3D Character:


This was a very good exercise and has been the only one that has really interested me so far this year in this course, in fact its the only one that has stopped me from transferring. The idea was to create a cartoony 'cat' or some other 'creature' using 3D Max. I found this to be a fun and useful exercise. Here is what I produced.

-Not the greatest of characters but a good first experiment, More work would have been done on this character but there was not enough time to do so as we where given four other projects to do at the same time as this one, making finding time to complete improve on the project I actually enjoyed very difficult.







The only problem I had was when I tried to turbosmooth the character, odd holes appeared at the side of it's ears and the face sort of went into itself. the face part did not make the character look particularly bad but it was technically wrong and would have played hell if I tried to develop the character further. I chose the shiny metal skin to check for errors on the background, it worked nicely.








One feature I managed to refine was to give this 'creature' a mighty fun butt. Important stuff first I always say... I am looking forward to practicing making some more character on my own time when we have finished with all the other work we where given in one shot. I am finding this course to be slightly frustrating at the moment because of disorganization on my part and the university.

Holding Pattern

We have been given a script and told to create a short 5 or so minute movie with it, the script is called 'Holding Pattern' and is basically a small snapshot of a foreign person (Romanian) life in Britain. I have checked YouTube for clips with the same name and came up with two that use the same script... however one of them uses a French person instead of a Romanian. here they are

This one is the French version of the same script, I did not find this one as interesting as the second version I found (can be found below this clip) - however I did like the little change to the script and the fact that this person was telling his story through a letter he was writing to his mom, very good improvisation.


Although this clip was not shot with greater detail to lighting (as the one above has) I felt the shots where really well done and gave a very good 'feel' to the movie, the music suited pretty well but the thing I would of incorporated from the last one was a way to 'steer' the story better (by writing the letter and telling the story better instead of just a few random shots without a narrative) - the thing that I was also impressed with about this movie was that I recognized most of the locations in these shots and thus giving me a pretty clear picture of how it would look if we used these locations and also showed me the types of props they used which could definitely be beneficial when picking ours ... thanks guys.

Thanks to Hannah Berry for emailing this list of 'The reason's why Joolzs gave us the exercise about taking an already written script and turning it into a quick clip' Also thanks to the whole group for contributing to this list.

• -So people can learn to analyse a text.
• -Look at other peoples’ work.
• -Learn to work as a team.
• -Make up own ideas to add to the script.
• -Try different things with the cameras.
• -Practice with different equipment.
• -Try to interpret other peoples’ work.
• -So we can experience following and writing a script.
• -Learn to deconstruct a script.
• -Learn what a script looks like.
• -Start to understand the process of scripting.

Analyzing a short clip exercise


We have been asked to analyze a short clip and give our general impression of what the director or creators intended



So where to begin?

-The clip starts with a medium close up shot - the characters steps are heavy, reinforcing the fact that he not only looks big but is also one bulky fellow (by the way he walks you can also instantly asses the person in question is male) - the camera movement is quite unprofessional and goes in & out of focus from time to time throughout the movie as the character changes position. the character is seated and the camera angle + rooms which is quite and has florescent lighting gives the mood that this person is being interviewed. the distance does change once during the interview (when he is examining his gun) - the shot 'Medium shot' (and silence) makes the person watching seem as though they are examining the characters natural behaviors when alone (a bit like a wild life documentary).

The next shot is a close up of the characters face, this is used to show his expressions more clearly.

and finally coming towards the end we have a nice pan around the character, again zooming in closely to his face to show his ' clearly crazy' expression and then zooming out again to show the destruction he is causing with loud bangs and gun noises which reinforces how volatile the area is.

* This clip is taken from the promotional videos for a game called Team Fortress 2 - developed by Valve*

3D Max experiment

I Have been experimenting with 3D max lately and am coming along quite well I think, I have been trying my hand at modeling and doing slightly more complex animation animation techniques which at first where quite difficult to understand but later became quite logical. of course I have not mastered the skinning process and am only using basic omni lighting at the moment but with time I am sure that it will become second nature. here are two examples of my most recent work.

the first one I experimented with was a short exercise given to us in a recent lecture. I created this model again but did not look at the sheets (well actually once to get the height and width of the initial block that the exercise was started with) I was really surprised how easy and quick it was to model something in 3D max after only a few lessons. I also used custom omni lighting and a custom' skin' (chosen to look like plastic) henceforth inspiring the name 'Plastic man'
I had fun creating this character and hope to maybe bring it to life in the future by adding a few arm and leg movements... maybe even a face.


