The Oscar Chronicles: Oscar & Quin

In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?

Stanley Pickle (2010):

How effective is the combination of your main product and ancillary tasks?

what have you learned from your audience feedback?

How did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages?

FINAL FILM

Here is my final film, I released it on YouTube on February 3rd and since then it has received 186 views to date, a number of comments and 6 likes. I am incredibly happy with the response because it included a wide range of ages and a lot of people had something positive or constructive to say. :)
Facebook comments: 
such a good idea!
that's awesome!
too cute!! :D
this is great - all the hours have paid off!!!!
very well done! does he die at the end? lovely to see your mum, brother and house!
what can i say?!!! that is excellent, well done.
21 likes

YouTube comments:
very good, how long did it take to get the stop motion bit right?
wow! That must have taken hours of work and what a great end result! Your first attempt at film making was a success. The sound track was beautiful and I really enjoyed watching it.
THATS SOO COOOOL!
6 likes

updated film poster - complete

finished film review (double page spread)

Here is my finished film review, I am really pleased with it! I made a number of changes during the production process because I found that having the background image fully visible made it difficult to both view the text and also to find a text colour that was visible on all areas. For this reason, I changed the hue and exposure to tone down the image and to give it more of a washed-out effect. This meant that I could use simple black text on top (I actually layered it twice to make it more visible) and the orange type was also clear. I decided to put my blog site on the bottom trimming because I found that a lot of magazines either had links to the magazine's site or the film's individual site. It also provides a nice 'link' (excuse the pun) to my production company - Juxtaposed Productions.
When creating my review, I found that a number of people asked me why I rated my film as '4 stars', not because they thought it was too high but because they thought it should be rated '5 stars'. The reasoning behind this was because I didn't want to come across as pretentious and also, '5 star' ratings are fairly 'rare' so to speak and for a film to be of such a good quality, I feel as though it should be perfect. 

finished dvd cover

Here is the DVD cover for my film, I am incredibly pleased with it, I decided to keep it fairly 'simple' because obviously my film is a short - the plotline isn't thaaaat extravagant and short films typically don't have DVDs unless they are made by Pixar etc.

dvd cover DATED24THFEBRUARY

A few weeks ago, I decided to send off my ancillary tasks and DVD cover to a professional printing firm in order to gain multiple hard-copies as this would be the case for real media texts. The three pieces arrived quickly and I was really happy with the quality, aside from my film poster being slightly under exposed. I was incredibly impressed with the quality of my review and DVD cover J yay.

When designing my DVD cover, I found that the most difficult part was finding images that I hadn’t already used for my ancillary tasks. This was difficult because being a short film, there weren’t many production photos or storylines that I could exploit.

I researched into a lot of DVD covers to find what elements were the most successful, examples that I looked at were the Toy Story trilogy, a number of Tim Burton films and other age appropriate films of similar genres.

I decided to include a trio of images and borders that I also went on to use in my film review, because the colours form a good colour scheme for my film. J

Certain factors that I spent a long time on were the duplication of sand, the font of the text on the back and text itself. I deliberated for a long time about the font because I wasn't particularly happy with it yet I discovered that the font used is commonly used on the back of DVD covers; this was also the case with my film review, however, upon receiving my hard-copies, I love the way that they look! 

dvd design DATED 30THJANUARY

Regarding the design of my DVD cover, obviously it won't be a massively in-depth and heavily designed product because there is no budget for my film and it isn't a large scale film. Having said this however, I am going to design the product to the best of my ability to demonstrate the skills that I have learnt and acquired over the last two years. I am currently undecided on what image I would like on the cover and whether it will be a 'screenshot' (still image from my stop motion) or an external image taken during post-production. On the back of my cover I would like some kind of tagline (similar to the ones used in the images that I have attached in the blog posts below) and then to have a blurb fitted around an image. Below the blurb I intend to have three images from my film in framed boxes with the outer colour being the orange, blue and pink that I have used in my film title.



One problem with my film is the characters are not voiced and so there aren't any actors. I have however come across a poster for Rise of the Guardians which has the characters' names written across the top, rather than the actors. (Could be a solution) i.e. the sandman, tooth fairy, santa claus, jack frost, easter bunny.

new idea DATED 29THJANUARY

Seeing as I am very interested in the post-production side of making a film and particularly the aspects of media production involving design, I came up with the idea of designing a DVD cover for my short film. 
When researching the designs for films similar to my age range and genre, these were my favourite designs:

is oscar going further?

