Extended Practice: Analysis of Scene Mid shot - Reading newspaper, my first scene with a coloured pencil background

I wanted to talk about this scene because it is the first that includes the coloured pencil background of which Lucy is 13 in and I'm also very happy with it. I feel like I don't have any complaints with Lucy's physical animation in this scene which is quite miraculous considering it's the very first I've animated of her at that age, but to me she has the physicality of a 13 year old.

This scene was heavily referenced because it was a scene I needed to get right. I chose to animate it first and not animate the first coloured pencil scene in my storyboard to keep to a chronological order because I feel this shot is integral to the story and one of the defining moments in the animation. The reason for this is because it is the moment Lucy's opinion of her father changes forever so I needed that look of her world being turned upside down to reflect her emotions.

Originally I was going to animate her breaking down on screen, so tears and everything. But in the end, I wanted to be more subtle than that. I'd kept to a certain level of subtlety throughout the whole animation so if I were to change that now I would not be staying true to the point of this animation. Therefore, we only see her immediate reaction, everything after that is left up to audience interpretation, does she breakdown? That's up to the viewer to decide.

Wing did an excellent job at acting out the role of Lucy for this shot and the reference material turned out to be incredibly useful, not just from a technical standpoint with animating her opening the newspaper but also it was useful son I could truly capture her facial emotions.

Extended Practice: Analysis of Scene 14: Long shot, my first scene with a watercolour background

I wanted to talk about Scene 14: Long shot because it is the very first scene I have animated that includes a watercolour background aesthetic. I knew it was essential to animate a watercolour scene for my submission to actually show that it works with the character animation and I'm glad I animated this scene because it is the first scene in which we meet an older 17 year old Lucy.

I knew the backgrounds had to work with the characters, they had worked throughout with a coloured pencil background and a coloured felt-tip pen background so this was the last hurdle. I think the results are very successful and accomplish exactly what I was setting out for. At this point in the story, Lucy has matured pretty much into adulthood mixed with a teenage rebellion. And I wanted the backgrounds and her in them to reflect this, she is more mature, that is why I used the Maya model of the Nan's house as a guide to trace over to show her maturity as the backgrounds have matured.

In terms of how the actual animation looks, I am reasonably satisfied. This is a more complicated scene because the characters interact with the backgrounds. in this case the Nan opens the front door. The last time I animated a front door opening was for the scene 'Long Shot - Entering home'.

Here, I decided that to keep to visual consistency, for every frame the door moves, I should colour it and draw it by hand. While I feel the results were very strong, it was a hugely time-consuming process for such minor details. This scene ended up taking around a week to animate in full and for such a small scene, deadline or not, that is too time inefficient.

This time I decided to animate the door straight onto Animate CC. There was no way I was going to hand paint the door with watercolour on every frame and I feel the results still look good. Even though the visual change in the door is noticeable, I feel like it adds to the novelty and charm of the characters interacting with their surroundings.

 Not only does the background and Lucy's physical appearance change throughout the three stages of the animation, but so does her physicality. When I animated her as a kid I kept in mind throughout something Oscar mentioned to me that kids never stay still. Even when they are seemingly doing nothing, for example sitting at a school desk, staring at the clock, they are still tapping on the table with their hands or kicking their feet. To enforce this idea I tried to imagine that every surface Lucy touched was slippery, so if she leans on a surface, her arm slides. Then as she gets older she obviously moves less, so when she's 17 I tried to keep her physical movements more subtle. The breathing I think works just about, but when I asked for feedback, Eleanor pointed out to me that it looks a bit odd that while her chest moves, her head stays completely static of which I agreed once it had been pointed out to me.

Extended Practice: Putting my Animation into a Festival

I've only just started looking into festivals to put my animation into. The reason for this is because I have been pretty much entirely focussed on finishing the actual animated footage. But of the ones I have looked at, Manchester Animation Festival looks like a good choice to place my animation into.

As you can see they are holding their yearly film competition where they will be accepting student films. Now I want to be slightly careful as to which festival to place my animation into. The reason for this is because some of the subject matter in my animation is not child-friendly and I'd say my target audience is more mature. But what I like about Manchester animation Festival and why I think it's the ideal festival to showcase Cops and Daughters is because it has a massive range of different types of animations, some child-friendly and some definitely not. Yet, there is little similarity to the student films, they are all incredibly diverse with no set style. It's not like they only accept 3D or only accept 2D, therefore I think it would be welcoming to my animation.

