Professional Practice: Dissertation Proposal

For my dissertation proposal I wanted to focus on animation in Japan and the issues of localising it in the western world. I knew I wanted to focus on animation in Japan but wasn't sure about the topic I wanted to tackle. Although I thought about issues on localisation in the western world I wan't sure on it.

When I had my tutorial with Chris this week it really cleared up some things and gave me a clearer understanding on what I wanted to do. Instead on focusing on localisation I'm going to compare Japanese animation to American animation. There are many differences between the two such as different types of audience and specific types of genre. I plan to observe how history has affected two different types of animation e.g. how Tom and Jerry evolved into the The Simpsons and how Astro Boy evolved into One Piece

Professional Practice: Commission

For my professional practice, myself and a couple of other students were asked to film and make a promo video for "The Social" which is taking part on Saturday 28th of September at Mote Park in Maidstone. "The Social" is musical event with many different acts performing such as Robert Dietz, Carl Craig, Loco Dice and many more. For research I have observed other promo videos for festivals very similar to this one and have made a short list of ideas for shots etc.  

Major Project: Idea

In this blog I will demonstrate the process of how I've come up with my current idea for my major project and why I have chosen to do it.

My original idea was to do a 15 minute long sketch show which would consist of 3 sketches and a few mini ones in between. However when I went back home for the summer I stumbled upon a book that I bought several years ago by Andy Riley called "Great Lies to Tell Small Kids". The book is full of humorous illustrations with captions of (as the book says) lies to tell small kids. I then remembered that I had the option to create fifteen one minute episodes and the one minute episodes would be perfect to adapt these lies into film. So I decided to change my idea from a sketch show to a 15 episode series.

I decided that if I were to create this series I'd rather work with adults than children so I changed the title of the series from Great Lies to Tell Small Kids to Great Lies for Gullible idiots. My second port of call was to come up with a story for each episode, obviously the stories for each episode would be based around each page of the book but I still needed to form a story around these pages. So I decided to have a maximum of two main characters The Compulsive liar and The Gullible Idiot. The compulsive liar character will tell a lie and the gullible character will believe it, the gullible character will see the lie unfold in real life. I then decided to shorten the name of the title to just "Gullible" to keep it simple and to the point.

That's about all I've got so far I keep updating when I have more ideas or any changes are made

Coming back from the Summer

Over the Summer break I kept my self occupied with a number of things one of which was videoing and editing press conferences for a website called Bollywood Eye. I got this job through a friend who interviews for the company.

The first bit I did for the company was film the Satyagraha press conference. Unfortunately the camera which we were using was not high quality so the footage wasn't entirely clear and we had no external mic to record sound, however I felt that I grabbed a good spot to film from considering most of the camera crew from other websites were competitive for places to film. Overall I feel that the positioning was good but because the footage and audio was not high quality I felt that this let it down but I did my best to edit the footage together with parts of the trailer and it seems to be doing pretty well with views by reaching over 3000. Here is the video below.

 
The second piece of work that I did over the summer was an edit for the press conference of Bhagg Milkha Bhagg for the same website. This time it was filmed on a proper hd camera with an external mic so it was much easier to edit compared to the Satyagraha one. I put the official music of the film over the top of the interview to associate it more with the film. I feel that compared with the Satyagraha press conference this video looks and feels much better because of the difference in image and sound quality.

Fiction Adaptation: CD/DVD cover

Today I created my covers for my CD and DVD cases for the Fiction hand in. Below are my two covers:

I created a DVD and CD cover because I wasn't sure what case I would buy for the hand in. In both of the covers I used a picture of Jim Morrison (the author of The Graveyard Poem), an old letter for the background of the cover (to represent a fiction piece) and included all of the contents that will be available on the DVD and put them all together using photoshop. I personally prefer the CD cover as the image is a lot more tighter which I feel the DVD cover doesn't have.

Fiction Adaptation: Edit

Yesterday I finished my edit for The Graveyard Poem, in this edit I had to overlay lots of different sounds to give it that horror edge. At one point I came across a huge problem when my first rough cut was over six and a half minutes, at that point I really wasn't sure what I could cut. In the end to size it down to the 5 minutes mark I had to cut out a whole scene. The scene which I cut out was the bathroom scene as it contributed the least to the story and also the fact that Sam could be seen in the background of some of the clips (I didn't notice on the day). When I finished my edit I showed my peers and they really liked the sounds I used and the "creepy" feel that put across in some of the clips.