Will89’s Weblog

First of all I do apologies for not keeping up with my blog, this is due to the fact that i have been spending every waking minute trying to complete the project. and I can gladly say after six weeks of this I think I have completed the website. This is not say that it needs improvements done to it but in spite of this I am happy with the final outcome I produced.

One interesting problem that arose from doing this project was half through the production period, the brief was annoying changed as the Lectures who had set this brief realised that the project that we are doing was totally buggered from the start, and we only found out about this into our 4th week into production when we couldn’t upload any content, this was due to FTP coding was not properly implemented and also that the content that would be uploaded was to be done by the BA(Hons) Television Production course and now we are 5 days from handing in the project and do I see any content done by the TV Production course, do I bloody hell and I won’t get on to the fact about them supplying the Live feed that is to be incorporated into the website.

So overall I can say that this project out of all the projects I have done at Bournemouth University, this has been by far the least enjoyable, mainly because of the time constraint and having to learn PHP from scratch grrrrrrr.

I have decided I am definitely going to be a Designer after university and stay away from anything that relates to website design.

Finally I have found the authorship unit brief at long last. So with out any further to do here is what I shall be doing over the next month and a bit:

The Brief

To design a front end solution, including branding, for a new online Media School service called ‘THE STATION’ that will showcase media students work. It will consist of an archive student work as well as present a live Television Studio broadcast every weekday at 12pm.

Design work is to be minimalist in style and reflect the nature of the website. There must also be a location emphasis within the design work i.e. that it is Bournemouth/Dorset/South Coast.

To build a back-end editorial interface to ‘THE STATION’ that will allow Level I student teams to add new media content to the website and administrate/edit material already online.

The target audience for this service will be made up of the local community, media student peers and professional media companies

 

Overview

As of next academic year there will be a new online repository of Media School Student work. This will be made up of archived material plus a live 15-minute Television studio broadcast that goes out every weekday at lunchtime.

Level I student teams will man ‘The Station’ on a weekly rotation, providing regular updates to both the archive and the Live shows.

There will be a web front-end to allow the general public to access this work and view the live broadcasts, as well as a back-end editorial solution to enable the student teams to update the site with new content.

As a precursor to ‘THE STATION’ going live next academic year there will be trials of the potential services that will be used, in particular the HD TV Studio broadcasts, which will commence in week 5/6 of this academic year.

 

Technical Overview

The live broadcast will be streamed via the HD TV Studio, using a QuickTime Streaming Server that will announce the video using Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP).

Video material for archiving will be provided either on tape or as a QuickTime DV-Pal file.

Interactive Media will be provided by means of a web address or on CD/DVD-Rom as potentially Photoshop/HTML/Flash/Unity 3D files

Script writing material will be provided by means of a Word document.

Radio material will be provided either on miniDisc/CD or as a WAV/AIFF audio file.

All this material needs to be encoded into a web friendly format, archived and searchable by use of meta-data.

Material that is uploaded by the student team must be cleared of copyright or have permission from the original authors.

Archived material needs to have the ability to be rated and commented on by the viewers of the web site.

The base requirements for the server are PHP5 & MySQL

 

Word to the Wise

Try to be realistic about what you can achieve given the short period of time you have to complete your project. Remember this is only a working prototype not the fully finished version of the website and back-end editorial interface.

Even though this is an individual project you will be expected to collaborate with others to help provide content on their websites.

Bournemouth Universtiy BAIMP Level I Authorship Production Element Brief 2009

My personal opinion about this project is that I am not going to like it one bit….. o dear but always up for any challenge.

These past couple weeks have been a challenge and half, but now it is all finally over and i can gladly say that i believe that i have created a good piece of quality work. To end this unit I would to take the opportunity to make an evaluation about my project.

Looking back on my research that I conducted before creating my animation, I said I wanted to create an animation that didn’t have any reference to violence’s and shoot’em ups blood killing content, which we can find mostly in computer games influenced by TV, film and current events in today’s society.

