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This is the ongoing Production diary for my stop-motion animation project. All of the research and evaluation tasks I have completed are situated in the column to the right of this page above my user profile. Some of these pages contain videos that I have edited and are quite entertaining.

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Production Diary

Day 1

First day and we're all nervous to be in our new groups about to embark on our big project......
The first thing we thought about doing was getting what we were advertising and for who out of the way first. We talked about using baked beans because it was for a target audience we new we could advertise for, but we thought they might be messy to work with and ruin the continuity of the piece, also there was the worry that they would expire and go mouldy which wouldn't appeal to our consumers. Then we thought more about sweets which were roughly the same size as baked beans, and we had the same problems with continuity and individual sweet characteristics as well as their target audience which was younger than we wanted.

Eventually we decided upon Smarties because they have a wide audience, they are simple which personifies our style of animation and are brightly coloured which will catch the audiences attention.

This sorted we then set out to find a target audience and a channel to advertise on. After much research we decided to produce our advert for 'E4' as it had a target audience of 16 - 34 year olds which we thought would be easy to advertise for and has over 8.9 million people viewing it each month. With this channel being a British channel this will be the opportunity to make our home country better. Also studies show that British people prefer traditional chocolate to sweets with high additional flavours and preservatives.

Day 2

With an idea and an audience we begun planning our advert and our own jobs.....
Everyone knew what they wanted to do; Jack wanted to be behind the camera and direct the scenes, I wanted to do the editing and Charlotte didn't want us to fail. We all shared a part in the written work, (though some of us did more than others, whether we wanted them to or not) Jack got roped into being on camera as well as being behind it, I was asked to animate because Jack knew he couldn't be running around setting up the scenes as well as shooting them and Charlotte made sure we were organised, being where we should be and doing what we were meant to be.

After this discussion we all looked at different stop-motion adverts and liked the idea of our product moving around and making different shapes. With this in mind we started choreographing the Smarties and thought about them making animals, plants, scenery, words and firework displays. Which we then added to our story board to go into our project folder.

Then we had a lengthy discussion with our technical guide about how we could control lighting conditions and if we could pretty pretty please borrow the studio lights for the day. As advised we chose a room with no outside windows and minimal doors to control the lighting conditions (making sure that it had an industrial strength air conditioning) and subsequently booked the mac suite.

Day 3

We had the Smarties based part of the advert, we now needed a story to go around it.....
After many thoughts and ideas concerning target audience, gender and who our product was aimed at we decided who was going to be the main character in our piece. Jack was the best contender as he was a guy and we new that if we based our advert on women then no male audience would even look at it.

Looking into how we were going to incorporate the Smarties into a real world situation we began researching hallucinations, dreams and fantasies. Deciding that we didn't want smarties to be associated with drugs or any sordid feelings people may have towards chocolate we thought it best to concentrate on dreams.

All of us collaborated together and planned what Jack was going to act out. With multiple arguments with Jack on what he was and wasn't prepared as a struggling actor we finally figured out the basic story line. We then gave these ideas to Charlotte who used her supreme art skills to draw up a story board that we had to stick to, or else! *DRAMATIC MUSIC*

Day 4

With a plan, a schedule and a very stressed out Charlotte we booked out the mac suite and began filming.....
The scene started with Jack sitting at a table looking very bored in his 'work' environment. He then found a tube of Smarties in his pocket and shook them onto the table, he then ate the fallen Smarties, chewed (not as slowly as he'd have liked) and swallowed. Realising how amazing they are he gasps and stares into the camera with a look of pure wonder! More or less....

After multiple takes, to a very chocolate-filled Jack's dismay, we had finished the first part of our advert!

As we had an our left of the day I decided to throw together the bare bones of the advert and get the verdict from our media teacher. To our delight she liked the photography and smoothness of our piece but wasn't very fond of the setting and wasn't sure why Jack was there. So with our first take down the drain we then thought a bit more about why Jack would want Smarties and where he would go to get them.

Jack answered this for us; he said he'd go to the shop to buy sweets, then eat them outside. Taking this on board we drew up a new plan which we were determined to execute next lesson.

Day 5

With a new plan of action we set out for the local news agent....

We set up the camera outside the shop, certain that we'd catch Jack going in and out and that these shots would be a piece of cake! Maybe not. After half an hour of takes and retakes and making sure little old ladies stayed in the shop as we were filming, we'd got the first 8 seconds of it. Moving onto the long shot of Jack walking up to the bench which went relatively without a hitch, even with the wild life mistaking us for David Attenborough's camera crew. Finally for the day we re-did all of the eating, swallowing and looking amazed really not much faster than when we did it yesterday, but 45 gruelling minutes later and we had our first scene in the bag.

