The idea of making a stop motion animation is one we had last year, but beyond doing a test shot of two seconds with Tailycat – our lead in The Quest – we hadn’t got around to taking it any further. So when Filmdash 2010 was launched, with the general theme of ‘happiness’, we thought what better than to revive our animation idea with the two happy Jellycat toys!

As per the Filmdash rules no scripting, shooting, or planning was done in advance of the start of the challenge at 7pm on Friday – the only thing we did beforehand was to make the decision to do the animation using the toys. At the 7pm start time we got our criteria, containing a mandatory line of dialogue (“you’ll feel it in your blood and guts”) and a mandatory prop (a scarf).

Our process over the weekend was:

Friday evening

Initial ideas for the plot, deciding which characters would be used and how, and drawing up of the basic storyboard.

Saturday all day

Principle photography, rendering all the still photographs for each shot into a motion .avi file, first (very) rough cut of all the shots into one continuous video.

Sunday morning

Starting to do the special effects in photoshop (an idea which was immediately abandoned!), starting to do moving subtitles for the dialogue (another idea which was immediately abandoned), replaced by doing silent-movie style caption slates.

Sunday afternoon

Incorporation of background music soundtrack into the film, a series of rough cuts (three in total) in order to get the timing for the caption slates right, followed by exporting the final cut and uploading to YouTube.

Not only was this our first film with a story (I’ve made a number of YouTube films which are more documentary), it was also our first animated film – and after the fact (well during the fact on doing the postproduction work on Sunday morning) we can see all the errors we made – some of the focussing is a bit off, had we known we were going to use caption slates we should have left each shot before each slate linger just a touch longer, the special effects (which were going to be the kiln getting hotter, and the dalek firing its gun) were dropped, the penultimate scene (shot at the end of the day using fading natural light) with The Oracle really could do with having been re-shot entirely, my tripod, whilst smooth enough for normal use isn’t really smooth enough for panning and tracking the micro-movements needed for animation, and the scenes we shot right at the end of the day really did start to have bigger movements between each frame (thus becoming jerkier) as we started to get tired and wanting to ensure got it completed and uploaded by the 7pm Sunday deadline. And due to a whole day of crouching for extended periods of time in awkward positions to take each frame, I’ve twisted my back a bit!

But these are all things we would have done just the same had we spent two months making the film rather than two days – and that would have been well annoying! We were also a bit compromised by having a bit of a rubbish computer – about five years old and not the fastest processor available even at the time, using the free software which came with my hand-held video camera  (Adobe Premier still seeming to be a bit temperamental on this computer), the best thing about which can be said is ‘well it sort of works’.

But in the process we’ve learned an awful lot in a very short time about how to make an animation, meaning for Tailycat’s next adventure things should hopefully be a bit smoother. Many thanks to Chris Unitt and Ian Ravenscroft for their work in organising it, and also thanks to all the other Filmdash entrants for helping make it such a fun challenge to participate in!

The complete set of Filmdash entries are now on YouTube.

Powered by Twitter Tools

Powered by Twitter Tools

http://www.myspace.com/davidlloydhenry

Dear British Broadcasting Corporation,

I would like to know the outline costs of the various BBC radio
stations:

Radio 1
Radio 1 Xtra
Radio 2
Radio 3
Radio 4
Radio 5 Live
Radio 5 Sports Extra
BBC 6 Music
BBC 7
BBC Asian Network

I would like the cost information broken down in terms of:

Total ‘on air talent’ (ie presenters & djs etc) salaries (I do not need to know individual salaries),

Total production staff (ie producers, broadcast assistants etc) salaries,

Total rights (ie music broadcast rights, drama first broadcast & repeat fee rights, etc) costs, &

Total transmission cost (ie, how much it costs for the transmitters etc to physically pump the broadcast out).

I would like this information separated for each of the stations listed above.

Additionally, I would like the number of hours per week that each station is broadcasting for, & the BBC’s estimated (or known) weekly audience figures for each station. If you were able to calculate the total cost per listener hour for each station for me,
that would be icing on the cake.

The perfect present every time, indeed; whose face couldn’t possibly fail to light up at receiving such a kind & thoughtful gift, when the gift of choice includes wares from these fine emporiums:

One is – quite literally – spoilt for choice.

