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New blog for 3rd year…
i have been asked by the anti-academies alliance to film their conference tomorrow, at the congress centre, in london. their cameraman had to pull out so i got a last minute call asking if could do it. i’m on a train to london as i write this from my phone. i’ve got lots to sort out and very little time to do it in ie. clearing off memory cards, charging batteries, learning how to use the zoom h2 recorder etc.
i will be filming the first opening plenary (6 speakers – 1 hour) in the morning and the closing plenary (5 speakers – 1 hour) in the afternoon, as well as some of the workshops taking place in-between. pete jackson (the guy in charge) said he wants mid-shots of the speakers throughout and a very simple edit that they can easily upload to youtube. i managed to borrow a fluid head manfrotto tripod off a friend and will borrow a sound recorder off my brother tonight. i do not trust the quality of sound on my nikon plus i might be quite far from the speakers so having a seperate sound recorder could be vital.
i’m getting paid 100 pounds for this which is nice but its also great experience for me and if i do a good job, i may be offered more work in the future.
bright blue day – finished video
ZBIGNIEW RYBCZYNSKI – Tango
i’m posting the link to this video so i can always find it. i think tango is brilliant but it’s not on youtube and i can never remember the artist’s name.
http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/21108595
“Thirty-six characters from different stages of life – representations of different times – interact in one room, moving in loops, observed by a static camera. I had to draw and paint about 16.000 cell-mattes, and make several hundred thousand exposures on an optical printer. It took a full seven months, sixteen hours per day, to make the piece. The miracle is that the negative got through the process with only minor damage, and I made less than one hundred mathematical mistakes out of several hundred thousand possibilities. In the final result, there are plenty of flaws ® black lines are visible around humans, jitters caused by the instability of film material resulting from film perforation and elasticity of celluloid, changes of colour caused by the fluctuation in colour temperature of the projector bulb and, inevitably, dirt, grain and scratches.”
- Zbig Rybczynski –Looking to the Future – Imagining the Truth,” in FranÐois Penz, Maureen Thomas, Cinema& Architecture. Mþliús, Mallet-Stevens, Multimedia, BFI, London, 1997
i’m not going to have enough bamboo (or enough time to cut it up and hollow each individual piece out) to completely cover the head, hands and feet. started sewing the netting on head today and working out the best way to attach the bamboo.
using the wire was definitely the fastest material to thread through the bamboo but it just didn’t hang in the same way as the fishing wire. and as for string/thread well that was just impossible to get through the bamboo unless it was completely hollowed out.
the above was a technique i tried the night before but because it meant using thread i decided to rule it out. although it also proved to be incredibly fiddly the fishing line was definitely the best option as it was rigid enough to help thread itself through but behaved with the looseness of thread/string
off to b&q to buy the rest of the materials for the costume:
bamboo – to attach to the costume – going to need a lot but i may not be able to afford to buy as much as i need
saw – to saw it up
pond netting (or mesh or chicken wire) – this will be sewed to the costume so will save me time sewing in each indvidual bit of bamboo
long thin screwdriver – to hollow out the bamboo
wire and fishing line – to attach the bamboo to the netting (would use string but found out last night that its incredibly hard to thread through the bamboo)
i found the sewing machine much more difficult to use today. it kept playing up which resulted in me making a few mistakes that took a while to put right.
it was the sleeves that i had a bit of trouble with but managed to get sorted in the end.
the heads been tricky as well because it needed to be done as five separate pieces. i haven’t actually finished that yet but will do tomorrow morning. this was the one of the five pieces. once i cut it out i used it as a stencil to cut out the rest
storyboard attempt
thought i’d attempt to do a storyboard. story-boarding is something i haven’t had much practice doing and usually avoid it as i don’t really enjoy drawing. anyway someone in our group was asked to draw one up and still hasn’t done it so i’m going to give it a try. only sketched out the first two shots at the mo. will add more later. before i started it i thought i’d remind myself of shot sizes and found this on some film theory website:
storyboard – first two shots
pprd
During this first year on the course I have gained an extensive knowledge of design software and production techniques. The course appealed to me because of the wide range of areas I could experiment with before specialising in a specific one. My area of expertise prior to the course was in photography and some in video production. I have expanded my knowledge in these areas as well as learnt new skills, especially in animation and post-production techniques.
The first assignment of the year was to take a still image with a night out theme and to expand upon it to create an expressive piece of motion graphics. We were encouraged to use the animation program ‘Adobe After Effects and had weekly tutorials on how to use it. Due to the fact it was the first our first brief I found I had many problems generating ideas. I used brainstorms to help me and eventually began pursuing the idea ‘the effects drugs have on people on nights out.’ We had mini crits where the class shared their ideas and after hearing my fellow students were doing similar things, I decided to take a different approach. I saw a short film about a graffiti artist in London that inspired me to base my animation on graffiti. I wanted the animation to have some narrative but also a purpose or punch line. I went back to London and photographed graffiti with the intention of stitching a series of still images together but I was still without a solid idea. Whilst out photographing I realised how technically poor, insignificant and pointless some of the graffiti was so decided to base my idea around that – poor graffiti.
