Digital Video Production Evaluation

Digital Video Production Evaluation

Jordy Cernik, year 2 commercial radio 

My idea was meant to be simple, something that would hit my set target audience of 14 year old.I believe that at 14 years old young students are more aware these day about planing there future. If an advert  can capture there imagination at this stage, then they have the time to work at school towards the direction the college course they would like to do. I also wanted to show that this age group can start to look now at the course they want to do at college, they can take control and go in to see people at the student advice centre, they can direct there own path for any early age.

I have a back ground in making video and TV production but i have never worked with animation this way before, i understand and have a lot of experience in green/blue screen work, so i though instead of playing safe and just doing a normal "let look round the college" style production, i would give my self a challenge.

We first worked on ideas and turned them in to pitches, once this was done and feed back was given, we moved into creating story boards before filming began.

The next thing i did was buy a small photo box that had a blue screen backdrop, i also go to smallpar-can  style flood lights to laminate through the sides of the photo box cloth, this gave me my ready made shooting set. next was come come up with the look of the models, for this i tried two three different style:

First was using my kids toy figure, i got 4 small plastic looking characters to play the part and put them in to the box, with out shooting anything i could see that this made the production to young, instead of secondary school, it look more like it would appeal to infants or junior school kids.

Next i tried modelling the figure with a lot of detail and attention to the look, given the characters fingers,eyes and even belts, but after making one which took almost a day, i felt i did not have the skills necessary to make the models look up to the right standard, it also took away some of the comedy feel i wanted and made it more of a lecture than a chat style that i was looking for.

Lastly i tried a more ruff, quite childish approach to there look, i gave them different colours, put a bit of texture on them and made them the eel like a student had made them.

Once i was happy with the style which also gave me the ending to the video, at the time i had the script and the ending was very plain, animation, title out. but after thinking about the style i wanted, this gave me the idea to have a picture of a student at the end with his details and course he is doing, this gives the impression that the student in the animation made the video, so if you join gateshead college, you could do this to...

The script i had worked on before had was quite a simple script, i got the idea of a students point of view about there first time going in to Gateshead college simple from listening to the conversations around me with in the class. a number of my class mates had been going to look round hire education course and there feedback sparked the idea to let a student tell there story. seeing it from there point of view like the voice over was just taking to his mate (and they say the best advertising is word of mouth) 

Once i had the basic out line of the idea i set to work shooting at home with my small studio set up, i first tackled the longest part of the animation which was the two main character, for the set i got some blocks and a small table for a dolls house that look normal and not to childish. I ended up snapping around 500 shots for this part of the production which took me around 8 hours, the next day I set about doing the smaller parts (the drummer, the dancer and i also did a photographer but this got lost in the transference due to a upgrade from windows to mac at home) this part was quicker using up only just over 350 shots and around 6 hours work.

over the next could of days i worked on editing the peace together, my idea was to have the screen split in the middle, one the top section would be thee two main character always in shot. The bottom section of the screen would fade i and out of the three other characters, but due to the loss of the photographers shots, i dint have enough shots to keep this section in vision though out the production. it was at this stage i had to come up with a new way of mixing the action together.

After a couple of tries with different ideas, i settled on a black screen with the action taking place with in boxes on the screen, this worked well to make the main two characters stand out and they were still able to stay in vision through out the production. I used my other two characters as fade ins, one would fade in one one side of the screen and show some action, then the other would appear and a cross fade would happen taking the action from the first to the second.

I felt this worked well, maybe even better than my first idea would have been, it make the eyes work and if you done pay attention, you will miss something, this also makes the advert re-watchable, this means that people will watch it more that once so they can look at the different action that they have missed.

So just to recap the editing, the first thing i had to do was transfer the stills in to my editing program (pinical) then render (make a high quality video) of each section (the two characters, the dancer, the drummer) this gave me three video to using in the main edit, this will have lost me a very minor bit of the quality, but this is why i first render it in a high quality formate, the reason i did this first is to make it easier to work with it, with in the edit.

At this stage I started to look at the paper work, I already had the script and was regally updating my reflective journal, I looked at the health and safety side of the project, this took me into working out a risk assessment and to look at the locations, crew and cast I would need.

As this was mainly a one man production, there was not much to cover in these parts, I did come up with a permission sheet for the cast, so that I could use there recordings.

Once all the paper work was complete and ready, I had a chat with the drama department to get the right voice to do the voice over. Once he was found I was able to set up a quite area to do a number of recording in different style to cover all my bases when I put them into the final edit.

Also at this time I put a ruff cut of the video on to you tub so that Gary our tutor could have a look and comment on it, with Gary happy I started to finish of the final cut adding the v/o. I also recorded a small v/o part with a member of the first years as I need a lady's voice to finish the project off, both voice overs signed the permission slips to cover recording legal basses.

The final technical part of the recording was to save the project into different formats, for lossy I save the project into MEPG 4 which took up o.51 MB of memory which made the recording very blurred, this can be used in and email but I would not recommend it.

Next I used MEPG 2 which gave me the lossy formate and was high quality DVD standard, I also did a recording that shows the In between formats that could be use on a website or emails.

With everything now up and running on my blog for marking, Gary gave some great feed back, only thing left was to let the rest of the class view and project and give there own feed back.

The class and Gary gave very positive feedback and it seams like the video was like by all, they all agreed it it the target audience and that the idea was worked well, the only negative was from one person that thought the man v/o did not sound young enough, which is a fear comment.

Over all I enjoyed the challenge, it was a shame I lost the photographers recording as I feel it needed that extra bit to make it a fuller project.

Next time I will spend a little more time on the voice over and do some work in logic to produce the sound more professional.

I would have also cut the script down a little as I feel the voice over is rushed and to fast to fit the recording.

I would have liked to get the blue screen to work better but for some reason I have not come a cross, the shine of the play-do made the merging process not work properly.

At the end of the day I feel this would make a good start to a project that would do Gateshead college we'll to reach out to the 14 year old and under.

Mark out of 10 I would give 8