“Britain’s First Past The Post voting system could be scrapped if Labour wins the general election, under plans which have been outlined by Gordon Brown. The prime minister wants a referendum on changing to an Alternative Vote system, where candidates are ranked in order of voters’ preference”.

Whereas superficially this proposed referendum to move to what appears to be a fairer voting system appears to be a step in the right direction, I believe the Alternative Vote system – in the context of English politics – to be fundamentally undemocratic.

Why? How AV works is the voter gets the list of candidates & ranks them in order of how much they want each candidate to win. The candidate who received the fewest ‘1′ preference votes then gets all their ‘2′ preference votes transferred to the other candidates accordingly, until one of the candidates has received over 50% of the votes available.

In a system where there are a multiplicity of parties – ie, where views within parties are sufficiently diverse that splits have occurred – that’s fine. But in English politics, and to a certain extent the other nations of the UK, we are, to all intents and purposes, a three party system. Sure, we’ve got the Green Party, the British National Party, the Unofficial Monster Raving Loony (Rainbow Alliance) Party, & Dr Richard Rogers’ Common Good Party, etc, but we only have three serious parties. And by and large, if supporters of Conservative or Labour are likely to put a second preference on their ballot forms, more often than not they are most likely to allocate that second preference to the Liberal Democrat candidate rather than to the other serious party or one of the amateur candidates.

Which means that in all but the safest seats, the LibDems will be favoured disproportionately to their actual support. All credit to the LibDems, they are saying the plan doesn’t go far enough.

It’s possible that if AV is introduced more serious parties might emerge – most likely as a result of the broad coalitions of the three main parties fragmenting, leading to such as the Judean Peoples’ Front and the Peoples’ Front of Judea, alongside the Popular Front of Judea. But would that really be such a good thing? Party politics is divisive enough, without it being made even more divisive; all that would happen would be the introduction of coalition governments comprising the same actual people, but just paying their subscription fees to more parties.

If Gordon Brown is serious about improving democratic accountability, then not only does he need to think about something better than replacing one flawed vote counting system with another flawed vote counting system, but also think more radically about the whole relationship between the People and our elected representives, and the system of cabinet government with winner-takes-all.

“A quarter of people living in England’s countryside will be over 65 by 2020, a campaign group has said. The National Housing Federation said figures estimate a 40% rise in older residents over the next 10 years. The federation, which represents England’s housing associations, said the number of over 65s living in rural England is expected to be 3.23m by 2020, compared with 2.32m in 2008″.

For me, there are two issues here. The first one is the one of the social contract which makes Society what it is; one of the problems the increasing number of rural over-65s increases is that of care for them. If there is too high a proportion of old people to young people (for want of more appropriate – but more cumbersome – language), then it makes it so much more difficult, and costly, to provide suitable care; at its most basic level, fewer younger people in the village means fewer younger people able to simply pop to the shop on behalf of their elderly neighbour who doesn’t find it so easy to get out of the house for themselves any more.

This is of course sad, but the thing is – and here I’m conscious of sounding quite uncomfortably tory – the social contract of society is a two way contract; if Society contracts to look after the elderly who’ve paid in to the National Insurance system for 50 years etc, do not ‘the elderly’ have a correspondent responsibility to facilitate being looked after? Is it really so unreasonable to suggest that somebody who has a high level of caring needs moves from their four bedroom house on the edge of a village in the middle of nowhere (with three buses a week) to somewhere a bit more, y’know, central?

And then there’s the second issue – the dirty little secret of the countryside.

“The rising cost of housing in rural areas is driving out younger people as houses are, on average, £40,000 more expensive than those in towns and cities – even though wages are far lower, it said. At the same time, better-off older people are retiring to their dream country home”.

We’ve been hearing for years how awful it is that young people who are born and grow up in rural villages end up leaving when they come to need a home of their own, because they can’t afford to now buy a house there due to rising countryside property values; this is made out to be the fault of rich urban dwellers buying second homes, and Government Intervention Is Called For.

What always seems to be overlooked is that if rich people are buying all the houses in the countryside, who is selling them to them? Is it not the people already living in the countryside? Fair enough, you sell your house, you try to get the best price for it – but ‘the countryside’ can’t collectively sell itself out to the highest bidder & at the same time collectively complain about pricing its own children out of the market to remain there. Similarly, ‘the countryside’ cannot enjoy the peace and quiet that disconnexion from the urban rat race provides, and at the same time complain about the inconvenience which comes from that disconnexion.