Introduction to Digital Media
Group Proposal
Group members: Grace Hillier and Natasha Patel.
The main idea that we wanted to portray through our stop motion animation piece was the idea of body image and insecurities. We focused on ourselves and other women around us. We then chose to develop this idea to create a final concept of, ‘male insecurities’. This issue is extremely common in today’s society as research from Glamour magazine revealed that 84% of men aged between 18 and 40 would change their appearance. We found that some men would have plastic surgery to change their appearance. To help further our knowledge research through books, magazines, Facebook the Internet and personal interviews will be done. This will help us to produce facts and figures around this topic; it will also make our piece more interesting. With the correct use of audio our piece will become emotive and the audience will be able to relate and understand our concept. We want our piece to give an emotion and knowledge towards male insecurities. We are aiming our project towards men between the ages of 18 and 25 as we found that this is the common age group where appearance in both men and woman is highly important in today’s society.
For our screen based stop motion animation, we will be taking still images using a digital camera to tell a story. To help us do this, we will be using computer software’s such as: Adobe Flash, for editing and animating our images into a moving image sequel, Adobe Photoshop for enhancing and editing images to give it a better effect and meaning and Apples Final Cut Pro a software used for editing video. We will refer to tutorial books and websites for extra support on these softwares.
It is also important to have a storyboard, this will guide us through our animation and help us make correct editing decisions and also save time.
An external hard-drive would also be required in order for us to save our animation work on as the files will be very large for a computer to save.
“Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera is a song that talks about her low self-esteem and insecurities and how she won’t let the negativities get to her. This is a potential audio that we may be using. However the choice of audio may change through some research later.
We will begin our project in week one where we will be making final touches and improvements to our storyboard. Then we will begin to take our pictures, going to our local gym to take pictures of the personal trainers for the ‘perfect body’ shots. We will also be researching in this week to find out more about ‘men’s insecurities’. Week two we will be focussing on photos, research and interviews we are looking to take pictures of men who we have interviewed to find out what their biggest body insecurity is and take pictures of it.
We will also carry on our research in this stage. Week three, we are looking to finish taking photos and also editing them on Photoshop. Week four, we will be working on Adobe Flash and the audio. In this week we will be using Adobe flash to create our stop motion animation, but putting the pictures in order and running the images through in one go. We will also be experimenting with audio to see what sound effects or music fits with intended meaning that we are trying to portray through our stop motion. Week five, we will carry on using Adobe flash to make sure that we have put together a good overall preliminary piece and that our audio works effectively with our images. And in the final week six we would like to work on Apples editing software Final Cut Pro to edit the audio and our stop motion animation. We may also work on Adobe Photoshop and Flash to add the finishing touches. By this point our project will be ready for presenting.
Our final proposed product will be a short documentary based on facts and statistics. We will show through images and audio, some insecurities men experience in today’s society and will give our audience something to think about.
