Compare and contrast Jaydon with a character from a similar U or PG film.

Jaydon is a friendly horse made out of placticine.  He is made of many different colours and has many different friends. He dreams of becoming a magical unicorn. 

Gromit Is a friendly dog made of clay. He is one of the stars of Wallace and Gromit. Although he can't speak. He has good intentions and gets in many adventures.

They are both similar because they are both well know animals  that little children could reconise easily (horse and dog). They are also both made out of a material that can be sculpted in to a cartoon character. They are both friendly creatures and have good intentions and are very kind and caring in there ways. They are both admired by there friends and look after there friends also. The set that they are placed in are both colorful and engaging to there audience. They are both also memorable characters because of the way they are made and how they bring the audience into there world. They both don't look like animation but like a real life character in a film. 

They contrast because Jaydon is multi-coloured and that makes him look more non-realistic, but this made him more appealing to children. Gromit is the same dog like colours and has all the characteristics of a dog. Jaydon is more of a cartoon representation and Gromit is more of dog representation. Gromit is also more of a side-kick and has a fellow main character his best friend Wallace. Jaydon is the main main character. 

Evaluation Photos

What our target audience can learn from our film

Children can learn different morals throughout the film for example they help Jeydon follow his dream of becoming a unicorn. This shows two important things, the first of which is how important friendship is. the children can learn that helping others is a big part of friendship. The second is that it is important to follow your dreams and make your dreams come true. By using unicorns and bright colours it is teaching the children to have a creative mind.
Another moral conveyed in our film is teamwork, for example, the friends all play a little part to help their friend Jeydon fulfill his dream of becoming a unicorn.

our opinions

We are first of all happy with the whole of our film, we feel it is a real achievement. The music we felt was one of the things we were more happy with as the music we picked fit really well with our movie. The music was upbeat and happy perfect for little children.  Another thing we were really happy with was the camera angles we used. At first we thought that these would be quite hard to use in i-stop motion but we think they worked really well and put across the messages we wanted to put across to our target audience. We were also happy with our characters, we all had to go away and make our own character and we feel that they again were perfect for both our genre and target audience.

We are unhappy with only a few things. The first thing we are disappointed with was that we left out a piece of dialogue. When pauline is talking about a horse she once knew we forget to say about the map she goes and gets and so she just randomly goes and get a map. We don't think it shall effect the story line to much but it might if an older person is watching it. Another thing we need to improve on is the editing going from I-stop to final cut, because the pictures were so short it was hard to cut out a mistake where as if we would have noticed our mistake on I-stop it would have been much easier. We have one moment where it goes black (just for a second) because it was very difficult to edit. We also have some shots that are darker than others but this could not be helped as we did not have the appropriate equipment to light our woodland set.


Overall we are very happy with the quality and turn out of our video.

Overall we are very happy with our movie. 

Children's Film

This is our children's film movie! 

Last Day of Editing.

The first thing we did was added the diagetic sounds to our piece such as walking on leaves. This took us less time than we had anticipated making us on track for the rest of the things that we have to do.
We have already found the music we want to include in the sound track it is now just a matter of putting it all in the right place.
We are going to swap the movie from final cut to garage band to make things easier and more precise.

Next we added effects to it. We want to make the part where Jayden day dreams of being a unicorn in black and white or sepia to make it look more dream like.
We found an effect called dazzle which made our dream like effect look even better as it was sparkly.
We also found a ripple dissolve transition that also made our piece look dream like and really emphasizes that it is a dream and makes it clear and understandable to little children.

Next we moved on to adding the soundtrack in garage band. This will allow us to add non-diagetic sounds to our children's film. This is also taking a lot less time than we thought.

We have now finished. Overall we think it is really good and are really proud of the work we have created.

Check list for monday.

We are fairly worried about not finishing in time so i thought i would make us a check list of things we still need to do so we don't waste 5 mins in between each thing wondering what we need to do next.

- We need to put in the naturalistic diagetic sound effects that jade and molly made outside.
- We need to add our non-diagetinc music that we have created.
- We need then just to check that it all runs smoothly and make sure we haven't missed any bits that have things like hands in.
- If time add some transitions to make it look more professional.

Then we should be finished :)

Day 5 - Filming and Editing

In today's lesson we stayed as one big group, to get the last of the credits filmed to save time. This didn't take us long. Then we started to delete the frames that had hands in them or where they where blurry. We had to repeat some frames in the credits so the children watching would be able to read the name easyer.
We also re-arranged some of the extra things we had filmed to put them into the right place. We thought that doing this in i-stop would save time rather than going straight to final cut.
We then put the animation into final cut to be able to edit it if any was needed to be done and then add the sound effects and dialogue. The editing did take us longer then we thought it would, because we had not got rid of a frame that we didn't want so we had to cut it out of the film. We then added the dialogue under the movie which fit the movie quiet well and we only had to lengthen some of the frames to make the dialogue fit. Although, the dialogue did not fit where we expected as the frame was not long enough but we actually preferred it to have the establishing shot of the penguin (pauline) and then have the voice carry on narrating whilst she finds the map. It made it sound more fairytale like and so we diddnt change it to how we originally wanted it because we preferred it this way.
Over all a very successful lesson and we learnt that the editing takes longer than we thought and adding sound effects is also harder than we thought because of the different times. 

