Toothache

Our children's film is about a teenage vampire boy who has a 'crush' on his older brother's girlfriend. The difference between the younger vampire and other vampire's is that he is a vegetarian.
Bernie is the main character, and he is a vegetarian and the 'nice-guy'. He doesn't stand out from the crowd and is shy to say how he feels about things and people, particularly Jill, the older brothers girlfriend.

In this lesson we started editing our opening sequence. We cut parts of the clip into smaller clips so when we come back to edit it next time, its easier to do. We decided to cut out a certain part of our clip as we felt that it did not fit in well with the rest of the sequence.

Toothache

In this lesson, we began filming for our credits. The credits that we decided to include are Costume Design, Art Work, Production, Casting, Film editing, Music, Producer and Director. The credits are displayed using different coloured playdough and they come in individually to make each word. We made up names for the people who did each role and these were written in blue marker pen on a yellow post it note, we did this as it makes it appear more child-like and therefore is more suited for a childrens film.

In our third lesson of filming, we introduced our other two characters, the problems we faced today were the letters were to flimsy to stand up against the wall, and they kept falling down, we overcome this by laying each of them down and filming from above, we also introduced the cat today, both of these we used the play dough letter which we make as we go along.
In our next lesson we are finishing off everything and we are going to start the editing, if everything goes to plan.

Second lesson filming

In our second lesson on filming we, wrote our names in play dough and introduced the characters, we found that the play dough vampires would not stand up very well on their own so we managed to put a paper clip in there head to stand them up, we will be able to edit that out when it is in final cut. We shot each letter one by one and again we had to slow it down and use more shots because we felt that it was going to quick.

In out next lesson using iStopMotion, we are planning on using our names in play dough instead of paper because the colour doesn't show up very well from the camera. Hopefully if all goes to plan, then we will introduce our characters and start adding our credit list.

In our first lesson of filming using istop motion, we started by placing our playdough letters infront of a blank, black screen and shot them coming on one at a time, we took three shots of each letter as only one would be too quick to really see. After presenting the name of our film company and name of the film our computer froze and we lost all previously unsaved shots and had to start filming again. We also had to re-make a few of the letters after destroying some to use for the other credits. We finally got both credits shot again and put the "presents" credit written in pen inbetween the two playdough shots. After the shot of the name of our film we used a playdough mouth to eat all of the letters one by one taking three shots of the mouth on the letters and then the mouth on it's own afterwards. We also realised that credits drawn by pen does not show up aswell as playdough and have decided that we may have to do the rest of our credits in playdough.

Making the playdough models

Our group for the children's film opening brainstormed some ideas and finally took inspiration from the animation works of Wallace and Gromit and then thought of a theme for our film, after realising that films like twilight are so successful we decided to make a children's vampire film that is mostly comedy as the lead role will be a vegetarian vampire. Later in our planning lessons we started forming and moulding the play-dough sculptures and words for our opening.

The preliminary film was a sequence of different shots taken by us and put together in a short clip to show that we could use the camera and get used to filming. In the process of filming we came across a few problems like finding a place to film and having enough room to do each shot in such a small space (a toilet cubicle). To overcome our problem we crammed all of our crew in the cubicle and did more hand-held shooting than using the tripod. When it came to editing our short clip we found that we didn't have enough original material to cut it that much as it would end up less than one minute long so we had to go back and shoot more for the clip. We then cut the small sections of different shots and slot them together to smooth out our short film. Our final product was the result of a lot of cutting and moving around of different clips and you can watch it on youtube!

Our preliminary task - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVazklJkAk8

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