Analyzing that narrative thingy that we did .

I am going to apologize beforehand for the God awful title you are about to see, yep it was a requirement so don't blast me if you don't like it - here we go, let us begin.

Highlight the skills and knowledge you have gained and developed and show how you have gained them. Provide suggestions for improvement and how these attributes will inform your study in future modules this year.

What’s going on?

I have broken down the project into key sections for easier reading, hopefully this will also make it more interesting.

The idea

I was very interested when I found out our project would have to be a short Narrative story, almost instantly I was thinking up ideas for a short but sweet story. I remembered that most good short stories are found in comic books… like Garfield or the Beano and Dandy comics. I remembered an episode in the Dandy where Desperate Dan is walking along the docks; flicking his ‘lucky Dollar coin’ basically a shark comes along, jumps out of the water and eats it. Dan being a tough guy jumps into a row boat and goes after this enormous shark (about three times bigger than ‘Jaws’), His cousin thinks him to be lost when his boat is salvaged, bitten in half. However at the end he returns riding the shark with his lucky dollar (which turns out it wasn’t his lucky Dollar really as he had left that at home) and ends up spending it in a snack machine. I basically took my inspiration from this piece and came up with something different.

The technique

Initially one would think straight away that the best way to do a story would be to book out a video camera and shoot it. I however have had experience in this process and didn’t think it would be appropriate for our first project. I discussed this with my team members. Firstly we would have to carry lots of equipment, the weather would have to be taken into account, so would our window of opportunity every day when the lighting of the sun would be round about the same luminosity (it was going darker, earlier lately so it would be slightly unpredictable but not impossible of course to time). For our story too there would be many locations involved and what would be impossible would be to get those locations with no people in them as it could conflict with our story… well if we had an air raid horn we may have been able to trick a large amount of people to duck for cover, quickly take the shot and then end up in jail for disturbing the peace but I don’t think it would have been worth it in the long run.

I thought it would be wiser to choose a process that we could tailor to suit our every need, but also something that was not too difficult to achieve.

A light switch went on in my head, wouldn’t it be nice to do a picture story as we would be able to control most aspects relatively easy and make any changes in Photoshop. I looked into this and found that something about photography was working well, but something wasn’t. It was basically looking like someone’s holiday snaps and the locations did not give off the appropriate ‘feel’ I would have liked; after all, this story was meant to be wacky in a way and should at least have something odd about it.

I thought that maybe I should try do something to the images, in fact why not use the backgrounds and drawn the characters. I jumped on to the internet to do some research.

Dive-dead copyright 1998 C’s WARE

After sifting through what seemed like an eternity of ‘crap’ I came across something very interesting called Divi-dead; This was Japanese game that featured manga characters appearing on hand drawn background, both looked excellent and worked well. It flowed pretty damn well too and I decided that we must do something similar to this. Taking into account of course time and budget, and the fact that no one in our team had ever drawn manga (excluding myself but I was nowhere near even being called an amateur) and could not create such amazing backgrounds and characters in the time we had.

A bit of playing around with techniques would be necessary, so I fired up good old Photoshop and had a play around; I separated the character from the backgrounds and stuck them in various scenes… some quick drawn scenes in ‘paint’ – they looked awful and where deleted instantly. Some normal photographs – they just looked like obvious cut-outs. Then I tried them on a background of a stage I built a while back; this stage was just a test map for a game called ‘Half life 2’ and I had fortunately taken a screenshot to show a friend at one point. I experimented with this and found that the photo fitted in very well with the backgrounds, also it was obvious that the sets would be easy to control and would never be crowded with people, also the lighting could be controlled and so could the weather!

I also found that it added a certain ‘oddness’ to the whole thing but looked pretty damn good at the same time, It was clear that it would be a perfect technique to use and we could also use certain other Photoshop techniques to enhance the cut out photos (I.e. shadows and reflections of characters on the tailored world)

I researched a great deal for this program and learned a great deal about lighting techniques and prop placement. The two main sites I used where à

http://www.migandi.org.uk/tutorials/half-life2-editing-hammer-tutorials.htm - SDK advanced/basic techniques

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/w/index.php?title=Hammer_Editor_Documentation – Hammer guide web page

I also found Wikipedia to be very helpful.

I popped an example on the VLP forum just give a good idea of what the general technique would look like.

I proposed this technique to my fellow team mates and it was agreed.