When creating the name for my film, I wanted to choose something that meant that there was a possibility to have more films in the future. Rather than just having 'Oscar & Quin' because I feel like having 'The Oscar Chronicles' adds depth and also the audience thinks, "Ooo, will there be a sequel/prequel?!" Or I hope they will ask that question anyway. :)

Creating a storyline which could be followed was a very important factor for me because I really feel like I believe in my characters and because I designed and created the puppet for Oscar myself, with help, I feel like I want to 'exploit' it/him as much as possible, so to speak.

In the summer of this year, I will be travelling to Costa Rica for a month and my intention is to take Oscar and Quin with me to either capture footage of them together, or Oscar prior to meeting her and how he comes to live in Norfolk, England. :)

first draft of film review

As our famous old friend Shakespeare wrote in ‘A Midsummer Nights Dream’ way back in 1598: “Ay me! for aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth; But either it was different in blood—“, the challenges new lovers face are as common today as ever before. This is certainly the case for Oscar and Quin, who feature in The Oscar Chronicles, created by first-time British director, Nicole O’Malley.

Oscar & Quin, a four minute stop-motion animated short film follows the story of Oscar, a furry blue character, destined for a gloomy life in a landfill site. Within seconds of the film beginning, we’re thrown into the turmoil of discarding outgrown toys and thrown in the literal sense into the rubbish bin. All is not lost when Oscar finds true love with Quin, a broken mannequin. Together they defy the odds and prove that hope is not lost but when faced with a life-threatening situation, their future becomes compromised.

Created on a shoestring budget, O’Malley describes her reasoning behind combining stop-motion and live action in The Oscar Chronicles “when intertwined with live action, stop-motion brings a timeless quality in a way that no other medium provides”.  

There’s something gratifying about seeing the animation process in action, the giving of life to inanimate objects, be they hand-drawn images, computer-generated models or articulated puppets. But there’s something particularly special about stop-motion animation. It’s not the process itself, which is painstakingly laborious, but what goes on behind the scenes.

Set in a rural Norfolk village in contemporary England, it’s a quirky tale of optimism and romance that compels and captivates the audience into the first instalment of The Oscar Chronicles.

RELEASED February 28

DIRECTOR Nicole O’Malley

RUNNING TIME 4 mins.

designing a film magazine insert

Prior to designing, writing and creating my film magazine review, I researched into existing film magazines and the kind of articles that they include.

• Empire Magazine is a British film magazine published on a monthly basis by Bauer Consumer Mediam, first published in July 1989. It is the biggest selling film magazine in Britain and is also sold in America, Australia, Turkey, Russia and Portugal. In terms of coverage and approach, Empire is very popular and takes on a more 'irreverent' and less 'serious' approachre, like Sight & Sound. Empire caters for a wide audience as it reviews not only mainstream films, but also arthouse.
• Similar to Empire, Sight & Sound is published on a monthly basis in Britain by the British Film Institute (BFI). It was initially published quarterly when it began in 1932, until the early 1990s when it merged with the Monthly Film Bulletin, another BFI publication. Sight & Sound reviews all films released during the month - both arthouse and mainstrean feature films.
• Total Film is British film magazine published by Future Publishing every four weeks, 13 times a year. Its original launch was in 1997 and offers cinema, DVD and Blu-ray news, reviews and features. 'Each month, Total Film provides a range of features, from spotlight interviews with actors and directors, to making of and on-set pieces for new and future releases. Each issue always includes the Total Film Interview, which is a six-page in-depth chat with an actor or director, along with a critique of their body of work.'

When creating my film review, I constantly kept in the back of my mind that my film was a short and so if it were to be reviewed in a magazine then it would have to be a 'special occasion'. This was why I decided to make my insert a 'Spotlight' and so it was enabling the reader to witness, read about and potentially watch a short film. Empire Magazine don't really tend to do this kind of thing so initially this cast doubt in my mind, however, Total Film really encouraged me to do it because they often provide 'spotlight interviews' :).

magazines

On a magazine hype...

