

Manual-> Exposure time 20 seconds-> Aperture f/5.6

I then looked where I am out of shot and where I am in the shot, and marked the certain spots.

Because I made a test shoot with Liam, I already new what to expect, so we took the first picture:

We had a look at it and saw that the background as well as the growing flower were in focus, which was because the aperture (how big the hole (lens) is opened) was on the biggest setting.

After a few pictures the flower was finished:

We then thought that, If we now only draw the wind coming onto the flower without drawing the flower over and over again while drawing the wind, we could now draw the flower on its own 4 times, and then the wind on its own flying toward the flower and then later on just combine these two pictures, we could save time.

So here is what we did:

flower on its own (4 times)

wind on its own

both pictures combined

So, while the wind is flying towards the flower, the flower are just repeating pictures I drew before hand.

We did the same thing with more than 2 objects involved every single time.

The S 4 times on its own, the man 4 times on its own, the outline 4 times on its own, and the R and I 4 times on its own.

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Things that went well:

Most of the pictures I drew were spot on and looked almost the same as the picture I drew before, I found that very impressive, as if it would very easy for me because my big brother did also have a go and did not achieve the results I did.

Things that went wrong:

I had to shoot many pictures again and again because I either drew them to quickly, so that the line is too thin, or to slow that I ran out of time and did not finish and the 20 seconds were up.

I sometimes did also make a mistake so that the picture had to be remade.

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Over all I am very satisfied of the work we did over the weekend. It looks really good an I did not expect such good results at the first time of creating this animation.

As you can see, I made changes from the animatic to the rough cut.

I did changes like from ‘random lines which will form the letters later on’ to certain objects, which will transform to the letters R, I, S, and K. When you look to the storyboard post, you can see what I had in mind while creating the storyboard (page 1, frame 1,2,3,4,5, and 6) and what I finally did in the animation.

This picture shows a flower (later on the R) and wind (later on the I).

I did these changes to make my animation more interesting than just lines building up to the word RISK. I also was inspired by the TalkTalk advert to a certain degree because I especially liked the flowers in that one.

I also did not animate the FIN what I had in the animatic because it did not really fit into the whole atmosphere I created by drawing the flower and the wind and so on.

Today I finished editing my rough cut of the animation I recorded yesterday.

Here is the rough cut video:

Because I made this at home, I had not the programs to edit the animation properly, that’s why it is only the rough cut. I will edit and finish this animation mostly at coleridge, on Tuesday and on Friday.

This is the animatic I made for my project. It consists of each frame I drew for the storyboard. The animatic shows me how the animation will look like when finished.

This is the storyboard I made for my long time exposure animation.

1,2,3,4,5,6: Are lines which will form the letters later on.

7: The green line formed the R.

8: The yellow line forming the I.

9: The purple line forming the S.

10: The red line forming the K.

11: RISK with blinking lines.

12:RISK with blinking lines and outline.

13: RISK is getting bigger

14: And bigger…

15: Risk disappears, leaving short blue lines.

16: F appearing inside the space.

17: I appearing next to F.

18: N appearing next to the I.

The creative risk in my project is that I never done anything like that before. It is also related to risk because I will write RISK into the air. The animation will be more experimental than risky, though. I will use lots of different colours and shapes and styles to make it more interesting to the audience.

It is also sort of underground art because I will involve the background of the picture with my light writing.

Example of light writing interacting with the environment.

Left to right: bright white light, white light, small white light, green light, bright red light, small red light, green lightning gel, transparent paper, green marker pen.

Camera with longtime exposure settings, tripod.