The Sand Pit: Chinese whispers PT2

When asked to do the Chinese whispers exercise again me and Stephanie decided we would take the Eagle flew in the window and Micheal Jackson theme from the narrative and develop them to re-create our own narrative. We would still use a mobile phone to take photographs, but also using the other applications of the phone to record moving image and sound. We drew illustrations of the eagle, we took pictures from flickr, we took videos from various websites and recorded sound from youtube and our own voices. We decided to turn this sequence of photographs into a short film with all these elements because we felt it would give an eclectic and surreal style to the narrative. Also doing this allowed us to use the phone to its full potential and it gave us the opportunity to try out new softwares such as final cut. Which developed our understanding and introduced us to some animation techniques.
The short movie is about an Eagle who goes on a journey in search of her soul only to find Hitler has it. Due to the fact that Micheal Jackson has stolen his pants, Hitler decides that anything with wings is vermin and so their souls should be traded in for his trousers back.

The film starts off with a speech from a video on www.revver.com. we felt the speech was a good introduction to our narrative as the lady explains how she is the eagle flying. Although we felt this was an interesting way to start we werent sure our audience would understand the link between the speech and the short narrative. The images in the background are from flickr which were done by a photographer called Jonathan Haeber of Micheal Jacksons Neverland and the sound are clips from the animation Alice In Wonderland.

I think the video works really well and I think overall we achieved the result we wanted. We had a go at editing in Final cut and introduced some old fashioned animation techniques which also worked really well giving the film another dimension. The only problems we faced was that initially we was going to record the eagle moving across the images that were on the computer screen but this only created a really pixilated video. So to get round that problem we decided to print off the images for the background and make our eagles puppets. Recording them this way was still bad quality especially the sound but not half as bad. if I was to create this film again id use a different software other than a phone as it wasnt suitable for this film to have a professional finish.