100 word bio of the each team member

I needed to create a 100 word bio of myself and my 'team' which essentially just consisted of Markus as he supplied the music. Luckily, Markus had already created a bio of himself that I could use which perfectly fit the template I was given. Creating the bio was difficult because I wanted to talk about so much but needed to be concise and to the point.

Biography – Markus Siegel

Markus is an enthusiastic pianist, composer and producer whose musical style is inspired by orchestral and electronic film music. As a performer, Markus is experienced in multiple genres, but specialises in classical and popular music. He has worked as an accompanist for various talented classical singers and ensembles, but has also played keyboard in a number of pop bands. Whilst being a trained performer and teacher, Markus has been writing his own original music as well. His trademark cinematic sound is evident in all of his compositions. Currently Markus' career has been focused on music for the moving image, which has always been his passion.

Biography – Max Ardron

Max is a motivated 2D animator who works both digitally and traditionally. He is passionate about telling compelling narratives with realistic characters’ viewers can relate to. He is experienced in the software Adobe Animate CC, Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects. Outside of animation he has worked as a gag cartoonist and caricaturist. He is also the art director for Smashed Vinyl, a platform for musicians and music journalists. Max is constantly looking for the next exciting opportunity, whether it be working as a cartoonist on a zine or performing as a voice actor for another animation, so long as it’s a story he can believe in or a cause he can believe in.

Extended Practice: How The Sopranos Influenced Cops and Daughters

From the very beginning when I was mapping out the initial idea for my animation I knew the ending I wanted to have.

I was always going to end it with Lucy going round to her fathers house after not having spoken to him for a great deal of time, maybe even years, simply to drop off some of his old belongings. There she'd find him throwing out his old booze and he's destroyed his firearms. He spots her stood in his kitchen and is completely taken aback by her presence, as is Lucy by his. Then the animation ends with a long shot. This long shot was absolutely essential to the narrative and it's with great regret I have not completed it for submission, I will however complete it for End of Year Show.

The reason why I think the shot is so successful is because throughout the animation we hardly ever see the main two characters on screen together. Lucy is in every shot so whenever we do see Cop, he's never more than ten feet away from her, however I rarely wanted to put them in the same frame because I feel like this separation is representing of Lucy seeing Cop through her eyes and her perspective. When we see him and her together on screen it's like she's lost control and we can view him as separate, it's now up to us to judge how we see this man.

I also wanted to exaggerate how much distance they have  between each other by exaggerating the size of the kitchen so they appear smaller on screen than they ever have. Lucy is no longer presented in a mid shot, she has lost control and is essentially out of her depth.

The staging of this shot was heavily inspired by The Sopranos. Frequently I've noticed episodes will end with a long shot to accomplish the same goals I am trying to.

In the episode Join the Club, Tony Soprano finds himself more isolated more isolated than he's ever been in his life. In the final scene, the camera spends most it's time fixed on a close up of his face, we as the viewer can study his emotions and reactions until the final shot. In the final shot he looks comparatively small in frame in a room that's dimly lit with a chair in the corner that's noticeably empty and a dark sky outside. It's in these moments that we truly get a sense of how alone the character really is.

I wanted to highlight that sense of loneliness and feeling small by staging my characters in away that they look so small in their surroundings and are also so far away from each other that they no longer look like a father and daughter but instead look like two complete strangers that just happen to have made eye contact in the same building.

But it's not just The Sopranos ending long shots that inspired me with the final scene but also the content of how they would frequently end episodes. An episode would never end with a 'so did we all learn something?' style ending, things would not always get resolved and I think that's far truer to real life. Yes, you cannot do that in everything and it is often better to wrap things up. However with this animation I did not want it to be too narrative based and I definitely did not want to just 'wrap things up' when it does end.

An example of an episode that served as a very good example of this and heavily inspired me was the episode Where's Johnny? I don't remember exactly what happens in this episode, but I will always remember the ending, it is incredibly impacting, hugely down to the fact it is so open-ended.

