After having a look into the stop motion idea, I decided that I was not going to be able to do it, taking into account that it required a lot of time and more importantly a very own area that I would be able to completely isolate so that things like light, positions or even stuff that could be moved, didn't affect the continuity of the video. Having that said, I started looking into very new ideas, but that at the same time sticked with my original plan, which was not to do a usual video with actors and flashbacks, as I though it was very cliché already. I wanted to do an animation, something new that I hadn't even done before. As a matter of fact, after thinking and thinking what I could do, I decided that I wanted to create my very own 2D animation. I have never been very good at drawing, but I am good at designing and creating and playing with shapes in the computer and that is when I said, why not and took the big risk.

The idea is to tell a story through an animation with the poem as a song playing in the background. My original plan was to make the story just as an animation,  but an advice that Simon gave me was that I should introduce the animation with some real life action. I liked the idea a lot to be honest and that is when I decided to create the animation, which was still going to be the main focus of the film, but at the same time was to be integrated and give a reason to it. The idea now was to start with real life, have animation and end with real life as well. I decided that I liked that idea a lot.

After setting up the idea, I talked it through with teacher Helen, who liked the idea as well, but gave me a couple things to take into account. The first one was to make sure that the music fitted, then she told me that I also should introduce the animation with real life, but I had to be careful with the way I did it since she didn't want that for a bad transition, all the hard work looked a bit bad. Taking all that on board I started working on it.

The virtual studio was a very big thing for the group, but specially for me as I was the one creating it. At the beginning the idea was just to find a template of a nice studio and adapt it with our colors and use it, but it didn't really seem to work. The original studio was something I had in my possession from a previous training and it is all royalty free, so the idea was alright, but then the problems started to come. I finished the first studio and brought it for our green screen training, but neither Danny or Helen liked it and in my opinion I didn't really like it that much either. This is a screenshot of the design of it:

The idea was to have the anchor standing and presenting the whole news segment form there as some relevant videos or images were in the background in the both big screens. The virtual studio is not bad, is just very flashy and doesn't really suit our brand, which is why we decided to create one from scratch and just do exactly what we needed. We discussed different ideas on what we all thought that was necessary to have in the studio. Here is the list of it:

- A monitor

- Anchor in a mid-shot

- A small studio

- Sport look

With all those elements I started searching and looking for some ideas to create the studio. I looked into studios like Sky Sports and ESPN, but none of them were really virtual, which didn't really help on what I wanted. The only thing that did help, was to have more or less a look at the kind of light and how the layout should have been. This are both the examples on what I looked at:

ESPN

Sky Sports

I realised that it wasn't going to work, so I remembered something that was definitely going to help me and it was the gaming news I look at sometimes from a very big company like it is IGN (Imagine Games Network) which is an online only news company. They have their own channel and massive brand on youtube and by looking at of their segments again I realised that what they were doing was more or less exactly what I wanted for the final studio for our project. It included sort of a mid-shot, some of them include a screen and it is very online newsy, which goes with ours as well since it is online only. This is a screenshot of what make me had the idea for our studio:

Although it has a real working place on the background of the right side, it has more or less the ideal scheme for ours. It has some sort of monitors, so virtual areas, sort of a mid-shot and it does look very according to the their brand. After looking at it and taking everything into account, the whole idea just started to emerge. 

One of the main ideas we have, although it wasn't included on the brief, was to create a virtual studio for our production. The idea was simple, design a studio on the computer and then green screen it. As for our green screen we realised that we had a lot of issues from which we are quite happy we did some training before. I have particularly used green screen before, as a matter of fact I own one, so I know that it can get to be a really tough job as there is a lot of things that need to be taken into account, which in my experience are:

- The very first thing that everyone needs to now is that no matter what you do, you need to have your green screen flat, as all the shadows that folding and bending creates, can become quite a problem when you edit. 

- Second is light. No matter what you do, no matter if you have the best place, the best actor or the best graphics, no light will absolutely ruin your video. When it comes down to lights, it is not as simple as just turning the lights of a room on or letting the light that comes from a window do the job, as the objective is to give equal light to the whole area plus make sure that your anchor is very very well light but at the same time not look yellow or over lighten. 

- The third and most annoying issue are shadows. Shadows might seem something obvious, but in a very well design green screen set, they are completely avoided as they become a big pain when it comes down to taking them out in post. In order to remove shadows, it is necessary to know and learn where to set up the light and work with the amount of lights you have. 

Thanks to all of this possible issues and many more that anyone could find when doing green screen, we decided to have a testing day before the actual shoot. One very common mistake by amateurs, is that they don't practice all this before and expect to get the chroma key right the very first time, which is very unlikely to happen. 

Our very first issue was the camera. We started using a Sony PMW as all the Sony EXs were being used for a workshop. In my opinion it was the worse choice we could have gotten as the PMW didn't really help us the way we wanted. One thing that is really important when it comes down to green screening is that the camera needs to have a very good resolution so that the computer can recognise the green screen and then the anchor and don't mix them up. When we did our very first shot with that the PMW, we ended up with a very bad resolution, which in my opinion is thanks to the distance between the camera and the person, although I am not entirely sure, but a lot if things were tried and nothing really worked. This is the outcome of the very first try:

After trying it with different people and different light angles and effects, the outcome was exactly the same and I never knew if there was something I was doing wrong, but I doubt it as I checked everything three times. Looking at the outcome we decided that this was not the best decision for us and we decided to change it and use the Cannon 7D. We borrowed one and used it form the same angle and same lights to see if there was something odd in the distance, but the Cannon helped much more with the resolution. Here is the outcome of it:

Once we say the outcome we decided that we were going to use that camera instead of the Sony PMW as it helped us more deliver what we wanted. Although in the end we decided to using more of a mid-shot for the final studio set, the Cannon was key for chroma keying. The resolution of it is so good that it allows the Keylight plugin in After Effects to identify very well the green color and separate it from our anchor. We were all happy with it and all the details with the final studio and resolution will be posted on another post. 

For our logo we had meeting to discuss what is it exactly that we wanted. We all agreed that we needed something sporty and something that didn't say "Football" or "Racing" we needed something that tell people that this was not the usual stuff you look at. At first we looked into other channels logos which helped us a bit to understand more or less how a logo should be design and how each of these ones have a message in them. The first image has some channels and film companies all around the world:

This second one has UK only channels:

After looking at all these and more, we decided that the logo had to be small, consistent and have the initials of our brand, TTV. The main thing that had to be chosen was the font that we wanted to use for our logo as we all agreed on not having a standard one. We came across with one of them that was exactly what we wanted. It is called Sports World

The whole idea came from wanting something that looked like those typical american sport fonts in college and even at school, they are all over the movies and they are real. This was one of the examples we took into account:

After getting the whole idea together we came with the logo first time, no change of design as we liked a lot what we produced. The logo TTV has the colors orange and purple. The orange represents bright, new, happy and fun and as of the purple it represent, innovation, unisex, sporty. Here is the final logo:

This is the Risk Assessment form for the Kent Roller Girls piece:

Risk Assesment Roller Derby by helzwelsh

After showing our first draft to teacher Helen, she helped and made some adjustments that were needed regarding how to introduce the show and the V/O. Here is the one with corrections:

Digital News Draft Script 2 by helzwelsh

Here are the consent forms taken for this production. We had to use them for Beth, Emma and Angie.