People on the Move

Our people on the move film is finally finished!!

I loved every minute of this assignment because I thought that we had a really great idea to work upon. We had quite a few idea on what we wanted to do, but we felt that 'Race for Love' would be something we could incorporate quite a lot of elements into and be quite creative with it.

The filming process deemed to be quite fun, even if I was sitting on a park bench for half an hour in freezing, windy weather! It was worth the final outcome!

Some of our ideas for the race though, such as the 'lasso' idea, where one of the guys would get a rope out and try to lasso the other to the ground in order to take 1st place in the race, but getting the props was a problem, so  we replaced that idea last minute with the 'Zoo magazine' which I think worked really well, and added humour to it.

Seeing it up on big screen and showing it too the class was a nice experience, and getting feedback, which was mostly positive proved to be important on reflecting on our own work, because we got to see any faults, that perhaps we couldn't see ourselves.

Turtle Dash!

On Tuesday we were asked to create a new game to be played the the screen school. There were no limits, but had to be something practical and not to 'out there'.Coming up with the initial idea proved to be quite hard at the beginning because the objective was so broad. After researching online we found that most people nowadays prefer games they can play with other, and be interactive, so we came up with a game that did just that. ‘Cute baby Turtles’ was actually one our first ideas, and thought people are usually drawn into colourful, fun animals. I went and asked various people what kind of game they liked playing when they wanted to pass time, and the most popular was ‘challenge games’.

I think the fact our game can be played with a vast amount of people is a strong point because it gets people involved if they aren’t so confident within smaller groups.

The prezi that Hannah and I produced explains the game and has brief instructions of it.I think the fact that we both actually came up with the idea together incorporating what other people said they liked and wanted made it easier to work together. But having done our separate research it made the process quicker. 

Heres the prezi breifly explaning the idea of the game.

TURTLE DASH on Prezi

I created a mock up poster for our game in Photoshop

Lego, Seriously?

When I first heard that we were playing with Lego as part of a lesson I first thought 'WHAT!? Lego, seriously?'

At first you think, well this is going to be a waste of time, it has nothing to do with media. Although, as a matter of fact it does. It is used as tool to help you think more creatively.

“You can learn more about a person in an hour of play than you can from a lifetime of conversation”

-Plato

The quote firstly seemed quite strange before I had actually experienced the LSP exercise, because I thought to myself ‘Surely that can’t work?'. However, what you don’t realise is just how much you can learn about yourself and other in one act of play and designing something out of the blue. We started with a task that required each individual to create a tower; and the only rules were that we had to use the green bases as a starting point and also to have a Lego person on the top.. A very brief objective, but it meant that we could creatively bring all these pieces and build a very complex or simple design .We then discussed these pieces in detail and you soon come to discover that what you create is actually a representation of yourself, regardless of what you are asked to do.

When I came to analysing my tower for example, what was evident is that I like perfection. It is safe to say that I most definitely am a perfectionist. And that the fact my little Lego man was hiding in a box, but was wearing a crown, shows that I like my own ideas when it comes to being in a team, and I can be quite stubborn when coming out of my comfort zone.

After that we were asked to then develop the original tower to something that represents the skills that we bring within team. I kept with the idea that I’m the ideas person within a team. The important rule when building is not to think about what you’re doing, and just keep adding things on. When it came to analysing it again, Its brilliant what you subconsciously do when building with these little Lego pieces. I had connected little wires to other Lego men, which in reflection could mean I like to help people in a team, like I keep the team together and connected.   

The fact that the end results gave us all a clear view of what we thought were the working of a perfect team, goes to show, that not everything has to be literal, you can find meaning within anything creative that you do. LSP is a great technique to prove this. In my opinion I think that Lego Serious Play could be an example of convergent and divergent thinking

Stop Frame animation

In Digital Media tools, we were asked to produce a short 1 minute animation using stop-frame.

Not one of my favourite things to do i must say!

My group and I found it quite hard to come up with ideas for this so the finished piece in my opinion isn't really a good example of what we could produce if we did put our minds to it.

Our idea was basically to film a 'flat party' and animate different things going on.

It started off well, but I think we all thought the idea was a bit too complex for just a small animation.