The final scene of this episode features Tony Soprano and Junior Soprano who love each other dearly yet have an ever increasingly fractured relationship.

The scene starts with a long shot of Junior looking isolated and small on screen. Tony enters basically out of the shadows, we can hardly see him from Junior's perspective symbolising that to him, Tony is just a stranger.

While Junior stays at the same size from Tony's perspective, Tony actually gets smaller looking ever increasingly like a stranger.

Tony places himself on the sofa next to Junior and while out of focus, they are on screen together symbolising that they maybe getting closer.

This only lasts a couple of seconds before the pair begin to argue. They then stop being shown on screen together and become increasingly isolated.

The last piece of dialogue is from Tony who asks in a defeated manner 'Don't you love me?'. Junior does not reply to this and the two sit in silence before silently tearing up before the screen cuts to credits. There is no resolve in this. Neither apologises and there are no hugs. We can imagine that there are plenty of things these two want to say to each other, but they don't because sometimes we can't. The episode ends and we have no idea what follows, it's up to us to make up our minds which leaves us emotionally hanging and the episode stays with us in a way I don't think it would have if things had been neatly resolved.

Creating my Artbook

Here is an Issuu document of my artbook. Now, I had initially created an Artbook very early into the animation development process, however I felt like I needed to update it. This task was not essential to my practice but I felt as a physical document I wanted more to show to the viewer. My first Artbook was lacking in concept art. It was very beneficial to me that we made an Artbook in the first place because it pointed that fact out to me. Now looking back and updating my artbook, I can see just how far I've come and how far the project has developed in just two months.

Extended Practice Critical Evaluation

Extended Practice Critical Evaluation

I knew from the start that this was going to be my most ambitious project to date. I had the idea for a narrative in which a cop and his daughter have a very close relationship until something happens - the dad shoots dead someone who is unarmed, the daughter is none the wiser still thinking her dad is wonderful until she finds out and it damages their relationship. My aim was to tell a story that audiences of all ages could relate to: what happens when a loved one does something that you would find unforgivable if anyone else were to commit the same action? What changes? Could they ever be forgiven? I always intended this to be the central theme of the story. I definitely did not set out to make any sort of political point. I never wanted to package my animation with the message ‘American cops shouldn’t have firearms or cops are bad’, I wanted that part of the narrative to be sidelined and secondary. However, I found that delving further into the pre-production process, it was never going to be that simple. Whether I liked it or not, I was going to be making a political point and I was heavily advised to be prepared for this. This was something I was not prepared for and found myself needing to do a lot of research into police brutality from a variety of sources. I enjoyed doing the research and felt it made me better prepared to tell this story and in a way more qualified. Research has never been one of my strongest skills when it comes to developing a narrative and an animation. In the past I would simply think of an idea and jump right into it without really doing much digging into the subject matter. However I knew that this was not the sort of project I could take this approach with due to the socio-political issues surrounding it. Had I done that, there would have been repercussions further down the line or even at the stage of promoting my animation or placing it into festivals that I would have not have been prepared for. However, this is not the first time I have developed an animation that deals with important social and political issues. In Level 4 Animation, on the module Applied Animation, I chose to make an animation for the charity Childline. This animation is a perfect example of a time I felt I could just come up with an idea and jump right into animating without conducting a sufficient amount of research into the delicate subject matter I was dealing with. And I was given excellent feedback about this at the time, that if I were going to be creating an animation that was going to be featuring this type of delicate subject matter, I was going to need to show I had done my research so I could deal with the repercussions later. So with this project I knew how important the research would be, given that at the start of this project I knew little about the United States Police Force, nor had contact with someone who was an American policeman. That is why I gathered wide ranging research from different sources of journalism. I had been persistently advised by my surrounding peers that I should teach myself a new software to speed up my workflow. For past projects I have been known to animate quite inefficiently, because I prefer to hand draw my frames before drawing them digitally. I worked this way because I believed I drew faster, and to a higher quality, on paper than on a computer. However, these rough frames would often need a lot of refining, and I would still draw out my neats by hand on separate pieces of layout paper before then scanning these each individually into the computer. For this project, I knew my workflow needed to improve, if I were ever to stand a chance of finishing my animation. So I taught myself with the combination of YouTube tutorials and a book on learning Animate CC, Animate CC. Learning this software proved to be very beneficial to me in the long run and I now animate far quicker than I used to. Nevertheless, I found that I still put my work in jeopardy, because I taught myself the software too late into the project. Had I had invested more time into learning the software, and not just the basics, before starting production, I feel I would have finished the entirety of my animation in time for submission. I talk more about my issues with time management in my Studio Practice blog. But to conclude, I feel that is the main reason for why I did not finish the entirety of the animation in time for submission. Around a month ago I could have perhaps foreseen this event happening and would provide myself with two options, either rush to finish, cutting corners in anyway I can, I’d finish the animation but the general level of quality would decrease. Or carry on at the speed I was, dedicating the same amount of time and attention and not rendering out a clip unless I felt like it matched the same quality consistency and gradually increase in speed, but not finish my animation. That is the approach I decided to take and while I am dissatisfied that my animation is at present incomplete, I am very happy with the footage I have completed which is my motivation for finishing the project in time for the end of year show. This method also insures that I have good quality footage to put into my showreel. The experience of working with a musician was a first for me and proved to be incredibly rewarding. This motivated me to be more organised with my workflow because all the progress I made with my animation, I needed to keep him updated so we could stay on the same page.