The team

The team consisted of the following people:

-Morag Upton ß Jesus reincarnated in female form

-Domonic Saneria

-Aaron Sinfield

-Andrew Twyman

-Ian Sanders ß Me

Fortunately we had a member in our team, who almost immediately assumed the role of producer, Morag was essential to the success of this project as she planned out all of the schedules and broke them down into small chunks that everyone could easily do in the time set, in the end it did not go as smoothly as planned though, due to lack of communication on the VLP forum – I learned that if ever I work in a team again it is essential that the team ALWAYS keep in touch some way or another and keep progress of each others work as we had a small gap when we where supposed to be doing work and didn’t communicate and almost nothing got done!

The extra work load that built up had to fall somewhere and it landed on my head, which was frustrating to say the least, however I learned quite a lot from the experience as I did sections that I wouldn’t have to have done and a lot from section that I had to do more of than I initially expected.

Morag and myself wrote the script – I got hold of a second year’s (Multimedia) script example and examined the technique the script was put together, I learned a great deal about structure and how important it was to ‘feel’ the characters, it was Titled ‘Clown’ but did not specify the author. I wrote a small treatment first before we actually got down to the script ß I probably should have mentioned that first. Morag saved my butt on many an occasion and also did a large chunk of the workload.

Dominic was in charge of the sound and got hold of quite a few fitting ones, I helped with the music.

Aaron was in charge of the storyboarding and some of the Photoshoping which involved modifying characters; the VLP message boards were very useful again, we could see some of Aaron’s sketches and plan our characters before hand. The work produced was of high quality but the essential storyboards were not done in time and caused great problems as we needed the angles for photography and for taking screenshots in the world editor used to create the sets. Fortunately Morag created a written storyboard that was invaluable (saving the day yet again)

Andrew did some research for lighting and camera functions took most of the photos and also generally helped with the ending title screen during editing and converting sounds into appropriate formats.

I learned quite a few important team leading and organising skills from Morag in particular who kept the project afloat, Morag was in charge of costume props and keeping the project organised (also at the initial editing phase), she too did a fantastic job on the text slides and inserted them during editing.

What I learned

I learned quite a few interesting techniques used to create a narrative story. I have broken them down into sections.

Storytelling -Taking a simple idea and turning it into a vibrant story, character relations and using the correct environment to make a viable tale. I would have liked to have written a slightly longer story though, but do to time limits that would not have been possible… however it was interesting to have constraints and turned out very well. I also learned that creating a story from the basis of an already successful story was quite a smart thing to do.

Pictures and scenes – I learned that lighting is everything when it comes to producing a successful clip; I believe that our lighting was not all it could have been due to the lack of research on 3 point lighting and the camera – resulting in a darker hue colour range, I have come to this conclusion by comparing our production the ‘The life of a post-it note’ done by another group, their lighting was a lot more vivid and crisp due to correct white balancing and lighting.

The scenes made in the ‘hammer editor’ where works of art, the lighting was spot on because the program took care of all that including shadows, however if you look carefully in some scenes you will see that the character was not placed exactly at the right angle (the train station for example), the storyboards would have been helpful during that stage of creating the narrative. But other than that I believe they lacked nothing.

Music & Sound – Unfortunately this was one of the sections that suffered the most due to late work, I am not entirely satisfied with the selections of sound (even though in the hundreds). I do believe we got the best ones associated with actions but the ambient ones where pretty poor and did not fit in properly and lacking in other places (well so I think anyways). I would have liked to have given this section more attention if it would have been possible.

The music was very fitting, I thought game music on game backgrounds was very clever and it did indeed fit. I believe all of them where appropriately timed too.

The music was found here - http://www.vgmusic.com/

Editing – The editing was not very hard at all and did not even require research even though I had only played with Adobe Premiere in a previous lesson.

The only problems we ran into was how outdated the software was on the machines we where using, we constantly ran into problems – for instance some of our music was in a midi file format and had to be converted to mp3 before it would work and we could only do this through Itunes on the Macintoshes. The Photoshop on these machines was some sort of ‘limited addition’ and didn’t even have layer effects!

This caused hassles when trying to make minor changes to our pictures. I have learned that we should probably stick with the Macintoshes when editing next time as I have used them in the past and they are relatively reliable when **not** plugged into a network.

Teamwork – It is very important to constantly be in touch with members and stick to the deadlines set or the workload falls on other team-mates and to keep track of the progress of each team member contribution every couple of days. The experience was interesting but also very frustrating… I have learned that the only person you can rely on is yourself, oh and Morag of course… But if you must work in a team then I have learned you have to keep in constant contact, no room for negotiation on this point.