Evaluation

For this assignment, we were asked to create a stop motion TV ident based on any channel and whatever topic that channel is based on, this can include Youtube and internet channels and we were even allowed to create our own channels, as long as they were tasteful.

To start off the assignment, as research we were asked to look into the history of animation and how stop motion came into existence. After this was all done we were then asked to think about what channel we would like to create our own animation for, as I really enjoy gaming, I decided to go with the GINX channel, a channel well known for the fact that it targets the gaming audience. After this was decided, I then had to decide on what I would do for my final piece, I originally had around five ideas that I really enjoyed the idea of, however, looking further into these, I realised that a lot of them were interesting but they required a lot of work and were too time consuming so I decided to stick with my first choice. Once this was all done, I then began to work on the actual piece, I started by creating a TV frame out of paper and then cutting this into several pieces, I then slowly put the pieces back together and taking a photograph with every small movement to create the effect of movement. After I had this, I then had to create the flash content and this was to create the effect of a television turning on and the logo itself. The logo was easy to create as all it required was putting the logo onto flash and then editing it to give it its own sense of movement. After that, I then went to creating the switch on effect, this required me to look into several videos and examine the exact motion and effect that they go through in order to recreate the very same effect of a TV turning on, this made the animation rather difficult as this effect can last around half a second.

With this all done, I was then able to get into the body of the animation which would be the compilation of trailers and gameplay, this required getting high quality videos off of the internet and then placing these videos onto a program called "IMovie". With all the videos on IMovie, I then cut them into smaller clips and put them together to resemble a montage, this wasn't too hard and I really enjoyed the process. The next section would be then placing this over the stop motion, this required a little work as I was rather unsure of how to do this but after getting it all to work, I was rather happy with the final presentation, it required placing the videos onto a "screen on screen", after this was all done, I just had to export the video as an MP4, I did this by converting the video to a quicktime file, this made it far easier to export and the video could be viewed on pretty much every system.

Overall, I was rather happy with the end product, it was fun and easy to accomplish, I was new to everything used in the assignment but I still found it fairly easy to get used to, this could be the user friendly interface of IMovie, however, it was definitely far more interesting to experiment and it should be obvious through the variety of different file forms i.e. Animation, stop motion and actual video clips. I would say that despite it being rather easy to use, there were a lot of complications in the development process with some of the files going missing and even the original more improved piece of work being completely deleted, thankfully, the programs I used made several backup files allowing me to work up from whatever had been saved and this did leave me lacking in terms of any extra alterations or audio improvements. If I was given the chance to work on this project again, I would definitely go along the same route but I would maybe act a little differently about it in order to make the whole process a little easier and this would then allow to me add in the improvements I wanted to make presently. But overall, I was really happy with the final piece and I would be really enjoy the chance to try this assignment again.