Creative Media Practice - Not as easy as I thought

Drawing seems and looks easy but it isnt. All the drawings were recoreded over a period of 4 nights due to both of us having a busy schedule we were not able to start recording till 9:30 each night. My boyfriend kindly agreed to be the artist of my project he isnt exactly picasso but he did manage to get the basics across. Here are a few images of the late night shooting we did to create my final piece.

After Effects is not the quickest way to make this video clearly! I have had so many complications with after effects now, well my 1st problem came with after effects not downloading on my laptop no matter how many websites I tried it just wasnt working. Then I finally managed to download after effects on my boyfriends laptop, I began editing had a finished piece to realise there is no option to make this into a quicktime movie. I came into an editing room the next day early morning to realise all the work I had done was pointless due to the after effects being a different version on my boyfriends laptop than the version there is in the editing room. Editing this video really hasnt been easy but I am glad that its nearly over.

Finally I finished using after effects, my video has been rendered and is now on youtube. I used the annotations on youtube to create the story for each charater.

Creative Media Practise - Evaluation

I think what worked well for the final piece was the story of characters getting to a destination. I think my idea worked well although it didn't finish the way I had planned. The characters worked well for the journey, also using  most of these characters made the video realistic. I also think the hole piece sped up made it look more effective. 

I had many problems with creating this final piece. To begin with my first problem came with filming the drawings, originally I planned to do a Birdseye view of this but had difficulty getting the camera to stay in the same place so I ended up filming this all hand held. This was not easy filming for hours trying to keep my hand in the same place. The next problem came with keeping track of the drawings which ones had been drawn and which were yet to be drawn. Due to bad time keeping I had to cut out a few of the transport options out, the first was not drawing the escalators, the second was to not draw the bus, the third was to not draw the train and then I finally took out the three options of the final destination and replaced this with a drawing of a sunny beach with all 3 characters. Then I had a problem editing the video I should of used premier to edit this piece but as I am not familiar with premier I thought it would be easier to use a software which I am familiar with, this being after effects cause me many problems. I did not manage to edit the piece how I wanted. Whilst planning I thought it would be much easier to make this into one long video and then just add the annotations in the right places and like to the same video. So I made the video into one long piece adding sound effects into the correct places to make this one long video for YouTube. Once I finished the final piece  I had many problems trying to render this on after effects, the first came when I didn't have enough space on the PC to render the file, I then borrowed a hard drive from a lecturer so I had enough space and then this failed half way through rendering, then I eventually managed to get hold of a hard drive from the technicians and I finally managed to render it although it took an hour. Once the video had finished I then had to upload it onto YouTube which took another half an hour. Once the video had finished I finally had the last bit of time to put the annotations in, unfortunately I only had enough time to put in all the cats journeys annotations before the presentation.

For possible future developments on the project I would re shoot a couple of the scenes so I could make the story a lot easier and create the correct annotations I set out to create. I would also change the camera angle whilst re shooting so it is more stable at a birds eye view.