Day 4 - Filming and Editing

Today we split into two groups to share roles in doing the soundtrack for our movie and to do some more filming. The groups were molly and jade and Anissia and Emma. We used the scrabble pieces again to do the opening credits. The credits include the director, producer, original music score, screen play and cast. This took a while but its worth it in the end because it looks professional. The music was hard to create as we have not got our video on the right computer so we cant match the music with the movie which makes it a little more difficult. 

Location Planning

We are doing I stop motion and so we created our background. We had a desk for our main background with a green sheet of paper as the grass and blue sheet going up to show the sky. We then made our grass and trees and flowers with card and colouring pencils. We wanted it to look quite fake an cartoonish so when cutting out grass we out lined in black and then cut out leaving a little bit of white.
We changed out background to white to show jaydens dream. We thought that this would be easy for little children to understand.
The only other thing we had to plan for location was the sound effects we had to create. But we found the trees and leaves out side that we used.

Potential Target Audience

We chose to certificate our film as a U so the type of audience seeing our film would be anyone who is over the age of 5.
This audience will be able to see our film because it has positive moral framework in it as it is about a horse who doesn't think he can be a unicorn but he soon finds out that his dream is possible and this will be encouraging for young children watching our film.
Children over 5 will be able to watch the movie without the presence of an adult because there isn't any bad language, discrimination, drugs, sex or sexual references contained in our movie. So a lot of children would be the potential target audience for our movie as their parents would feel content in letting their children watch it because the film offers reassuring messages to the young children rather than bad.

Other media products our audience would consume could possibly be video games, comic books, computer games, playing cards(trading cards), a t.v show about the characters, the soundtrack to the film, posters, and little teddys and figurines of characters etc. 

Credits

Opening Credits are shown at the beginning of a film and list the most important members of the production. They usually mention the major actors, guest stars, producers and director, as opposed to the closing credits that list the whole of the production crew.

Most of the Disney films that were created between 1937 and 1981 had all of the film-related information, including director and actors in the opening credits. With the closing credits only saying 'The End'

In this Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs clip, the opening credits show the most important members in the production of the movie.

The order of the opening credits are:

- Name of the Studio 

- Name of the production company
- Producer's name
- Starring...
- Film's title
- Featuring
- Casting
- Music
- Production design

In our film that we are making, we have the main title at the beginning of the film. We will also have our names go across the screen during the opening establishing shot of the forest.

Test footage

During our introduction to media we made a small video using i-stop motion. After we had decided that we were going to use stop motion for our children's film we wanted to test it further to see what materials and techniques we would use. In this film we experimented with using solid materials and more flexible materials. We agreed that the flexible play doh worked better because we could adjust shapes quickly and easily. We also liked the use of letters...in particular the ones used when we were spelling 'Emma'. It was quite interesting experimenting with ways to make things enter and exit the screen. We tried to make them playful so we could use them with children. At this point we're not sure which entences and exits we're going to use becuase we think it'll be better if we decide on the day.

Script

We also had to do our characters voices from a script.

The first line was before the day dream with Jayden

"i wish i was a unicorn"


Our script get more elaborate nearer the end of our introduction creating more of a story line.

Tommy: what's wrong?
Jayden: I wish i could be a unicorn!
Lenny: You can be a unicorn
Jayden: How!?
Pauline: I once knew of an old horse who went on a journey through magical worlds and fascinating places, she went on the quest to meet the Jedi of the sea Mr. Narwhale. he gave her her horn and transformed her into a magical unicorn.
Jayden: how do i get there?
Pauline: I know where the map is buried, wait a minuet.
Jayden: wow thanks guys 

Sound effects we pre-recorded.

We had to pre-record some diagetic sounds for our i stop motion so me and molly split off to do the sound effects. I will write down the effects we had to record and how and where we recorded them.

Walking on leaves - Jayden walks around a lot and so do the other characters and so we found some dry leaves and recorded our self's walking over them. We recorded first just one of us walking over the leaves and then to of us to create the effect that there are more characters walking.

Walking over twigs - we were going to do walking over grass to create variety to the leaves but we thought the grass didn't make much of a sound. So we found the twigs and thought they sounded nice so we disided to use that instead of the grass to add variety to the walking.

eating- we thought we would make an unrealistic sound for eating. So instead of recording one of us eating we just said "nom nom nom" to create a more childish and unrealistic feel to it. Making it quirky and cool.

sigh - Jayden has a sigh so we recorded one of us sighing to make the character sound real.

Trees Blowing- we thought the wind was in our favor to create the sound of wind blowing but we were wrong. So instead we waved the branch and that created the same sound we were looking for.

Birds singing - There were no birds for us to record unluckily but we can survive without them.

