Nisserin Bessioua - UCA Television Production

Research: Doing research in comic strips helped me to establish a clear style and one that I would stick with. I found that watching other people's animations with spoken word poetry was helpful to see what kind of styles work and how sound and sound effects can be used to enhance a production. Idea:  When I chose to create an animation I already had an idea of what I wanted it too look like in my head, I'm glad I stuck with my idea. First reading through the poem I imaged the characters as quite young, almost children as there's a line which stays they go to school. I went with this idea and made my animation look quite child like to match with the characters.  Editing: Throughout the project, I feel that I have gained some really valuable skills in Adobe Illustrator and After Effects. I enjoyed the challenges creating an animation brought and I found that I really enjoyed creating it and the freedom it gave to me to make everything look the way I wanted....

Troll by Shane Koyczan To get some further inspiration for my animation, I watched some other ones that were also with spoken word poetry to see some of the things they did.  I like the simple yet detailed images in this animation but how powerful they are, they use of no colour and then just red on the hearts makes them more significant. The images really aid the visualisation of the poem and help the audience to understand what the poet is saying. This is something I was to incorporate into my animation.  The mixture of animation and filming made it visually really interesting to watch. The animation is all draw on top of  filmed video, which is a close up of a grey textile. The focus pulls on the material is a nice effect and adds to the interest of the video, it makes it look very 3D and life like, rather than flat.   The voice over that was used to read the poem was really clear and made emphasis on the important and dramatic parts of t...

For the sound design of my production, I didn't want to overload it with multiple sounds as the idea I was going for is something simplistic.  I chose to include atmosphere sounds for the different location to make them more life like and realistic. For example, the scene where the characters are standing in the street, I recorded some street atmosphere and the sounds of cars driving past.  For the house scene, I chose specific elements of my drawing such as the fireplace, to which I added my recorded the sounds of my fireplace.  When the speech bubbles came up on screen, I chose certain ones to add a short cartoon pop sound or ding, this added to the effect of the speech bubbles and made it obvious when they were appearing. 

I decided to draw my animations in Adobe Illustrator as I felt this had all the tools I needed to make them look good and from my research into animation, Illustrator was the programme that was most recommend. I began with my first character, drawing out all his different body parts and separating them onto different layers so that when it came to animating them, the different body parts could be made to move separately.  After I drew the characters in Illustrator, I imported them into Photoshop and added in textures and effects to the layers to make them look more 3D and stand out from the backgrounds I also drew.  I enjoyed the drawing process of this, I felt that I could portray the characters I the exact way  wanted. I also draw my backgrounds in Illustrator which also gave me the freedom to put into film how I imaged it too look from ready the poem.  Images // Screenshots from Adobe Illustrator

I chose to use Adobe After Effects to edit my animation as after doing research into which program would be best to use, tis is the one that was most recommended. I enjoyed the After Effects workshop we had during the last project with Ferg and decided that I wanted to extend and increase my skills.  When I first started this was quite a challenge as I hadn't use after effects in great detail before. I did some online research about the different tools that were available and watched lots of online tutorials to help me get used to working in the programme. I did a test using my characters and backgrounds to see if it would be achievable. I started out fully animating my character, using the puppet tool to pin their arms and legs in certain places and then adding in keyframes to set the movements. This took quite a while to achieve to I chosen to use small sections of full animation rather than through the entire animation.  I enjoyed creating my animation, ...

Peanuts Comic Strip Comic strips begin in the 20th century and were usually published in newspapers and magazines. They would consist of a series of images in a strip that would tell a story through the images and speech/thought bubbles. Now, with the development of the internet, they also appear online, more commonly known as web comics. The 1920's saw Popeye, Tarzan and The Adventures of Tintin appear in our newspapers; these comics were hand drawn and by a comic artists.  I chose to hand draw my characters and backgrounds because I wanted to stick with the conventions of a comic strip but also because it meant that I could portray my characters in the exact way I wanted to.  Garfield Comic Strip One of the main conventions from comic strips is speech bubbles and thought bubbles. These appear of a character's head, depicting speech or an idea/thought they've had. This allow words from the story to be understood by the...