This is why I decided to venture down the route of creating an animation, aimed at a young audience, predominantly children, but also having the power to reach out to older audiences. In order to achieve this goal, I based my animation around an animal and incorporating the aspects of comedy and how I could create it around the idea of “A day in the life of……”, which is commonly used to help people write autobiographies, recount parts of their life. This idea and the inspiration from the animation “Simon’s Cat”, which I mention in my research, lead me to create my animation “A Doggy Day”. Taking some inspiration from the techniques from the creator of “Simon’s Cat”, Simon Tofield, I took the approach of incorporating the aspect of ‘Black & White’ for my style, for the animation. By using this style of visualization, it gave my animation a level of simplicity, however there was part of me that didn’t agree that there shouldn’t be any colour within the animation. This is where I took further inspiration from the film ‘Sin City’ adapted from the comic books. With ‘Sin City, it is predominantly black and white throughout the film, however the film uses elements of striking colour, for instance bright red to signify blood and bright blue for eyes of some of the characters and lastly the biggest use of colour, yellow for the skin of the character Yellow Bastard.

I decided to take this idea and incorporate into the my animation on a smaller scale, for example I applied colour to the dogs collar, bone and ball, also parts of scenery within the animation, for instance the Sun, the plant pot on the window, the hand and lastly the hole in the garden where the dog buries it’s bone, in order to make the audience feel a little more interested with the animation. If I took the approach of making all black and white I would have feared that my target audience would probably loose interest, as young audiences in today’s society expect a high level of bright colours to grab their interest. A good example of this is the animation Pokémon, which uses a wide and various range of vibrant colours.

Looking back on my research and what I said in my conclusion about how I intended to create my animation based around a day in a life of a dog, with a level of interactivity so that the audience will be able to interact with the dog in various situations and decisions. I feel that I have manage to for fill that goal to a high level and evidence to show that I have can be seen in my animation as the audience can do some of the following below:

· Waking the dog up by clicking on the window so the plant pot smashes.

· Choosing where dog can go, i.e. Kitchen/Living Room.

· Having to find away to get the pie down, with the dog’s bone and ball.

· Sending the dog out of the living room before it does its business.

· Finding a place to bury the dog’s bone.

I have only mentioned a few possible interactive parts for the audience to experience within the animation, but all parts that have an interactive aspect to them does affect on how the narrative progress.

To sum up this evaluation about my animation, I feel that I have managed to produce a good quality interactive animation that successfully targets the audience age to range I set myself at the beginning of this project. However this doesn’t go without saying that this project has been challenging from the word start and over coming my biggest problem, which was transferring over 2000 frames of animation into the right place in Flash, frame by frame, in order to make my animation work. I feel that I have learnt and gain new skills throughout this project and having a better understanding of how Flash works and hopefully in the future will be able to put these new found skills into work.

This will be my last post for the next 5 weeks over the Easter period. When I return to university I will be starting on my Summer Project, which I looking forward to very much.

Here are the storyboards that I have create for my animation project. These storyboards shows the rough basics of our project and how the narrative of the animation will turns out. Each shot shows a visualisation with a description of how the narrative is progressing. So here are the storyboards for my project called A Doggy Day:

A Doggy Day Project © 2009

Right here is my research for my animaiton project. We were ask to choose four different animations of our choosing which we felt appeal to four distinctly different audience groups, and to explain and justify our choices for choosing them.

So here are my four animations that I choose to research:

Tom & Jerry

Target Audience: 4 – Upwards

Tom and Jerry is a children’s cartoon series about a mouse and cat, living in the same house, however for filling a traditional stereotype of “cat and mouse”, audience gets to view an ongoing rivalry between the two, which consists of numerous of comically chases and confrontations. Usually the format of each episode consists of Tom trying to catch Jerry some way but endlessly failing, due to the cleverness of Jerry’s plans.

The target audience for Tom and Jerry is aimed towards a young audience, mostly children from the ages of 4 and upward. As there tends to be no dialogue within the cartoon, it provides an advantage for attracting a children audience, as they don’t have to listen to any dialogue to make sense of what is occurring in the cartoon.

The added advantage of this cartoon is that it has the power to grab the attention of an older audience, by playing on its humorous mayhem and comically accidents. This can make the older audience relate to personal experiences in reality of their own pets, getting up to no good.

Family Guy

Target Audience: 18 – 30 years old

Family Guy is an American animation that portrays the comically semi-dysfunctional Griffin family, which consists of Peter the farther “the so called breadwinner”, Lois the mother and house wife of the family, Meg the teenaged daughter who is portrayed as the unpopular member of the family due to Peter making jokes about her, Chris the stereotypically unintelligent teenaged son, Stewie the high intelligent baby who plans to conquer the world also having a personal vendetta to kill Lois all the time and Brain the talking dog who acts like a human being but still having the all qualities of an every day dog.

