Evaluation of Clip

When comparing our small clip to the larger animations, ours won't be considered as ambitious or professional however I think it flows smoothly for an amature piece, as this was Robyn's and mine first time creating an animation of this kind. Ideally, if we had had more time I would have enjoyed having the gingerbread men do different activities, maybe have had a day in the life of a gingerbread man from coming alive to being eaten. That would have been highly amusing.

Throughout the making of the clip, I thought that if the characters were made from clay, like Wallace and Gromit, rather than gingerbread, the army would have been able to do more actions, such as swinging their arms, and would have been able to express their emotions through facial expressions and posture. The material would have lended itself to being handled more than the gingerbread probably the would have had less suicides of the counter and breaking arms, legs and necks.

IDVD

To create a dvd we had to go on the only mac that had the iDVD software. This software would enable us to create a title menu for our clip, and our tutor showed us the many themes available to choose from. Luckily we found one that was of an old projector which suited our film very well.

Final cover

Cover development/research

The designing of the cover was done together, Robyn looked at the older covers for content and went on the internet to search for different symbols and then wrote the blurb for the back cover.
While Robyn was busy, I had the task of putting it all together. I used the modern cover as a basis for content layout as well as the other ones.

We found when designing the cover we wanted to edit the pictures, taking away the background and just have the gingerbread men.

DVD cover research

For our cover design Robyn and I wanted to something old fashioned to suit our small film, although neither of us knew what it would look like. Therefore, as Robyn was going to her nans and she knew her nan had several old films, Robyn said she would take pictures of what she found.

However what Robyn found wasn't what we were necessarily looking for since they have both been digitally re-done with a modern look. Especially Sayonara where they took and black & white film and have put a new colour still on the front. We both want ours to be black and white like the Laurel & Hardy also with a similar design.

After Effects - fading effect

While building up the film I played it back over and over again showing Robyn deciding if any sections were too fast ect. We both felt it was quite choppy going from one scene to the next drastically, after showing our tutor he suggested 'fading' which would help blend the scenes together more. Unfortunatly he wasn't sure how to do the fading effect in this software, so I went on a small mission to find out how.

Two minutes later on youtube and I found the answer.

The process itself I found very easy once I new how, and it didn't take long to add in all the fading ins and outs to all the seperate parts.

After Effects - first encounter

When I had finished making all the different clips it was time to edit it all together. Even though Robyn still had not finished the information screens I took the oportunity to explore the software programme Adobe After Effects. Now, I have never used any software like this before and I felt rather daunted at the prospect of having to figure out how to use the software in a couple of days. However once I got started it seemed fairly simple, import the files then add to the time line. It really was that simple. 

The imported files appeared on the left had side of the screen, to add these to the item all I had to do was click and drag, dropping the file onto the timeline at the bottom of the screen. When added to the timeline the files became blocks varying in length depending on how long the clip was. Each file was placed onto a new line with the name of that file in section to the left of the timeline, which made it a lot easier in the later stages of editing when there was lots of files as I could scroll throught the list click the relevent section I wanted which highlighted the corresponding block on the timeline.