Extended Practice: Reflecting on unfinished animation progress

It is with great regret that I have had to face the fact that I won't be able to finish the entirety of my animated footage by hand-in. I've often been known as a slow animator, animation is a slow process however I have proven to be particularly slow to the point of being called 'the sloth of the animation world'. This is essentially down to time management and work style.

For example, when I've worked in the past on a particular scene I would start then dedicate far too much time to it. I would often do a bulk of the work by hand on paper to create the roughs, then take these roughs and draw over them with fine-liner on separate sheets of layout paper, then transfer these scans to the computer where I would place them onto the photoshop timeline and add yet more in-betweens because obviously it's slightly difficult to figure out timings when your physically flicking through sheets of paper. Then once I'd added in-betweens, I'd colour each frame on Photoshop. this proved to be in of itself an incredibly time consuming task. Then finally I would render off my frames, but even in how I did this before was completely time-consuming with often turning to saving individual jpegs and dragging them and cropping them to the right timings on the Adobe Premier timeline.

I completely transformed my work style with the purpose that I would complete my full animation in time for the deadline. I was advised frequently by my peers and tutors that I should learn the software Adobe Animate CC because people around me felt it would suit my style of animating. I've found that although I was skeptical of first of the software, the people around me could not have been more right. I've been able to save a huge amount of work time with the software.

In particular I have saved a huge amount of time by not worrying about my organisation with layers, how they are set out on Animate is so simple to me and has really helped with skipping that part of the process in particular with doing in-betweens.

The process of doing in-betweens has been greatly sped up by using the software because of Onion Skinning. How I used to onion skin on Photoshop was by literally reducing the opacity of the layer in front and behind of the layer I was working on. So in that process I have saved a significant amount of time and wont be going back.

A big part of why I was skeptical of using the software was because I was aware of the fact that I am a slow learner. Once I have learnt a software, I've learnt it but learning it for me does take time and I was cautious. However with this project I was so determined to master this software after using it for a little bit of time and realising it was definitely for me that I took out the book on learning Animate CC in terms of learning it in-keeping with the twelve principles of Animation which I felt would be very beneficial.

Learning Animate CC wasn't the only thing I changed about my style of working. Instead of drawing out my neats by hand I decided that I would only draw them out on Adobe Animate and essentially cutout the middle-man. Furthermore I decided to significantly reduce the amount of rough frames I produce, deciding to literally only draw the most essential keyframes. This sped up my work flow significantly because it meant I did not need to waste as much time numbering frames and scanning individual frames. 

In spite of my workflow being significantly faster on this software. I still ended up behind schedule. So why was this. I feel that learning the software even though in the long run turned out to benefit me a lot did take up quite a bit of time at the start. However I noted in a weekly blogpost further down the line that my workflow was beginning to snowball and found that in that particular week I had produced the equivalent of animation to the entirety of what I had produced before in around a month of animating. This was evidence to me that I was becoming more and more confident and comfortable with the software so of course I was beginning to find myself working faster and faster. 

