Finished Masterpiece!

New Characters

Cannibal evaluation

Entertain and Evaluate: Evaluation: Kelly Cantrell.

“Entertain and Evaluate” is the brief title, we were given a few choices from the roses awards briefs, there was the choice to make museums sexy, make the role of an undertaker seem appealing to school leavers, integrate cannibals into society, make the British holiday seem more appealing etc. I can’t remember the others, oh something about Electric waste? The only ones that seemed appealing to me from the start were the cannibal and the undertaker one, (Oh there was a lifeline one too) maybe I am just obsessed with death? But then surely the lifeline one would have appealed to me?

I think I liked the cannibal and the undertaker one because I felt more ideas coming to me for those 2 when as a group we had to make some “brainstorm” charts, I had lots of fun quirky ideas in my head for those two.

I had a look at the undertaker brief and thought about contacting funeral directors and speaking to kids in some schools to get their take on it and I planned to approach it from a serious angle, however I soon got bored of it and didn’t welcome the memory’s it brought back of my nana’s funeral a couple years back.

So sticking to my serious angle I went for the cannibal brief again, it would be too tempting to make it into a joke so I wanted it to be very serious.

I began by researching cannibalism on the web, (so not exactly first hand research but it was a start!) I found out a few things and decided to over-exaggerate them in order to attack to stigma of cannibalism, It wasn’t long before I had a whole marketing concept planned out, a company name, slogans, partnership schemes, starter packs, advertisements, campaign ideas etc etc…

But I think I spent a bit too long with this idea and should have moved on from it sooner, I didn’t quite know where to go next, I always new it would be more of a slide show giving facts and information, I didn’t want to go near live-film, (too much hassle) I didn’t want animation because I wanted to keep it serious, so I thought of having a news programme with hosts and interviews with real life cannibals.

However at the presentation of the boards, the feedback I was getting seemed to be that I needed a mascot, I needed some humor, I was told about some shows such as the “daily news” or whatever it’s called and the Starship Troopers TV spoofs. Although I found these amusing it completely through me off track as it was nothing like what I had in mind so I found myself back at square one, with about 2 weeks left till deadline….

At this point I asked Hoi Kam if she wanted to work with me, it seemed like a good solution, I could help her with the concept and she could help me with characters and animation, or acting or whatever we decided.

So we got together had a brief discussion and then decided to meet the following week to discuss how to put our work together, but of course we had both gotten the date on the brief wrong and thought we had a week longer than we did have,

Then we struggled to meet at certain times etc because of illness and work and so before we knew it we only had a few days left!

I had been working on scripts and Hoi Kam wanted to make some cartoons so I told her to make some flash cartoons, Hoi Kam really liked the resident evil intro and wanted to do something like that, she was having all these crazy funny ideas and I kept thinking, No we need to be serious! But in the end I thought oh what the hell, it can just be a crazy collaboration with my serious stuff and Hoi Kams quirky stuff! So as we only had a few days I began the painful task of making all my scripts into flash animated movies, I had to think about timing and making it look interesting while Hoi Kam made her cartoons.

I had video footage of fire and stuff so I thought it would be “cool” to use as a background, I had wanted to involve the four elements of earth, air, fire and water and felt that using clouds, countryside and fire I could achieve this, however no one “got” it and just couldn’t see the relevance.

Also no-one liked my writing, from the start I noticed people weren’t reading it and by a 3^rd of the way through people had given up trying to read it. (Cavemen! Only joking!) this taught me a valuable lesson! One that I should have learned sooner really! To think about my audience! I felt because I was prepared to read it that everyone would be but thinking about it now that’s only because it’s my own work and ideas, if it were someone else’s maybe I wouldn’t want to read it either!

So we were then left with a week to do something about it! None of us wanted to film, well I tell a lie Hoi Kam seemed happy to do some filming but I just didn’t want to, I felt it would look shabby and rushed, maybe if we had more time to think about it and plan it we could have, but I didn’t want to risk everything going wrong with just a week left, so I proposed that we just animate the whole thing!

So between us we took certain scenes each, (from the writing) and went off and made little cartoons to go with each. At this stage, we have about 10 cartoons between us that we just need to integrate into the video tomorrow and then we have to do voice-overs and work out how to make an interactive DVD! All by 4.30pm tomorrow!

If I could do this brief again I wouldn’t. Well seriously if I could change anything I would have managed my time a lot better, spent less time on the concept and got stuck in a bit sooner! I should have planned to work alone or in a team from the start and then stuck to it.

I think we work well as a team, we just needed to manage our time a bit better and there were times where I felt we were hitting our head against a wall! but then there were times where we really got alot done and bounced off each other well.

We had fun today putting all our clips together and doing the voices, in the end we decided to just make it as a whole new film, it's a shame we can't show it to anyone as it's a BIG improvement on our first effort.

We made the DVD in IDVD which was fairly straightforward, and I am just glad that we have finally finished!

