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.