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.