I have not enjoyed this brief really if I am honest, I just want it over with, I feel very stressed, I have missed out on lots of time with my kids because of this, and am very annoyed and upset with the whole thing at this stage, I do not want to do it all again but we have to, I feel a little disheartened cause although we planned out time badly we have still worked our asses off to be fair and other people seem to have done a lot less yet we STILL have to do it again? I wish we could just submit the finished film from last week and all the extra cartoons as clips that we would have added, we don’t even know how to make the DVD, because we missed the session but this was because we were both working at my computer at home because the college computers kept crashing etc, and we also had privacy to do voice-overs.

At the end of the day I am glad it’s over, I enjoyed some aspects of the brief, like coming up with an idea, I liked making some of the animations, I enjoyed editing the first video actually, but it was more stress than it was worth in the end, I just hope that we pass and can just move onto the next thing!

finished cannibal vid!

Scripts

These are the word documents I have prepared for the video, I have just spent the last few hours sorting them out as I had written them late at night and each paragraph was it's own layer and I couldn't remember the correct order and what went where! so I have just had to make sense of it all and put it all together in separate documents, I'll then bring the layers into flash and animate them, nothing fancy, just fades and tweens, I don't have time to do it in after effects because I would need to spend alot more time with effects in there, one effect I wanted to try and create was fire around the letters, I have read a few tutorials on that but given the time misunderstanding with the brief and my being Ill for the past few weeks I will just have to make basic flash movies, I am concerned that the text may be too subtle to read over film footage so I might have to make the font bolder and bigger.

MASCOT

I thought about having a mascot for the company image, but I don't think it will be needed anymore, we have a quirky ident, quirky advertisements, etc and it is now becoming more like a visual FX video so I don't think a mascot would really add much.

I came up with this character because I have always felt a plant-like/nature theme would work well for what we are trying to say with themes of "green earth" "recyling" "feeding the future" etc. so that's why he is a cannibal-looking plant!

LOGOS

Some logo ideas for the recycle scheme aspect of the C.I.S. corporation, I will scan in my workbook sketches and storyboards etc tomorrow and put them on my blog too.

FONTS

This is just some of the script for our video on who we are, I decided to use "Hirajino kaku gothic" as the heading font, I felt as it was asking a question, that this one looked the most sincere and friendly, some felt patronizing or "corny", and for the main text I chose "miriam pro" because I felt it had an informative yet down to earth feel, I don't know that's just me and how I felt the fonts came across.

FONT

I was just looking at some different fonts to use in the video, here's some that I was thinking of, I find it interesting how each font seems to convey a different personality, some accusing, some shy, some in your face, some of them aggressive, some modern, some impartial and some make me think of artificial intelligence! they probably mean something different to everyone, but the majority of people will make the same connections and associations with them as they are used to seeing them everyday associated with different packages and branding, for example one of the fonts, (not pictured) made me think of the wild west, whys that? I thought to myself, then I remembered I'd seen that font of some sort of texan sauce in the supermarket and on tv!

So It's important to find the right tone and attitude for what we are saying in our video by selecting the right font, as we may not have any speaking in the film, we will have to depend on visuals to get our message across.

earth, air, fire and water! we're back!

In a moment of last minute panic and creativity I have decided to go back to my original idea of using earth, air, fire and water. This can be seen in my initial research, I had always wanted to go with this but a tutor put me off stating that I should have a corporate feel to it and that I didn't want it too "hippy-like" there's nothing wrong with him giving me his opinion and I appreciate the input, however I think by trying to do something else I actually "blocked" myself creatively for a while and struggled to change the visual dynamic I already had in mind.

When I went to visit my dad not long ago I made some film footage of the journey thinking it may come in handy for this brief, and I have more footage I have been collecting along the way, I didn't realize at the time where I was going with it but now it's all hit me! It all falls in nicely with my initial ideas and given the time left I am going to use it, the only thing missing is AIR and WATER, I also want to film some cars at night from the motorway near my house, I am going to film raw meat, but I don't have time to film the sky for a few hours, so I have found this footage, I wonder if there is a way I can rip some of it? I know VJ's do this all the time, so there must be a way to do it, I only need a little fragment of it so I will find out on monday if I can get this for my video.

Beautiful Clouds from michaelwu on Vimeo.

CIS Ident

IDENT

I'm working on a new ident now after loosing the other one last night by saving it in user work and then logging off the computer! (basically everything from userwork is deleted when you log off so you are supposed to move it first!) I liked the idea of having the earth surrounded by cities with CIS in the middle, like this picture:

So I had a go at making something like this myself in illustrator but as my drawing skills are not that great it turned out being a lot more simplified, and reminiscent of the "tamagotchi" world, (see pic below) which I might have a go with as the adverts for the show will be done in FLASH and will have that quirky style so maybe we should do the whole thing as a quirky cartoon? we don't really have time to think about it anymore now, I thought the deadline was the 17th which is stated on the brief, but it is in fact NOT the deadline, it is just the date to have a DVD done by? very confusing, so we actually have to have this finished by WEDNESDAY! so that gives us another 2 days to get it done. oh dear. are we in for it....

CIS logo

Here are a couple of my C.I.S logo's, I have some earlier versions in my notebook that I will scan and upload at some point.