Final Product

Evaluation

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Conclusion

To conclude my evaluation I have made a little video to express my thoughts

Anicillary Products

Here you can see the completed anicillary products.

 First you can see the poster and second you can see the two page spread in a listings magazine.

Music and Archival Footage

Currently, the last thing we need for our documentary extract is the music. We tried experimenting on garage band however have come to the conclusion that we are musically not talented enough to create a sound piece more advanced than a consecutive jingle sound. I am aware of the fact that we can not use copyrighted music so I went on a little hunt through the Internet in order to find copy-right free music and stumble across various sites which I didn't consider to be useful. Conveniently I remembered where I found my music last year so I looked for that site and stumbled across a wider variety of copy-right free tracks which I can now choose from. The webiste is http://freeplaymusic.com/ 

.Also, we have gone back to our original Idea of using some archival footage in our extract. I have browsed the web and especially youtube and found this episode of ' The Honeymooners' called 'twas the night before Christmas'. Because this is obviousley copyrighted as it was a real American Tv show we are only going to use very very small extracts for our documentary simply to show a some tradition.

what's going on?

Initially our animation was meant to be there to portray the story of how coca-cola created Santa Clause however after doing A LOT of research into all this, the myth around it all isn't too clear and it is hard to judge which of the information is valid and can be used to back-up our story.
Generally speaking I'm quiet happy about the whole change because our current idea is to make our documentary a tad satirical with Karl Marx dressed as Santa Clause as well as making a bit of joke about capitalism a system many people don't apporve of. We now need to write a voice-over and find a male who is willing to dub Herr Marx. Over all I reckon our production is going well our extract is nearly completed and I assume that we'll soon be done.

Just a little Update

For the past couple of weeks we have been working on our animation. We have been using Windows Movie Maker as a programme which I personally find really easy to figure out. Making an animation isn't too difficult it is just a very long process and very time consuming. So far we have about sixteen seconds of animation which took us a VERY long time to make.

Unfortunately what we realised recentley that the animation we made so far of our Santa who increases in size, is a little bit of a joke and doesn't look very interesting neither is it an exciting animation. This is why we decided to not use this part of the animation and try something new. Our new idea is the idea of a Santa hat wearing Karl Marx. This obviously changed the theme of our documentary a little in the sense of it now having more of a Marxist approach to it, however we are fine with that as we want to portray the changing nature of the celebration as well as how capitalism contributes to it. We didn't really want to have too much Bias in it however this documentary extract might seem like a Marxist documentary when only a little extract of it is looked at. 

Animation- Santa and Coca- Cola

As mentioned before we want our animation to be about the Coca-Cola Santa Clause myth so I have researched into this and found various different articles on the Internet telling the story how Coca-Cola brought Santa Clause to life. For example on the actual website for Coke they also have an article on how Santa came to be: http://www.thecoca-colacompany.com/heritage/cokelore_santa.html

Currentley for our animation we a re drawing a story board portraying the story of Santa Clause and Coca-Cola in correlation to the rapid growth of Capitalism which is also something we are trying to show. Also what we need to do is get a finial voice-over which we can use as a narrative for the images we are showing similar to the one on the last blog post.

Animation Idea

Like Michael Moore's documentary 'Bowling for Columbine' we want our animation to be the summary of our viewpoint. In our animation we want to portray the change of traditional Christmas to capitalist Christmas and who is benefiting from this transition.

Because neither of us are talented fine artists we are going to have to ask someone else to do the drawings required for our documentary. For the animation piece we want a voice over guiding the viewer through our imagination.

Voice Over:

' The tradition of Christmas started 2011 years ago when a little baby was born in a shed somewhere in Bethlehem. However this baby was no ordinary baby. He was born to a Virgin and was said to be the son of God. Now 2011 years later we still celebrate this extraordinary birthday but the story of Christmas has changed over the years. Everyone knows that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Christ but today we have added in our own little stories such as Santa Clause which have developed over the years. This mythical invention comes in form of  a chubby older man dressed in red and white delivering presents to children which have been 'good', rumoured to be an invention of the big corporation Coca-Cola. Living in capitalism, this tradition is very convenient as it encourages people to spend a lot more money than during the rest of the year thus benefiting 'the big guys'.