I wanted my graffiti artist character to be dressed in an ‘urban’ fashion but due to time constraints I had to use myself in my ‘everyday’ clothes. I got a classmate to take photographs of me in running positions against a green screen and keyed out the green in after effects. I then animated the still images together so that the character ran across the screen, similar to that of a 2d platform game. For the background I used photographs of run-down residential areas that I had also taken on my trip to London. I stylized everything in ‘cartoon’ so that the images blended in better and gave it an aesthetically pleasing look. I also brought down the highlights in some images so that they looked darker and suited the night theme. In Photoshop I cut out the graffiti from the photos I had taken and then imported them into After Effects to be used for the wall of graffiti, in the final scene. Despite taking hundreds of photos I would like to have created a larger wall with more graffiti on. This would have helped to convey my point about how pointless the characters graffiti was. Ideally the final shot would have been the close up of the characters graffiti followed by a camera panning out so that the whole wall was in shot and to emphasise my point about the insignificants of his ‘tag’. However, due to poor time management on my part I didn’t have time to learn how to use a virtual camera in After Effects.
I made my post-production video around the same time and used the After Effects when editing. From keying out the green screen in the night-out project I realised how the tool could be used in a different way. I used the plug-in Keylight to select the colour of the actress’s shoes and made adjustments from there. I purposely got the actress to wear bright pink shoes, which made the colour selection process easier. For the magic wand she was holding I would like to have motion tracked it so that the light beam it tracked automatically. However, due to sudden movement of the wand it blurred so I had to manually animate the light beam frame by frame. If I were to redo this then I would probably shoot at a higher FPS rate so that the wand did not blur and could be motion tracked. Overall, I feel both these projects in After Effects were successful and that I gained an excellent technical understanding of the program. I found it incredibly easy to use and satisfying to work with and therefore would definitely use it again in future assignments.
For the viral video assignment I wanted to make something that was either funny or shocking. I researched many viral videos on sites such as youtube to see what was not only popular but something that was realistically achievable. This was actually a group assignment that I ended up shooting on my own. The group I was working in wanted to do something with a guerrilla costume. I didn’t like this idea as I felt it lacked originality so I left the group and decided to do my own thing. I later went on to learn the importance of working in a group and would not attempt to shoot a group project solo again.
My initial idea was to get someone to stand in a busy place, such as a bus stop and eat Bolognese out of a can labelled dog food. Then secretly film it as well as the public’s reactions. Despite having the potential to be hilarious, I scraped the idea because I wanted to make something where I could integrate the technical skills and theoretical skills I had learnt about video production. For example, we had been taught the use of three-point lighting, the 180-degree rule, focus pulling, shot techniques etc. My new idea was to take a script from a one of ‘Craig Taylor’s tiny play about Britain’, adapt it slightly. The first one I planned to use was with a mugging scene, which I adapted to be slightly more humorous. The main problem with this was it needed to be shot at night. My tutor showed me some dramas he had worked on that were shot at night and explained how they were lit. It was going to be impossible to light this scene adequately without a generator so I adapted a different script, one that was based in a coffee shop. I contacted the actors and got permission from the canteen/bar on campus and arranged to shoot at 9 the following.
The actors didn’t turn up and because I was short of time I nearly missed the deadline. This meant I had to rearrange the location and get new actors in the same day, which were both males (one needed to be female) and were unfamiliar with the script. Whilst shooting I came across many problems. The first of which was in order to achieve a narrow depth of field I needed the camera to be quite far away from the action and zoomed in. This made directing the actors almost impossible, as it was in a public space so I had to shout to be heard. The second problem I had been with the lighting. I couldn’t keep moving and adjusting the positions of the redheads without slowing down the whole filming process. Basically I took on too many roles. I couldn’t direct, compose my shots right, prevent the sound levels from clipping, be the focus puller and the gaffer all at the same time. From this unit i learnt the importance of working in a team and have a much better understanding of what each of these roles involve. Next time I would get a crew of people together to do each of these roles, allow myself more time and try recruiting more reliable actors.
The unit on Autodesk Maya was one that I was always going to struggle with as I had little previous knowledge of 3d software. When having tutorials, I often struggled to keep up, as I found the tutor went through it them too fast. This led to a lack of confidence in my ability and therefore motivation to get the project done. I missed the initial deadline so I decided to attempt a very simple animation, which would involve a stick figure. I rigged the stick figure and attempted to make it walk but found that walking was actually a more complicated process, than I first thought. I then moved on to the idea of having the stickman sitting down and swapping his head round with a ball that lands in front of him. I wanted it to be a realisation for the stickman that he was just a stickman made up of 3d shapes that, could be used and adapted for multiple purposes. Although I was pleased with my idea the animation was technically not good enough to pass the unit so I developed it further.
I added lighting, made two duplicates of my sitting stickman and gave them different coloured heads. They then exchanged their heads by throwing them at one another. This allowed me to keep the original meaning behind the animation but also expand on it. The repetition of the backing music was being reflected in the process of them repeatedly swapping heads. After finishing that unit I felt I had expanded my knowledge of 3d software and realised its true potential.
I have gain comprehensive and broad-based understanding of digital media in my first year here and as a result this has helped me understand which areas I would like to specialise in. I know from doing the Maya unit that I would not want to pursue with that but wouldn’t rule out using it again in future projects. The viral video, nighout animation and post-pro, were units I enjoyed and can see myself doing a lot more things like them. Integrating the technical skills I have learnt on After Effects with video footage is something I would like to experiment more with. I feel I could have learnt a whole lot more had I used my time more efficiently. However, in this last term my confidence in my own ability and passion for the course has grown which should stand me in good stead for the year to come.
