Production diary:
Week 1:
At the weekend I was quite busy and was in Norwich but in the spare time I had I took the opportunity to ask people in the street how they feel about the environment, how they feel about British wildlife and to describe nature in one word. I was very surprised at the answers I got. Most people couldn’t care less about nature, others insisted it was fine and some didn’t know what I was talking about and started to comment on the Christmas decorations. The day I recorded was windy and I couldn’t really hear what was being said through my headphones so wasn’t very optimistic as to what the recordings would come out on the computer. On Monday I uploaded the audio I gathered and listened to it to separate what I could use and what I couldn’t. I was surprised to find most of it useable and could be edited, there was only around two recordings that I couldn’t use. On some of the recordings there was a lot of wind so I had to use the highpass filter to remove the lower sound registers, at first this also effected the people’s voices so I had to adjust the cutoff so it didn’t affect the voice.
Then I used Photoshop to draw characters for each of the different voices. I tried to remember who I asked so I could copy their general look to match the voice but I don’t fully remember what each person looked like so some of it is greatly improvised. At the time I didn’t think to take a picture of people and I also don’t know if they would have been ok with it.
Week 2:
I went to my mums work to interview people there. My mum is a biologist so the people at her work have a bit more understanding and concern for nature and understand smaller issues which other people wouldn’t even think about (beavers and bees) it was interesting to hear the different people opinions. My mum had told people I was coming and what I would be asking them so they had already prepared answers and read from a sheet which I think greatly affected the recording and they sounded robotic and it was obvious they were reading it off a script. So depending on their answers I asked them some extra questions which weren’t planned to make them think so I could get a more natural sounding response. It worked and I think I got some really interesting responses. Most of them all brought ready responses on paper and were so serious in reading them out and I think some of the answers were a little forced so I asked them surprise questions they were not prepared for and I feel I got some really good responses to them.
When I was back in college I looked through all of my rcordings inclusing the ones from town and selected my favourites. There are so many good ones and I know I am not going to be able to do all of them so I am going to start with my favourites and how thy go as I am not entirely sure about how long each thing will take. I started with three women which at the time I didn’t thing anything of it but now I realise in animating three people I am using up a lot more time to make one video. I loved drawing their characters ad I fond lip-syncing fun too but I didn’t reaise how mush time I would spend doing it. I also haven’t drawn a background and now I cant move my characers as I would have to move each layer individually and it would take way too much time. I now have to draw the background around the women and I have finished designing the next characetrs. A large blue man and a smaller man with a monotone voice.
Week 3:
I started animating a large blue man. I really like his audio, its clear, genuine and I think the most relatable out of all of them. This week I need to finish the main characters animations and lip-syncing. The big blue guy was more difficult to lip sync as in some areas he talked very fast and his words blurred together. In addition, the monotone dude mumbled in some areas which was difficult to animate. In the end I had to re adjust each mouth movement in the specific areas to avoid this. After I had finished lip-syncing, I added small animations. I am aware I am running out of time, so I have decided to do one small animation in each video and see how much time I have left. In the background of the monotone dude i designed a big window and planned to have a lot of animation outside but for now I just animated a squirrel. I think the long window is perfect to show the long jumps and flowing movement of the squirrel. But I will have to do that nest week.
Week 4:
This is my last week of production. When I logged on this morning and looked at my work there was a badger. It was appearing in my videos and I don’t know why. For some reason it’s just every time someone says the letter F. I don’t know how to get rid of it, so I had to edit it out of every area it appears individually. I really wanted to add in a lot more animations, but I am running out of time and still need to complete an end screen explaining about the MP. I am also planning to have both the bird and squirrel animations on it so having to edit out this badger was a massive time waster. After I have finished editing out the badger, I started to animate a squirrel running past the window in the monotone dudes background. It took quite a long time to draw each individual movement of the squirrel. And I had to colour each one in individually. I also created an animation of a bird flying and landing on a branch. This was harder to do then the squirrel. I found it difficult to create the movements for the landing but I think it turned out ok. I think I am also going to use these animations for the end screen. I think I will have a nice effect. Today I started the end screen, I figured this is the more important part and if I have time at the end, I can add in ore animations. For the end screen I have chosen a natural font which looks like a crayon has coloured it. I think it matched well and I have used the same colours from the wildlife logo for the fonts colour. I added a squirrel and a bird to the end page which I think look really nice. They are a nice way to end the video. But by ding this I have run out of time to add any extra animations to the main pieces and am very disappointed. I feel I should have focused on just one and made a really detailed one instead of a few less detailed ones.