Filming : Day 3

   Today we decided to spilt ourselves into two groups because our film opening wasn't progressing as well as it could have been. Emma and Anissia stayed in class with the set and tried to film different camera angles, shots and movements, some of these being a high angle, over the shoulder and zoom. They tried to do a pan however they didn't think it worked with stop motion because a pan is meant to move smoothly but with stop-motion it looked rough and unprofessional.
   Jade and Molly went outside with a camera and did some sound recordings. We filmed sound effect and then we read the script in the characters voices. We plan to inhance the sound of the characters voices by variaying them in pitch during the editing stage. We also started looking into music for the movie. During this time we had an idea that it might be fun and playful is each character has their own tune when they move. This is something we need to look into.
   We have almost complete the two minutes of film, so we are now faithful that we will complete the movie introduction.

filming day 2

   Today we continued with our filming. It was quicker for us to set up and we tryed to use some diffrent angles. We started with making Jeydon have a day dream by using bubbles and in the editing process we shall add special effects and magical music. We then made the day dream by using a white background so it is clear to the children that it is a daydream. In the editing process we will use a wavy effect and a magical sort of noise and also we'll put it in a sepia tone to highlight the fact it is a daydream. We then introduced our characters witht he scrabble peices. Finally, in the last few minutes of the lesson we decided to film in some different angles and shots. We used both the over the shoulder shot and a low and a low angle shot which was also POV. Overall it was a more productive day than yesterday and it looks like it is finaly coming together :)
   As we are using stop-motion some of the editing is already done for us, this means we're going to take less time in the editing process. However because stop-motion takes a while to film we were thinking of using one of our editing lessons for filming.

Filming lesson 1

Today we have learnt how to set up the camera's and our handmade setting (background), even though it took us longer than expected. We will know for the next lesson how to set up so we can jump straight into filming.

Though we had all of the peices of the set prepared we didnt realise how long the set would take to prepare. Today we shot the whole introduction from one angle. In the next lesson we plan to film the same thing but from different angles. We managed to get roughly 25seconds of the two minute film done. That leaves us with 95 seconds to film over the next two or three lessons. We're all quite impressed with how the film is progressing.

Mise-en-scene for Children's Film

Props

Play dough – we will be using play dough to make each of the characters (horse/unicorn, turtle, penguin and squirrel) so that it is easier to move each of the characters when filming. The horse/unicorn is going to be the biggest to show that he is shown as the main character.

Paper – We will have a green A3 piece of paper for the grass and a piece of A3 blue paper for the sky. There will also be trees, grass and bushes made out of paper that will give a 3D effect on screen.         

Bubbles – We will have bubbles when the horse has a dream/idea of becoming a unicorn.  

Pin – a pin will feature when the horse comes out of his dream of becoming a unicorn and wants to go on the adventure. This will give a cartoon effect of how ideas/dreams can burst!

Costume

We are not doing live recording so we will not be using any costumes, but each of the play dough models will have their own type of costume made out of play dough. For example, the squirrel will have red play dough to show its fur.

Lighting 

The lighting will be all natural, but if we find that we need to add some artificial lighting we will use a lamp. But our setting is a forest so the lighting will be natural and slightly darker then a field in the morning sun.  

Make up

No makeup is going to be used.

Setting/Set

We will have a very basic setting with a blue sky and green grass. We will have a 3D effect of grass that stands out with different heights, and a couple of trees to give a forest/wood effect.   

Colour

The whole of the film is going to be colourful. All the characters will be bright and vibrant so they can be seen from the background. Also as it’s a children filming opening with bright colours the younger children will know all their colours and be able to remember the characters by the colours.

Sound

All the dialogue that the characters are going to be saying is going to be diegetic, and while they are talking we are going to have an ambient sound of a forest with footsteps and other noises, by creating a sound scape.

All the music that we are going to use is going to be created on garage band to create a small sound track or many small sound tracks for the film. These will have a constant empathetic sound throughout. The music will be non-diegetic, so that none of the characters can hear it.

Some sound effects will be added to particular things (for example, when the pin comes onto the screen and it pops the bubble, we will use a popping sound to make the pop sound more dramatic. Also a small use of Foley may be used if the sound effects do not give the right effect that we want.

Shots

- The first shot is going to be a establishing shot of the setting so that the audience underatnd the story line and setting of the story. We will then have a wide shot of the setting with maybe the unicorn in the scene while the opening credits are running.  
- The second shot is going to be a pan shot of all the animals along the screen, so you are observing the characters and getting to meet them.
- The third shot is going to be a wide long shot of the horse, so that you can see the unicorn go past.
- The fourth shot will be a close up of the horse's neck and head that slowly goes into a mid shot to link into the dream section.
- The fifth shot is going to be from a mid shot (fourth shot) to an exterme close up of the bubble (the dream) with the unicorn inside/in front of the bubble.
- The sixith shot will be a mid shot of the bubble and then a hand come into the screen with a pin to pop the dream.
- The seventh shot is a long shot/mid shot of the horse with a panning shot while he/she is looking around for someone to help him with the quest.
- The eighth shot will be another long shot with the horse and another animal in the scene.
- The nineth shot will be a mid shot of the horse holding a map.
- The tenth shot will be of a extreme close up of the map, so all the audience can see the map
- The eleventh shot will be a panning shot of the horse with the map and other animal going on the quest.


*some of the shots may vary when we start recording to make it easier or to make it work with the story better.