In our montage workshop, we were given the task of creating a 3-5 minute long montage, filming it as a group and then individually editing it to create 4 different videos. The montage was to focus on one of these themes: Hope Fear Joy Despair Ideas: As a group (Becca Josh J, Ida and and I) fit chose our theme for the montage. We picked hope because we thought we could portray this on screen well. Our idea was to have Josh appear to be running for president, we would follow him along his journey, seeing him getting ready up until he did his campaign speech. We decided on filming in the style of Edgar Wright, using whip pans and fast transitions, and from this we wrote a hot list of everything we wanted to include, we also wrote out a script for the speech. On the day of filming, we spoke to Mike who explained to us that a montage doesn't need to have a narrative and should be different images that connote the same emotion. I understood it by thinking about it as ...

The Peanuts comic strip was written and drawn by Charles M. Schulz and began in the late 1950s, running until the 2000's. It published a total of over 17,000 strips and at one point ran in over 2,600 newspapers. The story focuses on a group of young children with main character Charlie Brown who lacks lots of self confidence. According the The World Encyclopedia of Comics,  he can't fly a kite, kick a football or win a baseball game.  There have been one off television specials such as A Charlie Brown Christmas in 1965, which was nominated for an Emmy Award. The style is quite simple and isn't too detailed which makes it easy to understand. I like this as it means the story is the most detailed part of it, when it comes to my animation I want to work with this style, making my images simple so that the story and poem is the most prominent part. 

Low Battery by Prince Ea Animation by Sabine Allaeys This is a a mixture of animation styles, it includes stop motion animation which as it is all done with taking images and editing the together, it also includes things that have been added in during post production like words and images. This is another simple video and I like how the white background makes the coloured images stand out that much more.  The added words on screen emphasise certain points of the poem, this is what I would like to do with the speech bubbles in my animation as I want them to highlight the important parts . The images appear on screen at the same time as the words are spoken word which makes the poem easy to follow along to.  I liked that this video was simple yet powerful and made an impact. It emphasised the message the poem was saying and made it have a strong impact. In my animation I want to make sure that my audience can understand what...

Suggestions that were made during my rough cut viewing: Make sure speech and thought bubbles line up with the audio In the editing process, it takes layers upon layers of images to build up the animation so when it comes to lining with up with audio, it's tricky to get it just right as there's too much data for it to play back. To make sure everything is lined up, I listened to the audio separately and at points of where things should start and appear, I wrote down the time code and the made this match up in After Effects.  Take out added images  In some sections of my animation where I felt there needed to be more on screen, I added in images and emojis that matched up with the words the poet was saying. This draw the audience away from the story and the world I had draw and created and didn't work as well as I imaged. I agree that these should be removed as the simplicity of the animations works fine without them, and if there is a word or image that I wan...

" 59 loved 60 from afar, but 60 thought 59 was… odd. And then 60 met 61, who was like 60, but a little bit more. Together, 59 and 61 combined to become twice what 60 could ever be. A prime example of love!" My interpretation of the poem after to listening to Harry baker perform is that the characters 59, 60 and 61 are all quite young and the poem is based around that innocent first love. I wanted to portray this in my adaptation and by decided to create an animation, I felt I could successfully portray how I imaged the characters to look and act.  The poem contains lots of detailed descriptions of the characters and I wanted to stick with the poets descriptions of them, keeping to the orginalitiy of the poem but, by changing some of the locations and situations the characters to make it more my own adaptation.  The story in the poem is quite simple and I want to keep a certain simplicity to it as well. I aim to draw all the images in...

Harry Baker is a poet and writer from London. His most famous works include 59, the poem I have chosen for my adaptation, Paper People and The Sunshine Kid.  Whilst writing and performing spoken word  poetry , he was also studying mathematics at university. Now a full maths graduate, he is working full time on his poetry. His work has been shared on TED.com and has been views millions of times, worldwide.  Titles: 2010 London Slam Champion 2011 UK and European Slam Champion 2012 World Slam Champion I chose the poem 59 because when I first read it, I could instantly picture in my head, and see what I wanted to with my adaption. I also read Paper People and I liked the style in which Baker writes his poems. Watching him perform the poems, the fast paced intensity that he projected made the poems exciting to listen to and helped me to further envision what I wanted from my adaptation.  References: http://www.greenbelt.o...