The second one I did was a more complex animation technique requiring a 'rig' on the character (some controller handles) to make moving the character less confusing... well it did indeed make the character easier to animate but the initial rigging was a pain at first but after a quick visit to Andy Love it was make clear what I was doing wrong and was corrected promptly. I decided to add a few features on the initial object (which looked like a leg with a giant ball on top) so I added a nose, mouth, two eyes, a pair of ears and some spiky hair with an antenna like one in the center. it turned out O.K and was easy to animate - however there was still some distortion on the bottom of the foot when it came back to its landing position but that can be rectified in the future. I am starting to like this program more and more and am quite sad to hear that we may be converting to Maya next year, however the experience gained here will not be in vain and I may even like Maya more.

Squidy!!!!!


I have been playing around with 3D max on my computer and thought it would be a good idea to try do the squid exercise again. Fortunately I had the exercise sheets at hand to make sure I didn't run into any major problems along the way but attempted the exercise without looking at it too much- it was a great success. I rendered it out to 101 jpeg files (320X240), imported them into Imageready and funnily enough exported it as a flash file (I attempted this first in flash but could not do it. Here is the final result, enjoy.

Layout for Presentation


Introduction.

• Present self (“hello my name is…”)
• Reminder of project done (Ie E4 Stings)
• Initial idea
• Present what work and points will be covered.

-Postcards
-Magazine
-E4 Stings
-Website

(For each one of these sections comment on the following)

• Research
• Programs (Problems and solutions)
• Time management (was it well planned out?)
• Did it work (give evidence by comparing to other peoples work or through evidence found out via surveys)
• What have you learned?

Conclusion – Was it successful overall? Back up with examples from above.

Another post card is created

I have been working on my postcards lately as I needed a change from making my web site (which is going pretty well so far - I am using Adobe Illustrator CS to create the template) I have settled on one but still think it need something, fortunately I have saved it in the .AI file format so it will be easy to change. I tried to recreate the static effect on a T.V that had been unplugged (had no signal - more commonly referred to as snow and those annoying lines that come up when the signal is bad) using a number of filters at my disposal (The film grain filter was most crucial) I wrote the text 'Good T.V is the way forward' (something I hear students say a lot - henceforth my target audience) and the 'Snow' on the background to emphasis the E4 (the only coloured item) channel would not have this problem as it was clear and crisp (thanks vector images) The text was a sort of western style which would emphasis entertainment (it is the most recognizable and to me personally dull movies out there which backs up the background, thats why I chose this text) - I also put the E4 symbol in a spotlight which attracts the readers attention. Take a look.

I ran through a few of these following some simple layout rules which I gained from a certain book.

-Letterhead and Logo design (top design studio, Los Angeles). 2003, Massachusetts, untied states of America : Rockport publishers,Inc.- <--- notice the Harvard reference. Here are the layout design I used - remeber to click on the images to get a better view.














If you would like to comment on this design please do, just remember there is a limited time before the hand in date is quite soon so please comment soon. thanks a mil in advance.





















I have done another one as some feedback stated that the positioning of the text could have been better. This is another style I took from the same examples I used to create the previous one. it still uses the same technique of guiding the eye downwards - like steps. but has a lot more harsher decent. it leaves the same amount of space open as the previous one did on the sides but at slightly less curved angles. I will be submitting both in my final folder.

Evaluating own work


Evaluating own work requires the user to pinpoint specific areas of the project, mostly in the following order – Idea, Research, Post production, Production. Research is the most crucial stage… for example what materials can be use, what techniques and if the software and hardware will support the creation of your final production. Jumping ahead a little, it is a good idea to write appendices at the end of your article and reference this information at certain points in your evaluation… For instance, when writing something about a technical error you ran into which has already been covered in an online journal, it is wise to copy and paste that text into the appendices and write a quick reference point during your evaluation pointing to it e.g. I ran into problems whilst using Dreamweaver but soon solved the problem (see appendix, 3)

Most of the time when writing a report (especially for lecturers) it is important to note that they will not be too interested in the programs and process you created the final product with, they will be more interested in why you chose to use those programs, why you used certain methods to create the product and most importantly what influences and materials inspired you to create the final piece of work – just saying you created a post card and the reason you decided it was finished was ‘because it looked good’ will not be looked upon too favourably.

I have also dug up the link for those that wish to 'Harvard reference' -

http://libweb.anglia.ac.uk/referencing/harvard.htm

3D Max text animation test


Here we have a quick text animation test I did in 3D max, unfortunately I did not attend the first 3D animation lecture because I was confused by the ever changing timetable (In fact I was looking at three different ones!)Fortunately one of my colleges gave me a copy of the notes that where used in the lecture (Thank you Sid) and I created this animation from following the instructions. I attempted to create shadows on a Solid object directly below the text but it was not successful - I will attempt this again in the future. I probably would have been able to figure it out with the use of the 3D max help files but my computer was playing up and did not allow me to access this resource... I guess I will be taking out the book in the library soon.




Here it is.

