Evaluation

Banana Split is the name of the stop motion animation that was created with the help of 3 other members and myself. We had to come up with a short stop motion animation within 3 hours which meant we had to use our own resources to produce the film. We first delegated jobs between us, first deciding who had the best camera out of all of us, wherein that person become the photographer, another person volunteered to be the director so that left us with editing and animation. Even though I was the only person in the group to understand the most about animation I felt that I should take the role of editing because the other person wasn't confident in using computers and they felt comfortable in taking the role of animator, plus I found that this arrangement was an efficient way to get the work done with ease, especially as we had each other to depend on for help, so I was still capable of adding some input on what I knew about animation. The concept of the animation is a box of assorted fruit relaxing when a pencil bursts through the box and kills the banana horrifically, spreading it's insides amongst the fruit that witnessed the massacre. Due to the constrained about of time we had we were left using a mobile phone camera, use of college grounds only and we had the use of Final Cut Pro as our editing software, which was convenient.

I got my colleagues and friends to leave some feedback on my blog to see what they thought of it. After reading the comments I noticed that they all had the same views. They thought that the use of the stop motion technique was good and the actual animation was funny but the camera was the main problem, they would have preferred if the camera was stationary rather than it moving around constantly. One person mentioned that the use of controlled lighting would have been useful due to the shadows being in the way throughout the animation because of the natural light from the sun. Another comment disagreed with the previous comments and said that the work was obviously done under a constrained amount of time but unusually adds to the effect and compliments the music used by adding the essence of playfulness and humour into the piece and thought that the work was in fact successful.

Taking these comments into consideration, if we had a longer time period I would have preferred to film the animation in a more homely setting rather than using the grass outside our building. I would have used a better camera with a tripod to avoid the camera shaking and also would have used controlled lighting to avoid having our shadows projected into the animation. With the editing I would have liked to create an original piece of music to see whether that would improve the piece of work or I would use the same piece of music but try to add more playfulness into the animation, possibly by filming it within a child's room surrounded by toys that would also be animated. If I decided to follow this route I could look into the fact that children are quite violent when they play but the actual child is seen as being quite innocent and the action of violence is taken light heartedly.