As I did yesterday with the remaining 20 minutes of lesson time, I roughly sewed the right shots together and showed our media teacher a basic take on our first scene. She approved this one, even with the lighting errors in some places but we took it! 

Lastly in our long long long day, we booked out the mac suite and the studio lights intending to shoot the Smarties scene the next day.

Day 6

Suite booked and lights in tow, we pulled out the Smarties and got cracking.....

I started our lesson by roughly editing and looking at sound effects and beats in garage band whilst Jack and Charlotte set up in the mac suite. When I was dragged away from the computer I found that the mac suite had been transformed into a lightless blackened box, complete with a table, camera, studio lamps, many many many packs of smarties and the air conditioning on top whack. It still felt hotter than the sun in there though.

After Charlotte briefed us on the first scene we got to work. We tried to go as quick as possible whilst still keeping the lighting in check (which is what we feared most). After the first firework scene everyone kind of winged it from there. Mainly we were just looking at what could be used for every colour and we let our imagination run wild!

Then disaster struck. We were reaching the end of our second hour and our technical guide had booked out the cameras to another class! But we didn't panic.....much. We decided to cut the end a bit short unfortunately, and hastily threw the dancing Smarties in the box as time was ticking away swiftly. Once we handed over the camera we put away all of the equipment (and got some well needed fresh air) and left pleased with the outcome of our day.

Day 7

All the footage we needed, now for the fun part.....

I began the editing process by first dropping in the desired clips and making them run at a frame rate of 24 frames per second. After I did this I then scoured and favourited various useful tunes, beats and sound effects in garage band. I found multiple sound effects for the actions that were taking place in the advert which I was most pleased about, I put these straight into final cut pro to save the hassle of having to find them later.

I then set to work on the soundtrack. I looked at a lot of hip-hop and urban beats to keep within our target audience but I also wanted a continuous happy jingle throughout the advert that could be remembered easily and made the advert more upbeat. After an hour of mixing and remixing and adding and deleting I had the final product which I exported and added to the final cut pro sound library.

Day 8

So we had a rough copy of our advert with the main soundtrack, time to unroll it to the judges......
We had the shop scene, the bench scene and the dream scene completed and in final cut pro. I'd only put in basic sound effects, e.g. walking, eating, Smarties shaking, and our soundtrack which brought us up to the end of the Smarties dream. With feedback from our media teacher and a bit of tinkering we had perfected our first few scenes.

Though a minor problem erupted when we found that our advert was only 45 seconds long and we thought that that just wasn't enough for a very good advert which is what we wanted it to be. After much deliberation we decided to end our advertisement with a waking up scene and maybe the Smarties could be left on the bench as product placement for the ending.

Finishing up and saving what we had we then booked out a camera for next week and were eager to finally finish our filming.

Day 9

Camera and bag of Smarties in hand we set out to find that one bench that we used before......

Trying to get the camera in the exact same spot as last time proved difficult enough but after a few tries we finally got it right and placed Jack into position. Again going through the takes and retakes and actor rage we had the bench scene down. 

We still weren't exactly sure how to end it. Whether we should use the Smarties and leave them on the bench or just have Jack walking off 'as if it were all a dream...'. So we decided to do both! We took shots of jack leaving along with close ups of the Smarties in his hands and Jack was once again free from the trials of acting and got back behind the camera. Finally we thought we'd just use up all of the individual boxes and Smarties and just scatter them over the bench in a random and disorderly way. Fortunately this looked quite good from what we'd taken and ended our advert on a final shot of the Smarties box.

As our final shooting session only took 45 minutes I had the last 2 hours to do the final clip ordering and exporting. I left the sound files where they were and just exported the clips as a movie file to add effects to later. 

Day 10

Determined to make this our final hour I primed final cut for filters and got started......

the first draft I created had the first few scenes unchanged to reflect their realness in the real world, the Smarties scene had the light rays effect on it to make it look more surreal and dreamy and the last scenes were darkened and contrasted to show that time had passed and it was night time.

We took this to be reviewed and our teacher wasn't very fond of the extreme contrast between the first and the last scenes and also the fact that the Smarties look very dark and not very attractive in their last scene. This coupled with Jack's dislike of the light rays effect I took another look at it.

I took out the light rays and toned down the contrast of the last scenes, as well as heightening the saturation on all scenes that the Smarties were in. This made the over all advert look less cheesy and gave it a bit more consistency.

Day 11

Final, final, final, final, final day.....

With the advert finished I tweaked the filters and perfected the sound files positioning and exported it as our final project. After 9 minutes and 34 seconds I then uploaded it to YouTube and subsequently added it to my blog and wrote the evaluation.

Our finished Smarties advert which I was very pleased with