Channel 4seven final video!

After my final idea kept going wrong, I decided to take it back to being simple and remembered the video I made that I thought would be good before of the lady sweeping the numbers into something so I got some old wood shavings and set up a scene, this time getting the camera in a good position where you could see everything. In the last videos I had a terrible time with focusing as the camera would focus on whatever was nearest and it made the video look really messy.

I think this one is definitely the best out of the others, but if I had more time I would have developed it further and tried to make it look more professional, but I think I was a bit too ambitious with this brief as I am not used to animation and although I knew it would take a long time I thought I would enjoy it more than I did, which is a shame. Think I'll stick with photography and illustration!

D&AD brief no.2 -Channel 4!

For the second D&AD brief, I chose to make a short ident for channel fours new channel called 47 which is an alternative way to catch up with you're favourite tv shows from the last week. I knew straight away I wanted to make a stop motion video. I looked at the existing idents for the channels related to channel 4 and found that I really liked the e4 ones that were just complete randomness and had cluttered rooms with different objects moving around, I knew I wanted to go along the same lines.

I've noticed for a while these little railway figurines popping up on greetings cards, ads and over the internet. I really like them and have always wanted to try photographing them as you can come up with some really clever ideas, but never knew what they were! Here are some examples I found.

I went to my local railway model shop and bought some, next it was time to set up a scene! I couldn't really think of what to do and was eating some fruit at the time so I just used that and loved the outcome...

There is just something about them and they are so effective.

Thinking about what to do for the video I gathered a load of objects with the numbers four and seven on to try and represent the channel, I had fun messing around creating little scenes for them, but trying to do a stop motion video with tiny figures that don't bend is very hard and frustrating! Here are a couple of the early experimental videos..

(you might have to give them a while to load)

I have no idea why these ones are upside down :/

I really like the simplicity of this video

For this one I took the little people outside to play!

These were not working well, it was too cold and I wasn't getting the effect I had in mind, but after really like the one where I spelt out the numbers with pins I focused on that idea. I looked at each figurine closely and what it is that they do and there was one woman who was holding a broom, I had an idea to have her sweeping up something to reveal the numbers..

D&AD brief - The living dead!

...With this new idea in mind, I ordered some face paints and invited my cousin round to get creative turning ourselves into skeletons! I wanted to try and capture us sat in front of the tv or somehow draped around it to show how the youth of today are being taken over by technology.

Here's us getting ready!

And here are the images!

Although rather scary, I think some of these could be really effective!

I did a lot of playing around with them...

I love all of these, some look a bit too busy though and noticeably photoshopped. I added photos of little light dots known as bokeh that I had taken over the years to give them some interest. For the last one I added the music symbol I did earlier during the drawing with light phase. I think it adds something to the tv. The last image is my favourite and will be my final image that i'll submit!