Film Language Grades

So today we got our Scene analysis grades back.

I personally didn't think i'd do that well with this piece, because since a-level i've never been very good at analysing extracts of films in terms of WHY they did something. I can easily point out the Cinematography or talk about the composition of shots, but when it comes down to explain why they have done it, I struggle a little bit.

I decided to do mine on the film 'Requiem for a Dream'. It is one of favourite films because there are so many unique editing techniques used in certain shots.

I chose this scene of the film:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuzNohk5cYw

So in the end i got a high 2:2. I wasn't surprised. But wish I'd done SO much better because I know i could have done.

Story in 5 frames.

Basically, this very afternoon, we were split into pairs and were given  a short amount of times to come up with a story that can be told in five photographs. I think everyone's initial thoughts were panic! Coming up with an idea for s story is hard enough, but having to tell it within 5 photographs seemed impossible. 

Although, it proved to be easier than I thought.

My partner and I, Becca, went into a computer room, and i basically said, pretend you're watching a funny film, and fall back on your chair. Pretty simple. But IT worked pretty well. It was quite a funny experience having to get Becca to lie on the floor as if she had just fallen of a chair though, especially as people kept coming in to the room, and looking as if we were mad.

So here it is.

I have cropped some of the images to bring out some of more important details such as the computer screen.

Typical

Not surprisingly I woke up and felt like my throat was on fire and couldn't attend the lectures.

I did however have all the time in the world to work on editing some of the pictures I had taken for todays lesson

I took these two images and decided to incorporate them together. I really like overlapping images, and playing with layers. I do think I may have gone over the top with the editing, but when I start, I can't seem to stop. I do like the intensity of the skyline in contrast to the softness of the overlapped image.

In the image below, I had a go at replacing the sky as in the original it seemed like quite a dull image, so with one easy edit you can completely change the mood to picture, which is what i LOVE about Photoshop.

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I then started with this image because I felt I could have fun just using brightness, contrast, and hue.

 
          I changed the hue and brightness, and added
    an 'omni' lighting effect to bring out the brightness                                                                        I tried something different and replaced
               of the sun behind the silhouette.                                                                                              the sky with a completely different
                                                                                                                                                                                image.                

When It Rains

Really wish this rain would stop. A car drove past me earlier and squirted a huge puddle all over me. I was NOT amused, as some of you now probably will be at the thought. 

So on the way home and looking at the photo's I'd taken for tomorrow Digital Tools lesson I realised that the wasn't particularly a strong image I could creatively edit or manipulate so I headed off and took a couple more.

So this is a sign post along the prom in New Brighton.

I actually had to take these images on my smartphone because well, I had to give the SONY back to my friend :(

Although I actually think the compositions came up nicely. I love the silhouette in the second image and the colours in the background.

I ALMOST FORGOT TO MENTION


We got to attend a talk off some people from the BBC who were talking about the College of Production website. Initially some of the talk was for the Journalism students, but having been into writing myself it was quite interesting to hear about some of the different tips they had. The website seemed to be extremely useful to me, and will definitely be looking at it later on to browse some of the videos.

Sunday Morning

I say Sunday morning because I still haven't touched my bed or slept yet!

I thought I'd post some of the photo's I've taken for Tuesdays Digital Tools lesson.

The task was

Take a photo of something you walk by every day without noticing.

So these are the photos I took!

The Giant Rooster! So i saw this whilst walking past someones garden, I just loved how it looked so out of place. I also sort of like how the light is over exposed to the right of the image.

Footprint in concrete. Its not something you'd typically notice whilst walking but I just quite liked the simplicity of it.

So I've been loosing my mind trying to think what these things are even called! So I'm settling for a sewer grate. I actually looked at several of these but this one seemed to stand out.  It just looked so bold and dominating in contrast to the ground around it. 

This is maybe one of my favourites simply because of the out of focus regions. Surprisingly it was by accident whilst messing around with the different settings on my camera. 

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So I was thankfully able to borrow my friends SONY DSLR which I'm hoping to buy myself at Christmas! 