 Over the past few months, I've been collating Empire and Total Film magazines, not only to fuel my new-found obsession but also to gain a wide and varying understanding of the different styles adopted for writing and designing film reviews. Whilst trawling through the magazines numerous times and re-reading articles, I found a number of articles/reviews/designs which I particularly liked from different aspects. The Skyfall article from the Summer 2012 issue of Total Film features text laid on the right-hand page, of the double page spread, on top of an image of Daniel Craig as James Bond and his signature Aston Martin DB5 car. I really like the way that articles look when the text is placed directly on top of a background image rather than on a plain white background/border. This was the first inspiration for my magazine. :)
The Empire review on Wreck-It-Ralph featured a rather 'kooky' section which said things which referred to video games and so I drew inspiration from this when I designe my film review 'The Oscar Chronicles: Oscar & Quin'. 
Frankenweenie and Paranorman were also featured alongside each other in comparing the makings of the films, I really like the production photos and so I decided to include photos from on set rather than images just from the film.

updated poster

Upon making the initial design for my film review, I have come to think about when the release date of my short film. Originally I dated it as 'January 2013' however, my deadline for the project falls in February and I want my magazine to be in March and so I've reached the decision to change the date, otherwise the audience interprets that my film is slightly old. 

current review design

new flashback

 





 

added scene

Upon showing my film to the class, I received really helpful feedback and from this I made the enhancement of adding a flashback scene to mix up the narrative, rather than just being linear.

Rather than focusing on Oscar or Quin this time, I decided to make it more human so that the audience can have an even greater rapport with the characters, and so I filmed my brother opening a present, with Oscar inside. I filmed a variety of shots, closeup, mid-closeups, POV shots but I decided to simply use the one type of shot, rather than a mixture because I felt that within my film I had used a wide variety of shots and by using more than one for the one scene, it seemed to make it a bit disjointed. With regards to editing, I chose to add an effect that would give the clip an aged and vintage look because the rest of my film doesn't really have many effects because it is more driven by the narrative and storyline. I also sped it up slightly so that it didn't last for too long, (because my brother was a little bit slow at opening!!), and also changed the saturation/gamma.

audience feedback

I recently showed the rough cut of my film to the class so that I was able to gain an external perspective on it and to use the feedback to possibly adapt/enhance my film.
Audience feedback....
Comment No#1
Good ident. Nice use of music. Good range of shots. A film that brought a smile to my face. Nice variety of locations - I think the beach works really well. Good use of stop motion. Love it!!! :)
Comment No#2
I larvvve it! :) Love the dog camera. It must have taken a lot of time and effort. It is also an adorable plot! I really like the titling as well.
Comment No#3
Amazing titles! Really good variety of shots. Very well trained dog! Falling in bin shot is amazing. Interesting editing. Emotive music. Really charming. I love it!
Comment No#4
Love the incorporation of footage and stop motion. Such a quirky idea! However at the moment I feel like it's more of a film opening than a short.
Comment No#5
Effective titling sequence. Variety of shots. Nice POV from the bin's perspective. YAY stop motion. So cute when they get married. Very good! Made me smile. I like that you incorporated stop motion and footage. :)
Comment No#6
Stop motion can be very risky but you handled it incredibly well. Very good storyline and focus on shots. Worked extremely well. Very amazing film! Well done. :)
Comment No#7
I like how you've mixed stop motion together with normal footage and I like how the music you've chosen changes the atmosphere half way through.
Comment No#8
I actually love yours. The fact you've done stop motion as well as normal stuff is just amazing. I do think the stop motion stuff makes the acting in the start not so good though. The music also adds such a touching effect. WELL DONE!
Comment No#9
The sections filming the dog work really well - I love your use of tracking. The shots vary and work/flow together. I love the narrative - it's so cute and creative. 
Comment No#10
Shots were all framed well. The stop motion parts were cute and also brought a little playful side to the piece.

Upon receiving verbal feedback from my teachers, I learnt that to make my film even better I should insert one or more flashback scenes in the prolonged moments during the marriage and also before Oscar and Quin begin walking on the sand dunes. I am thinking of filming scenes in which Oscar is being unwrapped as a present whilst Quin looks on from a shelf to show how the two first 'met' and then possibly another, or making the flashback fragmented that I can insert it in both places. This was a great piece of feedback to receive at this time because I have enough time to film and insert the footage and if I had not received this feedback then I would have missed out on marks.

I was very pleased with the reception of my film; I was initially worried that the audience might not understand why the couple falls in love or lack an emotional attachment with the characters.