In order to help plan out what i wanted my production to look like, I wrote a script operating the different lines of the poem and writing down what location will be and what action will be happening with what characters. I wrote a script to help me plan out what I need to do. I have the lines from the script in one column because i want the poem to be read as a voice over, with the animation underneath. I then have another column for the action and another to specify the location as i have a few direct backgrounds. This helped me work out what I need to draw and what I need to animate my characters doing.  From this script, I can now go through making show I have everything I need to make the project and then I can begin putting it together. 

I did a short test of my animation to see how well it would work and if i could convey on screen for what I imaged my characters to do. In order to do this, I looked through lots of online tutorials to find the best technique for animating in Adobe After Effects and this is what I was able to make.  I am happy with the progress of the animations and the way the characters and backgrounds look. There will be a scene in the final animation that looks like they test video. I have planned out different scenes where the characters will be doing different things, so that the is more variety, making the animation more interesting to watch. This also gives more more room for a complex sound design as more will be happening than them just running. 

Since my initial drawings, I have changed they way the characters look. This was because after using my first drawing, animating them was quite difficult and it became hard to get them to move in the way i imagined. By changed the characters from looking like numbers to actual people, I was able to animate them much easier, being able to make their arms and legs move in a  more natural way.  After reading through the poem again, I felt that by making them look more like people, I would be able to convey more of their personalities in the way they looked. I took all my original ideas of how I imagined their characters to be and just changed the design of them.  Although I liked my original drawings, I also like the news ones and feel that the new design will make it much easier for me to animate them. My next task is to do a test of the animation, to see how well it will work and then to draw the different backgrounds to go with the different scenes. ...

I have chosen to the do the poem 59 by Harry Baker. I decided on this because after looking through the list of peoma,s this was the one i could most envision in my head. I could already picture what i wanted it too look like and  see where I wanted to go with my adaptation. I want to create an animation to go with the poem, incorporating a complex sound design to bring it all together.  I started by testing out some ideas for the characters in the poems and what I wanted them to look like. These are my initial drawings, drawn using photoshop. I read the poem several times and made a list of the three characters different personalities, using how they were described in the poem influence my drawings. 

What worked ? Group work: As a group, I think that we have worked really well together.I have really enjoyed working with Josh, Ida and Becca and I would happily work with them again.  There was always good communication and everyone was always able to give their opinions. We started of early with having lots of group meetings and keeping everyone involved. We gave each other tasks so that we all had something to do towards the project and we stuck to our roles.  I think there was a good atmosphere between everyone in the group and I felt comfortable sharing my opinions. When watching the footage and sharing ideas, I felt like I could say if i didn't like something or if I wasn't too sure if it worked and this was good because it meant that as a group, we looked at how we could maybe to it differently. If someone had an idea, we would always do a test and see if it was possible and how well it worked. Especially in terms of editing, Josh would always try to achiev...

Behind the Scenes Posts In order to promote our digital news channel, we decided to use social media. This worked as our age range is students and younger audiences who are most likely to hear about us on social media sites. We created a Facebook account that I manage, Twitter which is updated by Ida and a Youtube Channel, controlled by Josh. The Facebook page is where we first uploaded our viral videos and was the only pace people could watch it as we didn't want the views to be split. This way we could see exactly how many people had watched them both and we could share the videos with a mass amount of people.  The posts since then have been short ones advertising our website and trying to get people to go over and see what things we've been posting. We also did a series of "Get to know us" posts where Josh had made small posters that include and image and short description of each of us which have been posted over the past few weeks, each one linki...

ROUGH CUT FEEDBACK Main Video: Our production is quite fast paced and where we had to include an interview in the package, it slowed it down quite a lot.  For this, it was suggested to us that we should try and add in some more effects to make it more silly and fit in with our brand more.  There were sum points in our video where the music was slightly too loud with meant whoever was talking was competing with the music. To fix this, we just went through the video and listened carefully and then told Josh where he needed to turn down the music more so the person could be heard.  In our script we managed to fit in lot of information and we were told that because it goes so fast, it's quite hard to take in all the information. Although is wasn't an issue and just added to the silliness of our video.  Promo Video: We were told that our promo fit in well with our brand and clearly portrays to our audience what Student Yak is a...

