When set this assignment the first thing that came into my head when thinking about 5 was 5-a-day which may speak to the power of advertising but I decided to run with it. I had had a notion in the back of my head to try some sort of stop motion for a while so I figured this was as good a chance as any. Plan A was going to be claymation but then my modeling clay fruit and veg didn’t want to stay upright so it was back to the drawing board and a quick trip to Albertsons to get some actual fruit and veg!

Poor fruit and veggies, denied their time in the limelight.

After I took all the photos I started thinking about what else I wanted and got to thinking about the Baz Luhrmann song (Everybody’s Free) to Wear Sunscreen and wanted to go for a similar vibe of having the somewhat techno music overlaid with facts about why you should eat five a day. I managed to find on the internet a list of 5 five a day facts and then since I didn’t much want to have to listen to my own voice again I outsourced the audio to some friends at which point I decided to continue the 5 theme and get 5 different accents reading my 5 facts.

Once I had all my bits recorded it was time to put it all together along with background music from the free music archive. Having never used Premiere before it was a bit of a learning curve and in order to get the look and sound of what I wanted I ended up assembling the stop motion in a different program and inserting the resulting video clip into Premiere then editing my audio in Audacity before adding that the premiere. With all my bits in place I could then play around and add titles and effects until I got something I was reasonably happy with.

I don’t think this is a perfect piece, far from it. One of the problems with getting audio recordings from people on the other side of the country/planet is that I was relying on them to record the audio so the quality isn’t quite what it could be. I also spent a lot of time playing with how I wanted to use the audio, originally I had everyone reading all 5 facts and just staggered but that just sounded messy.

Hopefully it’s at least moderately entertaining and if you are wondering who that odd guy at the end is go watch this and get an insight into what passed for children’s entertainment in the UK in the 1980s…