Evaluation: Factual & Social

Evaluation

For our last two assignments of the year we were asked to produce a 1 minute and 30 second factual programme and a 30 second social action and community film in groups of three. Knowing that we had to produce not one but two films and also complete all the pre-production work for both within four weeks was a little daunting but I was confident in completing both assignments by the deadlines given to us. 

During our first week of starting the assignment we were put into our groups, mine consisting of Jack Waddup and Ben Hammond. In our group we had decided on using Ben’s idea of doing our factual documentary on Facebook and how it effects the lives of students socially and educationally.  We thought this was a good idea as Facebook is popular amongst students and does effect our lives more then we realise. It would also give us a chance to see the view on facebook from a teachers side so we would gain an understanding from both students and teachers.

We also decided to use my idea of doing a short, stop motion animation along with a narrative from a poem based on depression for our social action and community documentary. My group liked this idea as it was different to what we have done previously and none of us had ever tried to do stop motion animation before so we thought this would be an interesting task to take on.

Since we were using a poem by an author this proposed a problem of copyright. To solve this I emailed the site where the poem had been posted. Shortly after my email I received a reply stating that they had forwarded my enquiry to the author herself who in return sent me an email giving me her permission to use excerpts of her poem for our social action and community film.

During the pre-production stage of our assignment I felt like I had the most responsibility in our group as I had taken on most and completed most of the tasks on our production schedules. This was due to numerous reasons as for a couple of days during pre-production Jack was absent and so me and Ben had to complete some of his tasks so that we could book a camera and start filming the following day. Unfortunately Jack was still absent the next day when me and Ben began to film for our factual documentary. However as the weather was disagreeable and persistently rained throughout the day we could only film the majority of our documentary inside only venturing out when the rain had subsided. After we had managed to film the majority of our documentary I converted the footage on the college computer using the AVS video converter. Being the first time I had used the programme I did need a little help from some of my classmates as I was still uncertain with some of the printed instructions for the programme.

On the Tuesday of our third week on the assignment we were supposed to film the shots we couldn’t get on the previous Friday, when it had been raining. The camera was also due to be given back at four pm that same day. However Ben, who had taken the camera home with him had forgotten to bring the camera back which meant we couldn’t film the rest of the shots we needed to that morning. Although we did manage to complete the rest of our pre production work and I was also able to organize our group folder containing all of our work, which proved to be a little stressful.

When Ben remembered to bring in the camera we immediately gave it back to Phil before booking another camera for the Tuesday of the following week so that we could commence filming and get the final shots needed for the factual programme. However on this Tuesday we were no longer allowed to film during class time. To get around this we decided to film the last shots we needed during our twenty minute break, however when the break started my group members disappeared. Disappointed with my group I then asked if we could leave the class for twenty minutes to film our remaining shots to which our teacher kindly agreed. After collecting all of our shots I converted the footage once again using the AVS programme on the college computers before being able to begin the editing process.

Once I had arranged the footage on the timeline and chose the parts I wanted to keep and delete from the documentary I could then proceed to add in my voiceovers, which I recorded using Garageband. I also used the Snapz Pro X application to film screen shots of Facebook as when we tried to film the computer screen with the camera the picture was extremely bad.

At the same time of all of this I had spent my spare time at home creating the drawings and text for our social action and community film. I did this by using Photoshop to create the text for each page of the animation before drawing the cartoon figure and other objects such as a balloon and clouds. I then scanned the drawings onto my laptop where I edited them in Photoshop. The process took longer than I thought it would and I had to pay a lot of attention to the details such as positioning the cartoon character in exactly the same place for certain frames. The stop motion process was very tedious but I enjoyed making the animation pages and after printing out all 80 pages, taking still images of the pages and putting the images back into Photoshop where I could edit them more I still enjoyed the experience. 

Editing the images in Adobe Premiere was harder than I thought it would be. After I opened the programme I imported my social action files (file>import). I then began to arrange the files on the timeline in the order they should appear in before editing the time for each frame.  However as I was editing I came across numerous problems, such as the files turning black on the timeline. To overcome this problem I could only save my work before shutting down and restarting the programme which I had to do on a few occasions throughout editing. After I had arranged the files in the correct order and edited the time for each frame I then played back the sequence which left me disappointed. The video was disjointed in places and even skipped parts of the animation completely.  To get around this problem I decided to edit the footage in Final Cut Pro. During the process of editing in Final Cut Pro I encountered only a few problems, some of which couldn’t be helped. At times some frames in the animation appeared to run too fast whereas when I slowed those parts down they wouldn’t run as smoothly as before. Another problem I encountered was with the audio for the film. Final Cut Pro wouldn’t let me import the music I had chosen for the film as it was being imported from Itunes and was protected. To get around this problem I exported my finished film from Final Cut Pro as a quicktime movie file. I then imported this file into IMovie where I then was able to add the song of my choice. However I still had problems as the excerpt of the song I wanted to use was now too short for my film. To overcome this problem I imported the song into Garageband where I split the song at the parts I wanted before copying and pasting the final 5 seconds of the song twice so that it would make the part I wanted long enough for my film. I then exported the file in an AVI format.

I found making these two films to be valuable experience and even though stressful at times, enjoyable. I worked well within in my team and felt comfortable sharing ideas and asking questions although at times my group members did frustrate me when some hadn’t completed work or disappeared when we needed to film on that rare occasion. I enjoyed using Premiere once again and loved using Photoshop to produce the animation images. Although it was a long and tedious process I felt extremely proud when watching my social action and community film back as it was my first time attempting stop motion animation. 

Looking back if I had the chance to redo the assignments I would try to do a better job at filming the actual footage for the factual programme. Even though it was raining at the time I felt that if we had been more organised and Ben hadn’t forgot the camera we could have filmed a lot more footage and would have had more freedom when editing as we would have had more options to choose from in terms of footage.  However I am still happy with the outcome of both assignments and feel proud of the work I have produced.