Family Guy is aimed towards the older teenaged and young adult audiences, with its array of comedy and intertextuality/parodies of different media texts within the episodes and also dealing with a number of stereotypes. Yet again this animation, like many others have the ability to make the audience relate to this animation and compare it to their everyday lives.

Simon’s Cat

Target Audience: 12 – Upwards

Simon’s Cat is a few short animated episodes, animated simply in black and white 2D, about a stereotypical household cat, which tries to achieve to pestered it’s owner called Simon into feed him, through various comical mishaps and annoyances like any other cat in today society.

This animation has the potential, just like Tom & Jerry to captivate a larger audience age range, through it’s very comically mishaps in the cat’s plans, than it’s originally target audience from 12 and upwards and also using the aspect of relating to today’s society.

Honda: The Dream Comes True

Target Audience: 20 – upwards

The animation, Honda: The Dream Comes True, is about a short story, portraying background life of Soichiro Honda through array of colourful montages and landscapes, repairing bicycles at his home, however, come night time Soichiro retreats in to his study and draws various designs and falls asleep in the process, where the audience get to experience Soichiro Honda’s dream about creating his design on a bigger scale within his fantasy world, and waking up to be enlighten that his dreams become reality in founding the Honda Company.

As this animation film is based around dreams and fantasy, it achieves by appealing to almost all audience age ranges, as is touches on the fact that everyone dreams and everyone can relate to the animation film. The reason why this animation can captivate a large audience, as it allows the audience to use their imagination, through it’s diegetic and non-diegetic sounds to empower their own dreams and also due to the fact that this short story can to perceived as being true from coming from nothing to becoming everything.

Conclusion

When conducting my research into various animations, I found that most animation found on the internet for example, were mostly to do with violence’s, shoot’em ups, blood and killing. From my own analysis there seems to be this niche market in audiences, in today’s society demanding violence’s and killing. This could be pointed at current events occurring around the world, that are influencing the audiences to response in this way.

However, shown from my research there are some beautiful, comical and inspiring pieces of animation work out there, which audience can enjoy, be entertained by and relate to, that appeals to more larger audiences, that haven’t fallen into this growing stereotypical audience, as mentioned above.

From this research, it has inspired me create an animation, aimed for a young audience, predominantly children, but also having the power to reach out to older audiences. I intend to create an interactive animation based around a day in a life of a dog. The audience will be able to interact with the dog in various situations and decisions. To keep the audience interested in my animation I intend to approach this animation with the idea of simplicity, with an added comical factor, inspired by Tom & Jerry and Simon’s Cat.

At last I have finally reached the third unit of my first year here at Bournemouth Uni, which is the Audience Unit, based mainly around flash animation for us interactive media production people.

The Breif for this unit states as follows: 

1. Research ‘animation in relation to audience’ and identify four different animation examples which you feel appeal to four distinctly different audience groups . Write 100 to 150 word on each example to explain and justify your choices, and obtain images or clips to illustrate your examples.

2. Based on your research findings, storyboard and create a short Flash animation of your own which would appeal to one of your selected audience groups.  Use ActionScript to explore interactivity, and the ways that giving control to the users can affect the narrative.  Also feature the use of sound/music). Explain your choice and solution, including how it relates to a particular user group.  

 

During the lectures and your research you will discover that there are also many different animation media and techniques (chalk, oil on glass, paper cut-out, cel-layers, plasticine,  puppetry etc).  However for the purposes of this project your chosen solution must be achievable using Flash software. Your solution may be either a complete short idea or a partially storyboarded larger idea, but in either case you must use movement and sound to showcase your solution. 

Aim for a user experience of between 1 and 2 minutes.

3. Use Flash to create a website which contains your research images and text, your storyboard, essay assignment and the completed Flash animation.

Bournemouth University Audience Unit Brief 2009

 

When I first got this brief a week and a half ago (apologies for my lack of posting on this blog due to medical reasons), I realised that I got a hell of amount of work to get through within 4 and a bit weeks and it also doesnt help that I will have to write an essay on top of this work load as well. The lectures have been nice an not told what the essay title is for this unit is yet and probably spring it on us next week, me thinks. not looking forward to that !!!

But on a positive note with this unit, I’ll get the chance to learn lot about animations and their workings and how the audience work within today’s media society.  

My next post, which will be posted later on today or tomorrow will be about my research into four different animations of my choice.