This is my animation. I am happy with the way it went as it was my first attempt. Now i have started my project i can now go on to making the covers of my magazine!!

Audiences.

What have a learnt from my audience feedback?


- asking many younger children what they thought of there favour programmes many choose Balamory and Mr Maker. Both of these are story based and creative.

- Children's programmes they enjoy are short and interactive

- Programmes such as Balamory refresh the mind of the children at the end of programme.


From the feedback i have learnt that i want to base programme on Balamory in the story telling way.

Why?

The reason why i want to do this is because Balamory is a childrens programme which is very popular to younger children. Balamory uses drama within stories to keep the children intested.

I thought using the Macs to start my animation was a great success!
Using them wasn't as difficult as i thought and i followed my story board as best i could - however i added i few extra things in to pad it out. The iCanAnimate software was easy to follow and it was easy to remove or duplicate slides.
The original animate will be shortly followed.

After story boarding my ideas it was time to get to work.

I knew that my programme would be a make it programme as well as a learning drama - i decided this from watching several episodes of Mr Maker for research. (As mentioned further down in the blog) Mr Maker is a children's creative programme, i took my ideas from him as i know that children like to be creative.

Using things such as pipe cleaners, pom-poms, sequins and beads worked out what i needed for my opening sequence to work. Using the Macs and iCanAnnimate is a new set of software for me as i haven't ever used it before as last year for my preliminary project i did the magazine question as i thought this would be the strongest question for me to answer. However this year i stepped out of my comfort zone to master the art of film making.

The next post i will do is summing up what i thought of my day of filming..

Story Boarding!!

To motivate myself to get moving towards using the Macs and the filming which i had never done before i drafted a few ideas of a story board down. Even though i knew what i wanted my production to be like in my head getting it down on paper was a lot harder than i expected. Having to weigh up whether the idea would work and if we had to resources meant i struggled getting ideas down. Finally i created the idea of which would be ..

'Come and Plays Opening Sequence'

My Story Board :)!

even though this is a rough story board i knew what i wanted to. The background of my animation is going to be a purple colour through out. Each of the things which i have shown here are going to be made out of products - this is because i want it to keep in nature of the 'creative' programme.

Review of first ideas:

Overall the first ideas didn't work out. I began by trying to create a 3D monkey.. however this turned out to look more like a squirrel with wires coming out of him as i didn't have enough brown Plasticine and his eyes were to big for his face as i didn't proportion it right.
After having the feeble attempt of the animation i decided that it wasn't the way forward for me to go as all my animals looked pretty poor, however i am pretty convinced that i was comparing them to something like Wallace and Gromit, and seeing as this was my first ever time with filming it wasn't going to be anything as near to it.

Still after not coming up with a name i decided to just use words i thought of, for example come and play. This began to stick and i decided that this would be the name for it. After making a start i looked around for ideas for a character - a monkey which i didn't have to create out of Plasticine. I came across a clip art on windows of a monkey, using this for a example for start with i started the ball rolling..

This is yet another new article this time from the Telegraph also underminding Peppa Pig, i have taken snipits from the article which i feel are relevant to my project.

Peppa Pig: Will careless pork cost lives?
Jemima Lewis asks whether it matters if cartoon characters wear seatbelts

..'Still, I wouldn't have guessed there was anything actually life-threatening about Peppa. Turns out, I haven't been looking hard enough. All this time, Peppa has been going on family outings in the car without wearing a seatbelt. In future – following protests from safety-conscious parents – she will be firmly strapped in. The company that makes the cartoons, Astley Baker Davies, has also promised to go back through all the past episodes, reanimating any offending scenes.'

'Still, I wouldn't have guessed there was anything actually life-threatening about Peppa. Turns out, I haven't been looking hard enough. All this time, Peppa has been going on family outings in the car without wearing a seatbelt. In future – following protests from safety-conscious parents – she will be firmly strapped in. The company that makes the cartoons, Astley Baker Davies, has also promised to go back through all the past episodes, reanimating any offending scenes.'

After starting the first part of my coursework i have realised how difficult it is to make a DVD cover which resembles a children's drama. My first ideas was a magazine called 'Monkey Business' - this was soon destroyed after googling the on going programme 'Monkey Business'. After that short brain wave my mind was blank for idea so focusing on starting but leaving the title to last was my next plan.

I knew what my main character would be as i wanted something cheerful and exciting something that many children would find entertaining as well as something they would have toys of.



My first ideas:

To start with i was going to create a live animation model of a monkey - this is because a cartoon monkey i feel is a friendly animal yet can be mischievous.

Once I'd made the model i would crack on with the animation side of the production - Bearing in mind i still had no title to work from at this point.

After i had created the animation i could motivate myself to work on the magazine cover and the DVD.

This is a news article i heard and found out about from the BBC, this is relevant to me as this is the ages i am looking at.

TV character Peppa Pig will be seen wearing a seatbelt in future episodes, after parents raised concerns over children following her example.

British animation company Astley Baker Davies said it would also re-animate scenes from the first and second series to reflect the change.
"We were very naive when we started making Peppa," co-founder Mark Baker told Broadcast magazine.
"If we could turn the clock back, we would," he said.
Aimed at children aged two and above, Peppa Pig won a children's Bafta in 2005 for best pre-school animation.
Shown on Five and children's channel Nick Jr, it follows a five-year-old pig named Peppa, her family and friends.
Astley Baker Davies had initially considered including seatbelts and child seats in the show but felt it might limit the characters' range of expressions.
But it reversed its stance after a parent complained that her daughter had refused to wear a seatbelt because Peppa did not.