Group Meetings

Meeting 1
In this initial group meeting we discussed science concepts that we could animate and base our story line on. After brainstorming we settled on the concept of food chains and picked a basic food chain to use. We decided to research the animals that we were going to include in the food chain to make sure that they were scientifically correct. in terms of what they eat and where they live etc. We also discussed possible roles for each member of group. Such as Script writer, character/model maker, set maker, camera person, mover and voices etc.

Meeting 2
Assigned roles to members in group. Iwan was assigned the role of script writer, Iwas assigned the role of set design and making and the credits ets, Hannah was assigned the role of taking shots using zu3d  and Roisin was given the role of creative director. They were also assigned the joint role of making characters  After finalizing the food chain we were going to use and the animals that we were going to make we discussed features to have for the characters. We discussed the type of stop motion to use and played with the different materials available and decided to use claymation animation.

Meeting 3

I brought the sets along to this meeting to show the group what I had made and for us to make a final choice on. We realized that some roles would need to be worked on by more than one person or would need input from all members of group in order to achieve it on time and to the best quality that we could.. Hannah had trouble finding clay and so she and  Roisin hadn't started making the models until this actual meeting.. As I had leftover green clay I made  the grasshopper character and props at home and brought it with me to the meeting. Iwan and I looked at the script and how to improve it whilst the girls made their two characters each.

Earlier versions of the characters in our animation made during an animation seminar seminar.






Final clay models for animation.

Meeting 4

Came across problems during the production and shooting of the animation that we had not realised that we would have such as lighting reflecting of background or being to bright or dark to see the characters actions etc. This took along time to combat as there were other groups in the same room and each group needed different lighting which was difficult to work with. In hindsight we could have asked to move to a room on our own if we had just asked. This would have helped the fussing about with bits of foam and cloth to block the light which ate into our production time. We recorded all the characters voices on a programme called audacity and exported it using a mp3 or wav file and got an embed code from archive.com to put on to our blog and animation. However trying to amalgamate the sound to the voices in the right places for each scene and character was to ambitious for novices like us. Our over ambitious idea to lip sync the characters just using the zu3d software and the characters movement cost us the whole day and wasted valuable time. However I managed to learn how to record directly on to the ZU3D software using the information provided by our teacher on moodle as a supplement to our friday lessons therefore we as a group decided to delete the audacity file.

Meeting 5

We decided as a group to start filming again as it would be better if we made the narrator in to a character instead of a voice over as it would give us more animating scope.

Meeting 6 Final Project

We finished filming all the animations using ZU3D and recorded the character voices on ZU3D voice recorder after making adjustments on script. Edited and matched sound to film as a group. It took contributions from all of us to figure out how to use the many functions of zu3d on the laptop as it was too much for one person. I am so glad that we have a finished working animation that we are happy with.

Evaluation of personal learning

I have gone from being scared of writing a blog to solving issues and problems that we have had with our animation using what I have been taught in class and the research I have done around the topic. I had thought that the other members of my group would be far more advanced in using the software that our lecturer had shown us to use for animation. However I found that my interest and enjoyment in the creative technology we were using, helped me to learn and retain things so I could help my group. I was able to show my group how to import sound for background music. I also learned how to record directly on to the zu3d animation from the example video that our lecturer placed on our e-learning cite called Moodle. The insert sound button and the direct reord functions were used on the zu3d instead of using the audacity sound clip that we had made as it was causing problems in matching speech to characters. I personally found websites that had good audio files and learnt how to enbed the audio tracks and insert them to ZU3d. Bruner (1966) states that action and interaction with environment, teacher and peers help the learners to move from working with objects to iconic and symbolic representations of salient points. Csikszentmihalyi, (1990) describes one positive emotion of increased learning as flow. This is when a learner is fully immersed in what they are doing.
I feel as I have experienced Csikszentmihalyi's (1990) flow as the characteristics of enerzised focus, full involvement and success in the process of the activity remained with me throughout. I believe that flow kept me going when we encountered lighting difficulties and other technical difficulties initially and throughout the production of the film.