Our short animation!

Well here it is, the premier of our short animation film! Starring one boy and two girl cups! Myself, Ian and Callum were the brains behind this madness were some plastic cups come to life at a work desk. We unfortunately lost all of the first part of the sequence were the lady cup actually stumbles over a pen, so decided it would take too long to take all the shots again with the camera. A little disappointing but we certainly learnt from the mistake of not keeping all your files saved!

Editing is just wrong!

Well as we had to collect the filmed footage for our people on the move assignment, we then had to edit it. My first time editing and I was like Bambi on ice! Luckily I had Ian at hand to which he literally got the hang of it within a handful of minutes!? I'm obviously not up to date with these younger students when it comes to editing software!? We really didn't know what to expect here when we uploaded the footage, I was cringing to the max as you could imagine because of the shenanigans I had to endure during filming. If you look closely you will see me with a blue nose and wearing a swimming cap, not a good look on the streets trust me! To be honest we were pleasantly surprised because they was literally a couple of shots that we needed to do again, so for our first effort I thought we done really well, as for my acting well I'm not expecting a Bafta put it that way!

Wallace and Gromit here we come!

Through the week we started our stop motion for our digital media tools module. I remember growing up when I was little and watching the likes of Morph on art attack. Back then of course I thought he was real but to my sadness as I grew up I realised he was just made of plasticine and animated! The pain staking process of having to move the characters literally every millimetre and then taking a still shot is unbelievable!? Oh and we realised that when we decided to do our very own short animation involving plastic cups that come to life when the desk is left! Original hay? Here's a picture to show you are very own 'Hollywood set', you can see that we used a tripod to balance and steady the camera so that the shots would appear smooth and fluent.... Well that's the plan anyway!

Learning about time lapse shots!

Starting to get into the real gritty stuff here with some technical uses. We were set a project called It's Liverpool to which a time lapse shot had to be included. Very interesting technique this one, you tend to see it in a lot of wild life documentaries. Very time consuming but the end results look fantastic. I had a look through the wonders of You tube and found a great example of some work done by a guy throughout the year. He's edited all of his weather changing time lapse shots, looks like I might have to get my umbrella ready if its going to be wet out there!

First day filming for assignment! People on the move!

Well it's not every day you get to put on blue face paint and act a bit crazy is it!? I took on the role as the main character and actor for our first filming assignment. Our group consisted of Ian, Carlie, Natasha and myself (the main actor of course!).

None of us had uses camera equipment before so the task did seem a little daunting at first, but we all really got stuck in and helped one another. Mainly myself looking like a right prat of course!

We created a story line were an old cassette player is found and when the tape is played it influenced the character and his surroundings, by dancing around and turning into the actual song! The songs used were all hits from the 1990's (my prime of course!), from House Of Pain to Eiffel 65 As mad as it sounds it did go really well and he's some pic's to show what I got up too! I even wrecked a pair of my own trainers, hows that for commitment!

My first blog experience!

Righty then, first blog here we go!

First of all as this is the beginning of my three year journey, I start as a "mature" student with a totally different mind-set to the one I had ten years ago. I've really looked at the likes of teaching as something that really interests me and something that I certainly want to push for in the foreseeable future.

As this is a media course my experience to date has mainly been related more to the radio side of media, with myself being able to experience and produce my own news feeds, research, journalism as well as advertising.

I'm really looking forward to the prospect of a more visual aspect to media, which I feel that this course will give me. Future wise I'd like to think that with the experience that I gain will give me the option to either pursue a career in media, or to carry on my current instinct to follow a teaching route after my degree.

Being a consumer of media I'm well aware of the fact that it is evolving all of the time, especially of course with the likes of the internet and technology making media so accessible. This is something that really intrigues me to see just how far that it can go and develop. As a producer's outlook I would certainly be looking at current techniques and editing equipment that will put me up to date with the current media world we live in today.