Trailer Mashup

For this mash up I took two trailers from different genres, comedy and drama, and edited them together to create an action style trailer using the constraints of that genre. Things like choppy edits, cheesy box wipes as seen in the A-team and heavy rock music lend them self well to the genre.

The right trousers

Pixilation is a stop motion technique where live actors are used as a frame-by-frame subject in an animated film, by repeatedly posing while one or more frame is taken and changing pose slightly before the next frame or frames. The actor becomes a kind of living stop motion puppet. This technique is often used as a way to blend live actors with animated ones in a film, such as in The Secret Adventures Of Tom Thumb by the Bolex Brothers, which used the technique to compelling and eerie effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixilation).

We watched some short films to get some idea of how Pixilation works, one of these, “Neighbours” is an award-winning 1952 short film by Scottish-Canadian filmmaker Norman McLaren.

"I was inspired to make Neighbours by a stay of almost a year in the People's Republic of China. Although I only saw the beginnings of Mao's revolution, my faith in human nature was reinvigorated by it. Then I came back to Quebec and the Korean War began. I decided to make a really strong film about anti-militarism and against war." — Norman McLaren

I found the film surprised me, I was expecting something for children and because of that was genuinly shocked by the violence in it. The pixilated technique lent itself well to the fight scenes as the jarred movement created by the stop motion filming created a feeling of agression and a sense of discomfort.

McLaren Based his film on a single idea, we used this method in the creation of our own pixilated video animation although it has to be said our idea was not exactly politically motivated, ours was based on the idea that our clothes are not inanimate objects but alive!! Really though it was just an excuse for Richee to get half naked!?

For the sound I wanted to mimic the jagged random feel of the peice. Glitch a dance music sub-genre lends itself well to this form of animation. I created the sounds using reason 3.5

Half term!!

Right now we're on a term break that's euphemistically entitled "Reading Week", although im not entirely sure what we ought to be reading as there arent many titles in the library relating to our degree! I have instead taken this opportunity to tidy up my blog, change the template and edit some of the posts. I wanted to add some text to decribe the proccesses surrounding the 'brainstorming' involved in creating our program "Pip to pint". Ive also to updated the text on the buget giving a more detailed explaination of the costs involved.

Wesail Video

This is the video evidence of our trip to a wesail, showing the roles that we undertook for the project. This was my first Wesail and I was'nt entirely sure what to expect. I had visions of druids making sacrifices, pagan rituals involving naked dancing or the worship of some bizzare gods! I was wrong of course. What it was was a truly local festival celabrating everything thats great about somerset. It was a real family affair with kids running around, young and old having a right old fashioned knees up! As you will see it was a lot of fun and there were some really knowledgable characters able to explain in detail the tradition of Wesails.

Planning an audio project

Below are some of the notes taking during the planning stage of "Pip to Pint".

Click on an image to enlarge.

These are the notes from our first "Brainstorming" session. In this session we stormed possibilities for our radio program, what type of program was it going be? Comedy? Documentary? Local interest? The posibilities were myriad so all ideas were written up on the board. As they say in radio"No ideas a bad idea", or did I just make that up!? Actually I think the saying goes "There are no original ideas in radio"!!