This is an animation I found on youtube which is relevant to the animation we are going . It is obviously a lot more detailed than we want ours to be as we want ours just to give a simple overview and just to add in a little personal opinion : ' I didn't think it was very funny.'

So this is our idea at the moment. Visually I don't think our animation is going to contain a lot of movement I suppose that we are just going to have a few images with a little animation like the 'brief history of Christmas video' which has a someone animated talking over it and then showing the images which the voice- over is  applying to.

Production Update

We have now finally started our editing for our documentary extract. We had an overview on all the footage and this has helped us decide which clips we will use. So far the progress is going well however we really need to start the animation part of our documentary. Also I started with the voice-over which I had to do 11 times in order for it to sound right as the microphone was always to far away or there were some unnecessary background noises. The programme we used was Imovie which personally for me was new as last year I used preliminary elements from adobe. I like Imovie because it is effective and it is easy to explore its various functions.

I am pretty sure that we will have our editing done soon, I'm guessing sometime this or next week. We have to look into finding appropriate music for the extract which isn't copyrighted.

Audience Research

In order to figure out whether our documentary would be a success and of interest to other people we sent out a small scale survey, We have now had the answers returned and can see the critera people fit in.

This has helped us see whether people would watch our documentary as well as the age of our target audience.



Ancillary Product - Planning

After looking at the different listings magazines we have decided to target the Christmas edition of the listings magazine Radio Times. After writing various drafts as the producer view and having various conversations with our teacher we have come to the conclusion that we want to have our listings spread as an interview with the people being interviewed being us. However this thing has a whole tie to it as know we have decided to include Stephan Fry, not in the documentary itself, but as executive producer of our documentary. We want to make our two page spread an interview by Stephen Fry interviewing us. I think this is a pretty good idea as it helps us to express what we feel in a leisurely fashion without trying to sound sophisticated or Superior, but just being honest on what we were doing and which difficulties and joys we have faced during this production. My initial Idea:

'Do they know it's Christmas Time at all?' featuring Stephen Fry

A documentary produced by two young film makers with executive producer being no one less than Stephen Fry, Britain's glorious and clever actor/comedian most famous for the programme QI. This collaboration has had the outcome of the fantastic controversial documentary ' Do they know it's Christmas time at all'.

Stephan Fry:What is the main issue you are trying to raise and portray with your documentary?
Us: Firstly we want to portray the correlation between capitalism and 'the celebration of joy and love' as this time brings a lot of controversy and contradiction with it mainly because of it's changing tradition. Also, we want to explain and portray the origin of Christmas and what Christmas is like today and what little baby Jesus birth in a barn in Jerusalem has to do with presents, pine trees and roasted 'traditional' food.

Stephen Fry:Does this Documentary have any approach towards the Marxist perspective of the world?
Us: None at all. For us the change in tradition and over time is of interest as well as the origin of traditions and celebration (Christmas in this case). Our documentary is not Anti- Capitalism but considering the fact most modern/western societies engage in this economic system, we want to show how consumerism and the economy change and alter traditions as well as showing how they motivate us to conform to these new traditions and ideals. It is simply fascinating to see the history and change of this really important event in the year.

Stephen Fry: Right, so what is your personal interest in Christmas?
Sonja: What fascinates me personally is the myth around Santa clause. When I was young i got told this story about Santa being an invention of coca-cola. Apparently Coca-cola took the mythological Russians figure father frost and simply made him a little fatter and a little rounder ever year until one year he was wearing red and driving a sledge led by reindeer's. However recent coca-cola adverts show Santa adjusting to evolution as he is know driving a huge red truck delivering joy and coke to all. I ask myself whether he makes it to Ethiopia...

Stephen Fry: Does your Documentary feature any religious aspects?
Us: Well we are trying to see the link between society becoming more secularised and how this affects traditions and values around this time of year. As Christmas is a christian religious celebration we want to show that people nowadays don't really celebrate the birth of Jesus anymore but now have different values and reason to engage in this celebration.



these are the initial question however i am sure that further research will change both the questions and the interview structure. I will continue with this soon and add more questions and research towards the Ancillary Product.

