creative making week w/ lbm

{13/03/14}

After our three weeks holiday and onto our 2nd week of FMP, this week's objective was to collab with Lens Based Media students and to get involve with creative making. Personally I was very anxious and worried because it was very sudden, so it would interrupt my plans for my FMP and therefore I would have to manage my time wisely to get both projects up to date.

So with the given brief we had to bring a kit which was a list of various objects, this objects will be the materials that will help build together something new for the project. First thing that happened was to form a group and my group contained two graphics & 4 LBM members.

Before we begin to brainstorm we introduced our own FMP ideas and see if there was a way to inco-operate an aspect of each member into one idea, although there was no link that tied us in together, we looked at topics and build around and find ways to link our own FMP during the week. We brainstormed the idea of space and aliens and other attributes to the topic like lifeforms etc. This led us to the idea of who is the aliens? what defines aliens? Aliens is something not much have knowledge and have the typical stereotypes in movies and we the viewers assume that is how they will look like, but my group thought it was a good idea to look at different perspectives and trying to show that through some sort of media. We decided on a stop motion simply because we had a time limit of one week and it was an issue of unfinished work that we wanted to avoid but also it will reflect the LBM aspect of the project.

As a group we began to create story boards and our ideas of the rocket in space, our basic idea was to look at the rockets journey through space and passing by the glaxary, mars and milky way chocolate bars, keeping it simple and short but we had various ideas along the way and so it wasn't very clear. At the time of our crit we didn't have a finalised idea / storyboard and so we couldn't tell the concept of the spot motion and the story but it was understandable that we had to have an idea that we was set on. But in the end we stuck with the idea of 'who are the aliens?' and so in our film we used a human hand to indicate the disturbance of the atmosphere and question the viewers 'are we the aliens?'

After we established the idea, we decided to divide our jobs with 2 graphics working on the backdrop for the stop motion, 2 doing the concept art of the rocket and 2 making the rocket with the various objects that everything contributed in. The rocket itself was using the jaffa cake box as a base wrapped with pages from a book, highlighting relevant words to do with space, we used buttons for the windows, the top of the bottle for the bottom of the rocket where we were able to put tissue paper in to create the affect of flames. We were very happy with the outcome of the rocket and began enhancing the scene. To accompany the scene we also learnt how to make origami stars using the pages of the book. I thought we had a lot done on the first day and we all knew what to do for our days where both graphic and LBM and we will had to worry about was the filming and editting.

The filming and editting was purely done by the LBM members and the initial idea was complete and we all was able to view and comment on the film using social network as our platform. Overall I like what they did to the film and they followed through the concept perfectly however we all agreed that the ending was lacking and we had to decide on a music to fit with the spot motion. We thought 'Elton John's Rocket Man' to the film an excellent idea.

From here me and the other graphics member decided to create a book to accompany our film, we wanted to compliment the idea of journey and show a different journey of my group making this spot motion. This is a great way to show our ideas and the journey that the rocket took behind the scenes, it would also show our group journey. We wanted to create a small book and use the space backdrop as base pages, and placing the image onto each page, we wanted a further unique link to our film by illustrating a rocket that would move on each individual page, like a flip book. Overall we was very happy with the outcome of this book, we felt that it had been done very well.

On the final day as we were able to come together, we looked at ways to improve the short film and made sure we all was on the same page on the ideas and so we filmed more to add to the ending, to show this clearly. During the crit we had done well to present our ideas and concept. As a whole I thought the project was successful. I did enjoy the work my group had done and felt that the group worked very well together.