In our intro we reference lots of different viral videos to give some history and show how many different ones there are. Charlie bit my finger, David went to the dentist PPAP  Keyboard Cat Damn Daniel  Harlem Shake  Shia Lebouf "About a week ago" To introduce Katie Joslin, we created an X Factor style intro. We used a similar style of graphics to show our audiences things about her youtube channel such as how and views and subscribers she has. Josh and I also recorded the voice over to go with this which is in the same style as the Peter Dixon, who does the actual X Factor voiceovers. Katie Joslin - Introduction During Katie's Interview we included lots of little pop ups of different memes and references to random things that match with words that Katie says. for example, she said the word "saw" so we included the eyeball emoji, she also says the word "hobby" so we included an image of The Hobbit. These only last for a few s...

Josh has been the main editor of our production and has done a great job. There were multiple times where he would edit a section and then as a group we would sit and watch it, making suggestions of things we wanted changing and ideas for different effects and shots to use.  We would often discuss things that we wanted to see and then Josh would go away and try to create what we'd described. Sometimes these ideas worked and sometime they didn't. Overall I feel like we've all had an equal say through the editing process about what we want and we've been really good with communicating so everyone has been able to be really open about whether they like or don't like something.  A section that I completed was the colour correction of our shots. In our live production, we used two different types of camera, one sony and one Canon which meant that there was a colour difference in the shots. one was much warmer and the other was very blue. As a group we sat an...

Last week, Josh and I decided to record the voice overs for our production. We went into the sound recording room and tried to set up the equipment, unfortunately it wasn't working so we ended up recording our sound on an Zoom H4N and connected that to the Rode Mic. We started by recording the voice over for our interview introduction which we wanted in the style of the X Factor intros. Josh read through the script and we recorded it multiple times in different ways so that we had options when it came to editing. We also wanted to record our Meme Of the Week voice over which we recorded the same as the intro where we recorded different versions in different styles. For our promo trailer, we went through the script and recorded each bit separately so that it was easily in the editing stage.  Overall the sound came out really well and we were happy with with the final sound.  Images // zoom_zh4nsp_h4nsp_handy_recorder_1116977.jpg

In our after effects workshop, we experimented with creating 3D texts in Cinema 4D and how to add animation to a text in after effects. After Effects: In after effects we started by creating a title, which we then went onto having move on screen and the off again, adding in a "wiggle" so that it moves from side to side as it comes in and adding a fade as it  goes of screen again. Although Josh had already created all the graphics for our production, I was a good opportunity to get to now how to do it myself so that in future projects I could create my own moving graphics.  Cinema 4D: In Cinema 4D, we started the same by having a title on screen, which the then added different effects to, making it 3D and adding on rounded edges. We then put it lights to light up the text, moving them around making sure that they lit up all the text. To make the animation, we then added in a camera and had to set starting an finishing points so that when the animation ...

Location:  On shoot day, it started to heavily rain so we had to change location from the car park to a room inside.  This worked just as well if not better because we had less things to think about like having a long enough microphone cable and outside noises like wind. Although the room was slightly smaller than we would have liked, this was okay  Equipment: We had set up a static camera to film a wide show of the whole live so that we definitely had the whole thing on camera. This also helped our presenter because he knew where to look when presenting his PTC.  We also had a handheld camera, moving around the room to capture the action, getting lose ups of the contestants, audience members and of the bottles being flipped.  Props: Because our presenter was holding a microphone, we wanted to somehow have a branded microphone like they no in real news. We tried to make our own out of cardboard but that didn't go too well  so w...

Interview: Set Up: The day before we planned to film our interview, we put together our set, moving sofas and tables into one of the lecture rooms so that it looked like a casual space and wasn't too formal. We used our own personalised props like mugs and cue cards with the interviewers questions on to keep our brand running through all our shots.  We also set up our lights before they day as well because from previous experience, we know that they take time to set up. We got two other students to be stand ins and sit in the positions where our interviewee and interviewer would be sitting so that we could get the lighting right and make sure there were no harsh shadows. This meant that the cameras were in the basic positions and that after we set up our cameras on the day, they could be easily adjusted so that it looked good on camera.  Cameras: We had two cameras filming the interview at the same time, one on the tracking dolly filming a wide...