What I Have Learnt From The Project

I have learnt a great amount and attained skills through doing this project. Most of the things i have learnt are in the above image.

One main thing that i have learnt is working independently. This project was the first time in all my time of school where i have been so independent with a piece of work. Although i still had my teacher in the lesson it still was a very independent project. At first i was scared by the lowered teacher help and i felt that i needed help in what to do. I did receive a few words of help from my teacher early on about the ideas i had but i still felt that i needed help. The reason for this was because i hadn't worked this independently before. But as the project went on i warmed to the Independence. This was the main thing that i learned from the project and i think it is a very valuable skill to have.

Some other things that i learnt were organising and managing myself. Although i feel there is still a big room for improvement in that department for me, i think that i developed the skill further in the project. I developed this skill because i had to organise my work and manage when i had to work, etc. This is a valuable skill as it is very necessary in the media industry and other industry's too.

Creating My Final Piece

After i had my idea finalised and i knew what i was going to do i started to create my final piece. The software i used to create my final piece was Adobe Flash. I used this as it is a very good professional animation software and the fact that i could use it at school and at home (by downloading the free thirty day trial) meant i could spend lots of time on my final piece. This also meant i had a lot of time to perfect it and change things if needed.

I started to create my final piece at school to begin with. In lessons and some lunchtimes i would do a few seconds of my work. One thing i made sure was that i didn't do too much at once as i would keep facing mental blocks where i couldn't get my idea down or created in flash. This was a problem in some of the first sessions of my creating. But in later sessions i solved the problem by not doing too much or rushing it. I then started to create my final piece, by moving it from school via a memory stick to my home computer and downloading the thirty day trial of Adobe Flash CS3.

I then continued to create my work and finished it a home. The next thing i had to do was find a piece of music that fits well with the animation. Also another point i had to consider was that the music matched with all the hit points. A Hit Point is a point in an animation or film where something sudden happens. The music should match or reflect these hit points. After listening to many pieces of music i found a song title '21 Guns' by the band Green Day. The song and lyrics seemed to work well with the animation and reflected the theme of Remembrance Day and War. I did however have to edit the song on Audacity (sound editing software) very minutely so the hit points were matched with the song.

Once my animation was complete and i found the music i wanted i had to combine the two together. To do this i exported my flash animation file as a '.mov' file. I then imported the animation file and the music file into Adobe Premiere Elements. I then very simply added the two together, made sure they were in sync together and added a fade in and fade out transition to the music. I then exported it as another '.mov' file, which meant i had my final animation for the project done.

My Final Piece

(the video quality is not very good on this website, just note that the

actual video has good and clear quality)

My animation is about Remembrance Day and more specifically the poem 'In Flanders Field', it is also in the James bond opening credits layout and theme. In my animation poppies are used and shown alot as they are the symbol of remembrance for soldiers. As the poppies are such a big symbol, they were the only colour in the animation. Everything else was black and white apart from the poppies which were red. I did this to show what the main theme of the animation was. I also used the item from Pitt Rivers which started my journey to my final piece which is the 'Uzi Sub-Machine Gun'. I also created and used a Black and White silhouette of a world war two soldier in the animation as the poem was written in that time. Also the world war two soldier "look" is one of the things that pop up in my mind as a symbol of war. I used the world war two soldier throughout a lot of the animation. As the poem 'In Flanders Fields' was the main theme, i put each line in the animation with the stanzas they were in. Lastly i used the song '21 Guns' by the band Green Day. I used this song because it seemed to show and reflect the them of the animation very well.

Animation Practise 2

Animation Practice