Another exercise we carried out was asking the audience to write in one to three sentences what they thought the message of the film was/what the film is about. This was, thankfully, very insightful and effective because as the sole director, producer, scriptwriter, cinematographer, editor, you assume that the message of the film is clear and that people will be able to understand it. This didn't prove to be a problem for myself because as the feedback demonstrates, people understood the plot of my film. Yay.

ROUGH CUT YAY

WATCH IN HD OR 480p! :))

update

Upon reviewing the opening of my short film, I came to realise that the changes that I made during production meant that the Photoshop images that I had created were no longer relevant and actually detracted from the effectiveness of my film. This was because the 'backstory' that I had created for Oscar no longer fitted and if anything, made the plotline less seamless and quite confusing. For this reason and because I didn't want to put my hard work to waste, I decided to draw out some new images which I hoped would be better. I thought that I would create just two images, rather than five or six, and the first I decided would show Oscar alone in the garden and then to fit with my dog Holly carrying Oscar out later in the film, my dog carrying Oscar in from outside. However, I felt that they didn't really work and I preferred my short film without them. 

Regarding my film title.....

Initially, I couldn't find a font that fitted either my genre, style, theme, colour scheme, target audience or anything of that sort so I turned to finding one to download from the Internet and then I came across a font which I layered on top of each other in two colours to make it stand out. :) I chose the colours because the orange matched Oscar's nose; blue for Oscar's fur and the pink was a good contrasting colour to match with. Regarding the actual words in my title... I wanted to create a title that suggested the possibility of it becoming a series of short films following the life of Oscar. To go with this, (similar to Harry Potter and the .....) I chose 'Oscar & Quin' because it is short enough to fit with the length of the full title and it is enough detail to just suggest the characters and plot. Also considering that my film is a silent film, it works well to have the character's names in the title otherwise these would be lost and less of a connection would be made between the characters and audience. 

Additional note, I really like the way the blue looks behind the title because it adds a drop shadow making it stand out more but there's actually a relevance behind the colour. (MISE EN SCENE IN ACTION...)

Snoooooooooopy. When preparing to edit my short film, I watched a few episodes of Snoopy to gain an idea of what music was used and how the lack of speech was approached. I then came across a clip on YouTube of Snoopy's wedding (which sadly goes wrong...) which was really helpful because I was worrying about what music to use and it showed me that I could just use a basic song (copyright free, of course) which fitted with my whole film, mixed up with a few others. 

quick mini sort of evaluative thing

As you will be aware from my initial plotline and ideas, I was planning to film the wedding, and probably the majority of my short film, outside in the snow. We had a small amount of snow (a slight icy frosting) at the beginning of December but it didn't really have the 'look' that I wanted so I waited in the hope that we'd suddenly have a mass of snow either before or after Christmas. Funnily enough, we have had plenty of snow over the past week - typically though, the snow fell a week after I had completed all of the filming and editing for my product. I thought I should take advantage of the snow and to just take some photos demonstrating why snow isn't the easiest to work with. 

When I first placed the mannequin in the snow , it fell straight over (See below images), this seemed to be some kind of sign that attempting to film in this environment wasn't really going to work. 

Problems: -

Lighting - the snow has a set sort of feel/ambience and there's not much that can be done regarding lighting.

Focus - despite being good in other circumstances, my camera initially struggled to focus with regard to the brightness of the snow.

Lack of continuity - unlike sand which can be moved quite easily, the snow is quite crisp and leaves imprints which are too large. Therefore uneffective in stop motion.

Practical reasons - snow gets dirty, the characters get wet and it's quite unpredictable in terms of melting, or snowing more.

Completed poster design...

Initial title idea

Final poster

Poster design

CHOSEN FILM POSTER IMAGE...