Before I forget: Our audience research is based on this on this Survey.


http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7Z25YV6

Radio Times

During our research we have found that the listing magazine Radio Times has a lot of additional background and production information on current media products in order to attract their target audience. It seems that Radio Times targets middle-class people, which is also the audience we are hoping to have for our documentary.

Furthermore Radio times is known for bringing out a special Christmas edition every year. This edition coming out at the festive time of the year and usually focuses on Media products concerning Christmas. Over  the years the cover has changed but a recent one produced is also portraying the changing nature of Christmas.

People are prone to be interested in Christmas Media at this celebratory time of the year. As the cover above shows us also radio times have noted the changing controversy of Christmas. This shows us that the topic we have chosen for our documentary is already widely discussed and established in the real world. Additionally this gives us confidence that the public is aware of the changes of tradition as well as having an active interest in this topic.

What's going on?

Momentarily we are facing some difficulties with our audience research as the computer it was filmed has broken down due to some spilling water. The computer is in the repair place however we don't know whether we have to film it all again as all footage may be lost. So far we have done most of our filming however on tuesday we need to finish of filming by interviewing certain individuals for our documnetary. Also we need to finish of our ancillery products which we have already finished planning.

Ancillary Product

Our ancillary products need to be a poster and a two page spread in a listings magazine. In order for our products to be as real as possible we have researched  various aspects of listing magazines as well as posters. In order to figure out how to make our article for the listings magazine we have looked at various different and popular listings magazines. This has helped give us an overview on what is important when creating this piece as well as figuring out what the appropriate way to do this and how many different options we have. The magazines we in-depth looked at were Radio Times, What's on TV? and TV choice. We later on discussed the target audience of the magazines as well as debating the quality of each of these magazines.

http://www.radiotimes.com/

http://www.whatsontv.co.uk/

http://www.tvchoicemagazine.co.uk/

For posters we looked at a website called 4 Creatives. This website gives us and overview on the types of posters are used for different genres and different types of TV products. Also this website helps us distinguish about which images we find powerful and intriguing and which we find boring and not appealing to the eye.

http://4creative.co.uk/flash/#/print/press_and_poster/disarming_britain_1

Making an Animation

Recently we have decided to include an animation in our documentary extract. To find out how to do this |I have researched it on the Internet.
Here are some websites which appear helpful:
http://www.fluxtime.com/animate.php

also I found a funny video which may be of use, however seems to be a little more complex than we would like our animation to be.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8683020727511417227

On YouTube you stumble across millions of videos of peoples animation they made in their free time which makes me confident that we will be able to create an animation piece as well.

Production Plan

For our documentary we have made this production plan showing us the steps we have to take in order to achieve our extract.

• different shots of different people expressing their emotions and opinions on Christmas without the audience knowing what they are talking about. By doing this we want to show all the diversity of opinions people whilst making the audience curious about what this documentary might actually be about.
• titles ---> film title + produced by: ( music: Santa Clause is coming to town). With the music we want to give a taste what the documentary is about as well as the usual titles which are needed.
• different shots of streets with Christmas decorations as well as voice-over. With this shot we want to be able to show the viewer what we can see during Christmas time in order to remind them what happens at that time of year.
• brief history of Christmas and the Christmas origin. Personally I think this is one of the key features of our documentary as we want to portray the commercialisation of Christmas and how it has actually nothing to do anymore with the birth of Christ
• during the voice-over we want to show some archive footage of historic Christmas. This is interesting as once again it portrays what Christmas was like in the past, even though we obviously will not be able to travel back 2011 years.
• show interviews: Christian Science shop keeper, Harrods manager, child, monk/nun/priest, parent. With these interviews we want to show the diversity of people who Christmas has and impact on, either because of religion, because of the profit that can be made or because of family life and traditional values.
• myth of coca-cola inventing Santa clause. I am really interested in this myth and I have been for years already. I think this is also and important aspect of our documentary as we want to show changes over time, and lets be honest a chubby old man in a red costume delivering presents really doesn't have anything to do with the Birth of Jesus
• ancillary products. We want to make a poster with some graphics on it portraying or documentary> also we need to have a two page news-paper spread but we are probably going to do this last once our extract is complete.