That to me is a big reason as to why I've ended up behind on schedule. I should have taught myself the software before the project commenced and not only should I have taught myself the basics but I should have also reached a point of which I was entirely comfortable with the software. And I wouldn't have needed to start learning the software that far in advance, maybe six weeks. 

To me the perhaps biggest reason I have ended up behind on schedule with not all of my animation complete is due to the sheer scale of the project. We were advised from the start to collaborate due to the fact that with a distribution of workload you can accomplish so much more. At the start of the project I simply was not prepared to do this because I had had the idea for this project and had storyboarded it long before we were officially briefed. I had an idea of what I wanted to produce and how I wanted to produce it, I wanted to put that pressure of making the highest quality animation I had produced yet on myself and wasn't too prepared to put it on anyone else. 

In retrospect, I do wish I had been more open to collaboration but I do not regret taking on all the roles myself. The reason for this is because I wanted to demonstrate that if I needed to I could so a wide range of skills. I wanted to show that while I might not be the best at it, I could at least demonstrate I had an understanding the the aspects of animation such as foley, soundtrack, background design and marketing etc. There are aspects of the animation process that are perhaps not at a level of quality I initially desired but I do not regret attempting to take them on because that is what this course is all about. This course is about trying everything and finding the aspects you are successful at and the aspects you are not.

This animation is definitely the most ambitious I have produced. It's two minutes long, that means it's the longest animation I have produced individually by two minutes. Furthermore this animation is not shaded (the last time I shaded an animation I spent two years on it even though it was only twenty seconds), it is entirely coloured with coloured backgrounds.

Extended Practice: Producing a Promotional Poster

As part of the promotional pack we each needed to create a poster for our animations. I felt like I was fairly comfortable to jump straight into this task as I already had an idea for a poster. The idea was to essentially take heavy inspiration from my title card where it is an aerial shot of Lucy at her classroom desk with doodles plaid out and the title Cops and Daughters written in a handwritten format but instead of using doodles in the poster, take screenshots from the actual animation and place them one on top of the other so not to give away the story but to give the audience a tiny snippet of the narrative.

I do like this poster and have mostly positive things to say about it, although I still felt like I wanted to produce another using a photograph of the Cop in how he appears when Lucy is reading about him in the newspaper.

I was initially inspired by the poster for the film The Social Network. the film came out seven years ago yet the poster has stayed firmly in my mind, and that's because it's very effective. Recently it seems all big budget movies use the idea of slap banging the face of the star of the movie on the poster. However here I feel it's done quite effectively. The text is written over Jesse Eissenberg's face which makes his face blurry and disstaughted to the viewer. 

Usually if we see a poster with a face taking it up we instantly connect to them (see above). Their face is centre frame wikth nothing distracting us. Yet in the poster for The Social Network the face is shrowded in shadows and covered in text. Usually we would instantly connect with this character but because our vision of them is skewed slightly we don't necessarily connect to them as easily which is exactly what I wanted to do with the Cop. Originally I was going to have just one image of the cop central on the poster with text written over, however Eleanor gave me another idea. I'd received positive feedback about a poster I created for a Smashed Vinyl gig. 

The ripping on the poster was a very simple technique that took a matter of minutes yet proved to be very effective. I was encouraged to use this same technique for this poster and instead of having loads of the Smashed vinyl heads, replace them with the portrait of the cop over and over again. This still accomplishes my goal of disstaughting our perception of the cop but now it looks more like Lucy has ripped up the image of her dad herself enforcing the idea that the narrative is about some sort of broken relationship.

I  received positive feedback about this new poster from Steve who said that the idea of ripped photography and ripped film is an image that is very powerful and impacting. It's a technique that's been used many times in the past but it's popular because it has proven to be effective at evoking that sense of a fractured hero.

I have to say that even though this poster took significantly less time to produce than my first, I feel it is more effective and communicates the tone of my animation better. However, I was encouraged that I should create a coloured version. Even though the subject matter of my animation is at times dark, it is always presented visually with very bright colours and here it's almost like I am promoting a film that itself is black and white.