Regarding my film poster design, I am choosing not to use an overly-edited or actor-driven style. Firstly, I couldn't really make it very actor-driven because of the lack of cast within my short film, being that there is actually only one human role. And I feel that using an edited image would detract from the style, genre and theme of my short film which relies on the characters to drive the plot and it is fairly simplistic, following the concept that I am not using an dialogue, only non-diagetic music and sound.
An element that encouraged and pushed me in the direction of a 'silent' film was the inspiration of Snoopy, a fictional character from the comic strip Peanuts, created by Charles M. Schulz. For the first two years of his existence, Snoopy was a silent character until on the 27th May 1952, for the first time, he verbalised his thoughts to the reader in a thought balloon. To begin with, he was a normal dog, only thinking in simple one-word phrases, e.g. "FOOD!", but as the comic strip continued, he became increasinly more articulate. The comic strips and television specials formed a considerable chunk of my childhood and it was this that influenced my decision to remain a 'silent' film. I also didn't want to detract from the themes and meanings of my films by layering on top of the footage, an unrealistic and ill-fitting dialogue.
The hardest decision I've actually had to make, regarding my film poster, is deciding on which fonts I will use for my film poster for both the title and credits. Adobe didn't really have any fonts which I would consider to use and so I have been researching into which fonts fit my film best and which are the easiest for the eye to read. Colours are also very important, I've concluded that the title either has to stand out from the rest of the poster, or to fit with a common colour scheme from my short film.

video

Okay so I intended to post a video yesterday of me talking about updates since filming and what changed during the production process. And A LOT changed.
Firstly, I decided to take a trip to the beach to film the wedding and it was there that I chose to film more scenes than I had initially intended to. I feel that this was a great decision to make because it gave my film a great deal more depth. Although, there were actually a lot of consequences for choosing the beach which I didn't really consider or think would happen. The first was other people, being a public attraction, obviously there were tourists who I had to work hard to try and not include within my film. Secondly, sand. Never work on a sandy surface! It moves and is incredibly difficult when doing stop motion because it isn't really until afterwards that you are able to see where the imprints on the sand were left. Despite some imperfections, I am very happy with how the scenes turned out.
Because I was so happy with the location of the beach, I decided to create an additional ending scene to utilise the lovely scenery and also an ending which is fun but also posing another idea. I hadn't really thought of a solid finish an so I feel as though this was a very effective choice :)
Regarding the garden scenes, even more changed, for the better I hasten to add!
Changing of scenes:
1. Having my mum packing old toys into a box to add a human element to the short film and also depth and history behind the characters.
2. Using a GoPro Hero camera attached to my dog's head to film her carrying Oscar outside.
3. My dog dropping Oscar on to the floor near the bin.
4. Having a stop motion sequence of Oscar and the mannequin meeting.

So as you can see, I actually changed most of my film during the production process.
Editing is my favourite process so I didn't really have too many problems with this. Although I did experience a few issues and delays because the stop motion images needed resizing for they were too large and I had to set the time for which they would be shown. I also had to use Colour Correction on the scenes filmed using the GoPro Hero camera because they were quite saturated and pale. These scenes were: my dog carrying out Oscar with the camera attached to her head!!! And the opening of the bin from inside. I like these two scenes because they are not only different but also when filming other parts (which I didn't end up using), it was very helpful to learn about multi-camera filming and editing:)
I just need to sort out my music and titling. Yay.

 

it's officially over!

FILMING AND EDITING IS DONE.
So, filming took place over a total of two days (Wednesday 2nd January and Saturday 5th January) and editing took 6 hours on Saturday, the whole of yesterday, and the whole of today. The reason that it took so long was because of the stop motion images which not only needed resizing and adjusting the duration, but for a number of them I had to clone stamp using Photoshop to remove the fishing line that was used to raise the mannequin and Oscar. 

Shots

EWS (Extreme Wide Shot) - The view is so far from the subject that he/she isn't even visible. Often used as an establishing shotVWS (Very Wide Shot) - The subject is visible (barely), but the emphasis is still on placing him in his environment
WS (Wide Shot) - The subject takes up the full frame, or at least as much as comfortably possible.
i.e. long shot, full shot
MS (Mid Shot) - Shows some part of the subject in more detail while still giving an impression of the whole subject
MCU (Medium Close Up) - Half way between a MS and a CU
CU (Close Up) - A certain feature or part of the subject takes up the whole frame
ECU (Extreme Close Up) - The ECU gets right in and shows extreme detail
Cut-In - Shows some (other) part of the subject in detail
Cut-Away - A shot of something other than the subjectTwo-Shot - A shot of two people, framed similarly to a mid shot
Over-The-Shoulder Shot - Looking from behind a person at the subject
Point-of-View Shot - Shows a view from the subject's perspective
Weather Shot - The subject is the weather. Can be used for other purposes, i.e. background for graphics