The decision to produce a stop motion was highly influence by an existing piece known as  “The Quiet World”, a stop motion directed by Blaine Dunkley. The theme of diversity was selected collectively. As young people living in London we are able to people of different ages, genders, sexualities, ethnic backgrounds and even religions living side by side and wanted to share how so many identities join together in one place. A very general representation of national identities are shown, the photo shoot was done on an ordinary day in London and not on the scene of any specific culture’s celebration.

The content of our stop motion is clean, there isn’t any explicit content and this allows it to be viewed by people of all ages. The theme can be considered as educational and can help people understand what London is like in terms of cultural diversity. The poem ‘Diversity’ by Glenn Bridgaldinho presented an narrative and although it subjectively described his opinions on diversity, the poem was converted to be more objective once combined with our images in different locations and with sound. It seems that the most appropriate way to share the stop motion would be through the Internet. Youtube has become such a popular website in which users are able to upload their videos in just a few minutes and ending up with a link which allows them to share their videos with others. Easy accessibility allows the stop motion to be used for educational purposes and even for leisure.

My primary role during this project was to be the photographer however I was in need to swap at some points to become the subject of our piece. I was confident with the role of a photographer as I have experience with outdoor photo shoots and in events. I embraced the task to produce a stop motion film as this is something I haven’t done before. An anticipated problem that was encountered was that it wasn’t practical to use a tripod in central London as it is such a busy. The solution in this situation was to simply not use a tripod but to take pictures free hand and adjust their stability on the computer using Photoshop if necessary. Other than this, I didn’t really encounter any problems however, in order to incorporate group ideas, I had to be humble and accept directions from both Emmanuel and Joey regarding the angle some shots were taken. An example of this is would be in Kingston town centre where Joey is sitting down and Emmanuel comes to be the focus of attention. I believe that most of the problems encountered during the course of this project was to doing with editing but these were resolved.

On this occasion, the only storage device for the group was my external hard drive, this was a huge risk we took as a group out necessity as the other group members didn’t have compatible storage devices and therefore depended on just one external hard drive and not having a back up copy of our work. Next project I will make more of an effort to obtain another external hard drive to protect our work from unexpected but possible faults.

Overall this was a project which I enjoyed, I believe that as a group we were able to achieve what we had planned to do and this was only possible through knowing how to use the camera, being familiar with Apple Mac systems, having a fair amount of knowledge of Photoshop CS3 and Flash MX in addition to being in constant contact with each other, meeting deadlines to complete each stage of development and just working towards the same goal as a team.

The sound – Using Audacity, Joey was able to edit the sound. He was able to cut out all the unnecessary parts of the poem, change the pitch and convert the sound files from .wav files to one .aiff file for usage in Flash.

I assisted Emmanuel in creating the Title page in Photoshop, this was then exported to Flash Mx and was developed further appearing with the word diversity written in different languages. One of the last things to be added was the button ‘PLAY’ which when clicked on, allows the stop motion to proceed.

The final touch were the credits at the end.

I did the majority of the speaking on this occasion, just because I felt that I wanted and was in the position to contribute more as a member of the group.

I explained to everyone:

• The theme of our project was diversity and why we had chosen it (please refer back  to the project proposal)
• The stop motion was based on a poem (which was then presented on the screen as I read to the class who were busy multi tasking, I believe they were listening to my group’s presentation but making some finishing touches to their own)
• I then presented the incomplete stop motion after stressing that there was no audio yet

After this, my group received feedback regarding our piece. Joey and Emmanuel assisted me in answering the few questions that we had regarding how the fade to black was done and regarding the timing of the sound and how we intended to complete the project with a voice over.

My fellow peers appeared to be and vocally expressed their appreciation of the variety of images used, the transition of characters and locations. In addition to this, they picked out the usage of the motion tween and the blur effects.

The majority of the concerns that we were presented with, I had already anticipated and wasn’t too worried about. We just needed more time to add in the voice over and the play button, which were two suggested improvements to be made. The third was to only use the fade to black transition at crucial points during the poem in order to create a greater impact on the audience.

(This was due to me having to under go  an emergency operation )

After recovering from my operation, I recorded myself reading the poem, this was done in a Digital Sound Booth to reduce background noises and allow my voice to be clearly projected into the device used to record. I used Voice Memo an application available on the Apple iPhone to record my voice.

I read the poem a couple times in it’s entirety before reading the last second of the poem twice. Each time, I aimed to pronounce each word clearly and also I tried different reading the poem and different paces in order to try and easily match the poem with the images.

From time to time I had an input on the image I thought should come next in the time line but I can not say I made a great contribution in this field, it was Emmanuel’s chosen area to specialize in for the duration of this project.

I did spend some time watching over his shoulder how he did things and at times I did try to assist him often, I was unsuccessful and in the end I learned how to do things from him.

The Photoshoot

The Plan

Date: Wednesday 17^th March 2010

Start Time: 11am

Break: 1:30pm – 2:30pm

Approximate Finish Time: 5:45pm

Location: Surbiton/Kingston/Richmond/Central London (Oxford & Regents Street)

Equipment: Canon 500D D-SLR Camera, Tripod, 8GB Memory Card, 4 GB Memory Card, 2 Batteries, Flashgun,Change Of Clothing

Cast: Us a.k.a The Group – Kaisha, Emmanuel & Joey

We were pleased with all the images that we were able to capture in one day. The planning of each hour, location, character and angel that the shot would be taken allowed the day to progress smoothly. Productive would be an ideal word to describe the day. At the end we were satisfied and felt ready to move on to the next stage of the project, editing our images using Photoshop CS3 & Flash, despite this, it always remained an option to do another photo shoot if we found during editing the images we needed to redo some shoots or to take more to add to the production.

It was agreed that we would take pictures in the following places: Kingston Upon Thames, outside Richmond train station and also in central London (probably Oxford Street).

After that, I learned about the layout of Flash, how the library works, how the timeline works and the importance of it. Key frames and inserting text  were also explained to me before I began to try things out for myself properly in Flash. I also found out about graphic and movie symbols before moving onto various other things.