So I created a second version of the poster and I feel adding colour has made all the difference. It still communicates the tone of being a fractured story yet it still looks like my animation. Steve did feedback to me that it might look more successful if the poster contained doodles scribbled over the portraits and loose pens, pencils and rubbers from my first poster splayed over so it more looks like it was Lucy that did the ripping. This is definitely something for me to consider.

Extended Practice: Markus' Final Score and Reflecting on Collaborating with a music student

So Markus sent me the final score for my animation and I am very happy with the final results. Again it fit really well with the animation footage and it was evident that Markus benefited a lot from having the animatic at his disposal so I felt like he would benefit even more from having me constantly sending him re-edits of the animatic with newly added footage.

It again fit really well with the animation but what I most liked about it is that he had expanded on the original snippet of music that he sent me so much. It starts out quite upbeat and happy and then delves into something completely different by the end, all the while keeping with the same beat. I told him that the score reminded me (in a good way) of the Netflix series Stranger Things and the soundtrack of that show. He replied to this by saying he created with this by experimenting with 80's sounds and was actually inspired by that show.

The experience of working with Markus has been very successful to me and has taught me a lot about collaborating with musicians. I was pretty lucky to find Markus but I feel I was able to find Markus due to the fact that at the time of meeting him I'd already had an idea of what I was making, in that I already had a draft storyboard to show. A big part of why Markus wanted to work with me was that he was passionate about my idea, I went to Leeds College of Music on that meet-up day with almost like a pitch to present, therefore I had an idea of what I was looking for which really helped.

It wasn't all smooth sailing though. There were things I did back in January I wouldn't do again with working with a music student. For example I felt like it was fine at the first meeting to try to talk to as many people as possible and get as many people interested as possible, just because I felt like it would give me more options further down the line. However at the time after the meet-up Markus and another music student was very interested in working with me. I, quite naively felt like this wouldn't be a problem further down the line and they could both produce music for the animation or collaborate. But I hadn't considered the guidelines of their submissions like I had my own. I waited around a month (mostly because I was working on other aspects of the animation) after they had expressed an interest before actually mentioning they were both interested in collaborating before finding out that for their submission they had to work on it individually, one music student per animation. I had to let the other student go, just because I felt like Markus was a better fit, although I felt awful and unprofessional and felt like I had wasted this other person's time.

Extended Practice: Promotion Research

So I am currently in the process of producing a promotion pack for my film. This is the first time I've ever really promoted an animation to this extent so I want to get it right.

Smashed Vinyl

I tried to recall if I'd ever promoted my work in a way that was ever like true marketing in the industry and I realised I had with Smashed Vinyl. Smashed Vinyl is a New Music Magazine/platform of which was started by my friend Ewan and for which I am the art director for. I remember back last Summer I was heavily involved with the production of the very first Smashed Vinyl Print Issue in which I created a huge chunk of the artwork for. But once I had created the artwork, obviously I wanted to show it to people. However, Ewan was resilient to me doing this, believing he did not want to give too much away as to the contents of the magazine until it's actual print release. Therefore I was very careful about how I promoted my work.

Instead of posting the above two page spread on my Instagram (a platform I promote most of my work) I went about only giving my followers little snippets of the poster.

I still received a substantial amount of likes per post considering I was never showing more than an inch or two of the actual poster.

The Disney/Pixar animated short Piper

Smashed Vinyl, and the promotional campaign we did for the first print issue inspired me with how I have been promoting my Extended Practice Animation.

These were my final character designs and the first piece of content for my animation I released online with the description being 'Final character designs for an upcoming animation I'm currently developing.' Now I'd love to say that at this time, this was fully intentional film promotion, but it really wasn't, it was just me wanting to show what work I've been creating. However I feel as a piece of promotion it really works. It gives nothing away, not even a title except from the fact that it's an 'upcoming' animation, yet I feel that lack of info was still enough to intrigue people to follow the film's production. Furthermore the studio Blue Zoo liked one of these posts, this showed me how useful Instagram is as a promotional tool and how something can be advertised to anyone within a matter of seconds.

From looking at how other animation studios promote their content, it doesn't matter if they are large or small, they still use Instagram as a very successful tool for Marketing. For example with the Disney/Pixar animated short Piper. 

Further down the production line I posted three stills from the animation. I needed to create these stills anyway so at the time I could figure out if the animation worked in terms of it's visual aesthetic but it was also so I could show my working progress and served to be in my opinion very successful marketing content. 

