Assignment 4: Evaluation - Looking Back

It was our final assignment of the entire first year and I can honestly say this was on of the most enjoyable assignments. The blog work this time was slightly lighter and I felt I really perfected all of my blogs on this particular go, whereas previously I have had so many, I almost lost control. I feel my organisation is now under control and I plan in advance when I am going to blog, to make sure the outcome of them is as high as it needs to be.

1) Evaluate how you have grown and developed as a practitioner, during this assignment?
I feel as though my editing and organisation skills in the planning of a production has significantly improved compared to previous projects and assignments. Even though our time for each project in this assignment was limited, we had a feasible amount of time to plan, film and edit a production to the best of our ability, and still make it look quite good! I have thrown myself into the planning side of things too, by creating storyboards and brain-storms to make the production easier to film.

2) What 2 things are you most proud of?
During this assignment, I am most proud of My Recurring Dream, which was the recreation of the actual My Recurring Dream, directed by Andre Chocron. I really like the way I edited this, and my friends and family have also looked at my videos from this assignment and agreed that this was the sleekest project. I feel as if I really got into this, and enjoyed critiquing the original movie, and writing up how I edited and processed mine. I am also proud of the quality of my blogs. I feel as if they have improved in the sense of perfecting them. I have included links and a number of quotes during critiques, and really gone quite in-depth detail of when I write up about my personal productions.

On the whole, I really felt as if this was my favourite assignment by far. I have loved every single production and the editing of my projects has improved dramatically. I feel as though I could improve on editing productions a bit better when we have to create a soundtrack. The Foley production we had to create, I found quite difficult, and felt with a little more time to plan and execute the edit, I could've done much better on this.

I have throughly enjoyed my first year at Plymouth College of Art, and cannot wait for the second year. I would just like to say a big thank you to Tim, Billy, Mike, Neil and Wendy for being absolutely incredible tutors and helping me when needed! See you in September and roll on Year 2!


Cheerio. :o)

- Olivia.

Documenting The Doing #30: Waggle Dance

It was our final production of the 1st year and we had been assigned quite a special task for this. A board game has been designed and will soon be going on a number of shelves in well known toy and department stores. Our challenge was to create "How to Play" video for the game.

Waggle Dance is a board game that consists of a number of different challengers throughout that are not as easy as your average day-to-day board game. The main challenge was to collect as many honeycombs as possible, in order to win the game.

Waggle Dance

The first task we had to complete was actually to play the board game, so we could get our heads around the concept in order for our video to make sense and be a lot more beneficial for us as well as the audience. The game itself took us around 3 hours to play before we completely understood the rules, regulations and benefits of each component.

Planning was underway on the morning after we had learnt how to play, and this was crucial. This was the part that we could really get our heads down and experiment with the ideas of how to film. We had to make is pretty simple, yet effective, as we had to teach people how to play a game, which isn't easy! For a clear idea of our plans, we had created a brain storm in which we would jot down every single idea that came into our head. By doing this, we could always inter join 2 ideas with each other and make them twice as good.

Storyboard and Brain storm

It took us a while to figure out what would be the simplest yet most effective way of filming this. We began to think of using a green-screen, and this would have been amazing, however we were so limited on time we physically wouldn't have been able to do this. Our idea was to make it look as though we were in the game itself, and the objects would be the same size as us. We would then begin to use voiceovers to narrate the production, as this would be fairly easy for the audience to follow. We also wanted to make it quite humorous, as the last thing we wanted was for the audience to get bored. 

After numerous decision changes and a lot of debating, we finally settled on quite a simple approach to this production that we thought would work in a simplistic yet effective way. Myself, Chloe, Naomi and Kim would play Waggle Dance around the table, and Matt would take control of the filming. Whilst we were playing the game, Matt took a numerous amount of close up shots and reactions. We also had a couple of shots of me throwing the dice, Chloe picking up her pieces and Naomi turning the cards, so when it came to editing, we could have a lot of cutaways and different angled shots to keep the audience interested. 

Other elements we added, that we had picked up from previous productions, was a time lapse and a stop-motion animation. This would create a little more depth with the production as a whole and make it that little more interesting for the audience. As we know what it's like to watch many animations and time lapses ourselves, we thought it would be a nice touch and both elements really worked in the edit. 

Close up/cutaways

There were a number of issues we had to resolve whilst filming this production, and the main concern was the numerous lighting changes. As the lighting we were using was predominantly natural, we were dependent on the weather. The sun kept going in and out, which began to get quite frustrating. In the end, we had to rise above this and accept the fact it wasn't going to be perfect. We had tried for hours to get it right but it just wasn't working as well as we'd hoped. We sometimes used studio lights to try and cover up the lighting changes, however this created a number of fierce shadows which just looked worse.

Other than the filming side of things, we also had to develop a number of different audio sounds to create a wild-track. This would be the main bulk of our production backing noise and would also have a few other noises connected to it. The rolling of the dice and the flipping of the cards were just two of the many sounds we recorded to create our own unique soundtrack, as opposed to getting it from the internet.

OUR FINAL PRODUCTION: How to Play Waggle Dance

The filming took a total of 8 hours, and this didn't include our final and most important factor of the production. Voice overs. This was another key element of our production, and would either make it or break it. The following day after filming, we hired out an edit suite in college to have a little privacy when it came to editing all of our clips together. We then had to create a script to ensure a steady speech recording to create a base narration that would explain the game to the audience. We then matched up the narrative speech with the actions on the game board.

On the whole, I am really happy that we managed to pull such a difficult production off. We had a number of problems in which we had to solutionate but I believe we did this to the best of our ability. The only thing I would go back and change would be the lighting; I would make it much more natural and make sure we focused more on the technique other than the content.

Cheerio. :o)

- Olivia.