I was actually in Liverpool when I took these over the weekend by St Johns Gardens. I love the sharp focus these cameras give

I played around with different angles and felt that this was definitely quite interested, as it also plays with depth of field, the background being extremely blurred and then the sharpness of the foreground 

(image below)

The colours of leaves is what I love most about Autumn! The warming colours int he background made this lamp so alluring to me. The complete boldness of the black against the brightness of the leaves would make this quite difficult to edit, because in my opinion the image does itself justice without any manipulation.

I have ALWAYS loved the Liverpool Skyline, and luckily its right on my doorstep! Liverpool has so many iconic buildings, and usually I never take a minute to appreciate the view.

Ideas, ideas, and more ideas

Today was just idea over lode in our Creativity and Concept Development lesson.

We were asked the question: 

'How would you change this Teaching room if you had unlimited money and resources?'. 

Naturally I'm looking around the room and thinking 'What WOULD I do to this room?'

Change the colour of the walls and flooring, add a couple of Television screens and comfier seats. But as soon as you really put your mind to it, you can really go over the top.

I mean who would think of edible walls? or a weather machine? 

I loved that most people came up with having a bar, or a a food bar, a relaxing area, Huge cinema screens, a mini planetarium!

I mean who would even want to leave the place to o home if it had all these different things in.

Some of the ideas were just brilliant! I really surprised myself at the amount of great things my partner and I came up with, and it was fun!

I think practical lessons like that, were you can really think creatively and out of the box,, really helps push your limits.

Happy Days

Well in this weeks Contemporary Media Issues we had to use Prezi. OH JOY. A little part of me died a little inside at the thought of it. I've used it so many times before in the past, and having previously used it at A-Level to present my work on a blog I'd grown to thoroughly hate it.

I mean the whole concept of it is brilliant, don't get me wrong, and when I was first introduced to it I loved it. Although when you're the time of person who likes to have everything perfect and goes over the top with design, which Prezi offers, you find yourself spending hours upon hours on it, and that's not even including putting text onto it.

Our task was to bring in an object that hold some kind of meaning or significance to us. After racking my mind and searching my room for anything, I end up with the two things on my wrist that i wear almost all the time.
The two bracelets, however stereotypical of girl, meant a lot to me. They were bought off friends as a memento of our friendship over the years as we were all separating to go to different universities. 

We then got into groups and had to link together our objects into topics. All of them seemed to hold memories of different places or people, so that is what we went for.

The link to our Prezi presentation

http://prezi.com/1cnl9daob1dv/significant-objects/

New Beginnings

I have always had a huge interest in Media having studying it for the last four years and with each year growing more fond of it. The media has so many different aspecs within it and I think that's what attracts me so much to it.

Having been quite an artsy person most of my life,being into drawing, writing, keeping journals and some photograpahy, I had started looking into website design. I felt I could be creative in a new way and develop skills along the way, which it did, it gave me an insight on using software tools such as Photoshop.

So from high school I have always loved developing websites, adapting imagery and much more recently filming and editing videos. Since A-level it has always been my strongest subject and the most interesting to me.

I started researching into different director's works' such as Tim Burton a couple of years ago when i went.  I had always been captivated by his work when I was younger, having watched 'Sleepy Hollow' and 'The Nightmare before Christmas' up to his most recent films but I had never really thought about the making and creative thinking that when into it. I loved the way he could put a dark spin on things so beautifully which can allure an audience. Many others have continued to inspire me, which keeps me so engaged in the Media and Film Industry.

I think the past 2 years has mainly been thereason why I have such a keen interest in this area. During my A-Levels we had a lot of oppurtunities to get into grips with production work, which is probably my strongest aspect. I love anything to do with post-production. So being able to reflect by own creative ideas into Magazine design, and print adverts really enthralled me to want to carry on. During my last year at sixth form, we produced an extract of a TV Documentary. I'd never really been one to watch documentary's, but having to create something from scratch, and seeing it come together changed my mind about the genre.

I personally chose this course because there isn't necessarily a certain area within the Media that I favour. I wanted to adapt my skills, and experience new ways of how I look at Media and it seemed like the right course that can do that. I don't exactly know where I want to be in the future or what I want to do, but does anyone?

So I'm hoping I'll find it along the way!