The way in which I have been promoting the animation, in particular the above stills is similar to how other animation studios promote their films. For example, the Disney/Pixar animated short Piper, before the film or even the trailer for the film was released, they released stills from the film.

I feel the above stills are very successful. They do not give away any of the plot of the film, yet they fully set the tone. The bird is very small and fluffy, with huge eyes, therefore I can assume and the general audience can assume that this film is going to be cute. Furthermore the bird is the centre of focus in every image, there is a bigger bird in the second image, but that bird is slightly out of focus, insinuating that this little bird is the protagonist and as an audience we are already rooting for him.

Comparing the Pixar stills to my own I feel like my stills are not as successful in what I am setting out to promote. Lucy is in every shot so it is evident that she is the main character. However even though I don't want the stills to give away any narrative, there is no evidence that there is a cop in the story or that the story is anything to do with a father's relationship with his daughter.

Extended Practice: Developing a Trailer

How do make a trailer for a film that's less than three minutes long without giving away the entire story? Well, I feel I gave it a pretty good shot and feel it actually reveals less than most trailers I see for modern movies today. This was something I wanted to keep in mind. I think that many film trailers I see today give away too much of the plot of a film. Why do film studios do this? I think because they literally think the viewer is too stupid to take in that 'less is more' idea, so if they are not given the entire plot of a film in a trailer they won't go see it, I think film studios think that if they don't put all the funniest gags in their comedy film trailer, people won't see it, or the biggest explosions, or best lines etc. I however with some film studios believe that in fact, audiences are far smarter than studios and production companies give them credit for and will actually see a film they know nothing about.

When a film trailer is given the time and attention it deserves it becomes to me a film/work of art within itself. My favourite ever film trailer was for the movie Cloverfield (2008). In this film trailer, a party in an apartment in Manhattan is happening before a massive explosion. Everyone floods into the street and then the head of the Statue of Liberty crash lands right in front of the camera.

The trailer gives nothing away and does the unthinkable. It has no title, just a date. But to me when people saw this they were not put off, it's not like no one would see this movie because they are given a date. Instead what I think it did was arouse excitement and intrigue.

Another film trailer I wanted to look at which heavily inspired me when working on the trailer for my film was The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya. 

This trailer gives very little away and I think it is very effective at doing it's job of intriguing the viewer. The film comes after the TV series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. And anyone who's seen that series knows it's incredibly upbeat and positive, this trailer is not. It has zero said words in it and the only audio we hear is the track Gymnopedie no. 1. 

It gives nothing of the story away, in fact we the viewer have no idea what is going on, even if we've seen the entire series, but that doesn't matter because we are carried so effortlessly by the visuals and soundtrack that we want to see it regardless of having no idea what it'll be about and maybe we want to for that reason. But after having seen the film, I can tell you while the trailer does not give away the story, it captures the tone perfectly, as does the Cloverfield trailer. A good trailer needs to capture the tone of the movie it's promoting. I think you are doing the viewer a disservice if you show them the entire film in the trailer, just like you are doing them a disservice if you present them with a certain tone in the trailer, then the film be a completely different tone.

I wanted my trailer to present two things, things start out good, we hear a bang, things are not good. I present this with footage that represent the good at the start, and footage that represents the bad at the end before ending on the Cops and Daughters title card. I feel it is a successful trailer. It gives nothing away of the story apart from we as the viewer assumes it's about a cop and his daughter, and the dad may have shot someone and things may go bad. That's it. I was inspired by the Gymnopedie no. 1 trailer music to do a similar thing to my own of maybe just having a piano cover such as or even I Giorni playing over but in the end decided to use an exert from Markus' score because if I used a soundtrack that wasn't featured in my animation I feel I'd again be doing the viewer a disservice. I feel that the trailer is very successful and I'm glad that I received positive feedback about it. Eleanor did mention to me that I do show the first ten seconds of my film in the trailer completely how it appears in the film. I felt like this was a good point but felt I needed to make sure it made some sort of sense narratively, even in a trailer. However, the footage in The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya trailer makes no narrative sense yet I still want to see the movie, so this is something for me to consider although I do like my trailer. I might opt to make two trailers.