Heartless Henry E4 Sting



Well I've completed my E4 Sting called Heartless Henry and have finally decided to put it up on my blog.
I have already mentioned how I animated my character in articles below so I shall not repeat the process, What I will mention here is how I created the background. Firstly, what better way to start than with a short movie clip - enjoy kiddies.



I Wanted to created a background that the Heartless Henry character could believably exist in, I knew I was going to have to stick to the colour scheme I initially started with (Gray scale - pencil drawing) as my character would look out of place in a nice, Millions of colours, Fully textured background. I also created the character with the intent to be standing in a 3D background as his feet positioning will give away - It also had to be surreal as my character was too. I built the set above using Google sketchup and tried to make it look habitable yet and extremely strange place to want to live, Initially I was just going to leave it as blank walls with shadows and maybe a few Photoshop effects but then I came across some very nice sketch textures which fitted perfectly. I then decided it would be a worthy idea to try different techniques in Photoshop anyways and see if I could create a different ambience, I was truly considering adding fog but it didnt work in the end, here are a few examples of angles and filters I tried - apart from the last one titled White block.JPG which was used to create the fade out effect in my final production. - PLEASE CLICK ON THE IMAGE TO MAKE IT BIGGER AND GET A BETTER VIEW.

After playing around with the character on these backgrounds I came to the conclusion that I would not have to add any effect to the background as it suited quite nicely (less can be more sometimes)

I then put the character into Adobe After effects (or should I say put the background behind my completed character) and BAM! it worked very well. The problem I had next was that Adobe After effects did not have the ability to do real time sound editing so I would have to make a sound, put it in and then render the whole damn thing as an AVI file before I could see it. This was unacceptable as sound editing required exact timing and even 0.2 of a second can make one hell of a big difference. I came up with a quick solution for this... Render the animation with the background to a PAL/AV format and then import it into Adobe Premier - I then proceeded to add the sounds in there and it worked fine. The only problem I ran into again was when I tried to 'Export' the new file using the DIVX compressor (It was reccomended by the Youtube Website to obtain best results on their systems ) I got lots of 'Artifacts' -> (which are blobs, irregularities and distortion on the clip) . I suspect it was due to the fact that my animation was rendered at 30 FPS and I was compressing it at 25 FPS again. I didnt bother trying to prove this theory and just exported it as a PAL File again with no compression as it turned out to be a relatively decent sized file anyways.

Here it is (not in it's full glory as the Youtube compressor Screwed the quality up just a little and made it more blurry but it is still acceptable) - I will try to upload it to www.Motiono.com at a later date though, this site offers better quality and faster uploads, another thing is it does not feature as much spam as Youtube either in my humble opinion.



And there you have it, Heartless Henry is born.

Photoshopping photo's




I was just looking around Youtube and found something quite interesting, it was a short movie clip about retouching photo's in Photoshop. I'll just pop it here for people to have a look at. One thing I like alot about this one was how he ( Rodrigo) adjusted the eyes to make them stand out more, it makes such a big difference. I think the Kid at the end of the clip looks a bit creepy afterwards though as the picture is darkened more and the colours made more bland, Still a nice technique though and the music compliments it well.




Here's another one I dug up too, it shows everything in more detail but can be quite lengthy to watch and only shows the techniques briefly but it's still quite impressive, this one shows how the Pro's do it - lots of messing around but the result is excellent - Makes you want to grab one of those horribly taken photos of yourself out of the drawer and do some magic. Gotta love Photoshop.

Heartless Henry

I Have been creating a Pencil/Photoshop manipulated set of images over the holiday, I have then imported these images into a program called 'Adobe After Effect 6.5' to animate it - I found it to be a worthy program but probably could have done it quicker using something else, I am creating the background in 'Google sketchup' and the custom sounds will be produced with 'Fruity loops XXL'. I also noticed later on in the process of creating this animation that After effects does not really support live sound which was not really a surprise as I ran into many other problems - mainly with my computers resource settings, nothing like a bit of technical chaos to keep you on the edge. I therefore now have to import the final heartless henry animation into 'Adobe premier Pro' and do the live sound editing there, it should be a piece of cake when I get to that point. I will be posting a link soon with the finished product.

Sunday lottery not so friendly after all

Today we had an interesting exercise to see how accessible some web pages where to everyone, the main reason for this was to test if it was user friendly for people with disabilities (for instance - some one who was blind) Yeah... I didn't know that until now but it is possible for someone who is blind to surf the internet, but as I found out it can prove quite difficult with most web pages because of all the 'bell's and whistles' that come with todays web pages (for instance flash applications and button) lets take a look at this page quickly



At first glance this web page looks pretty normal... well it is really. A pretty normal layout, normal colours, easy navigation. But what happens if you have a disability that prevents you from using a mouse and you can only use a keyboard effectively, well you are pretty much screwed with this page as they definitely didn't think of this one beforehand.

For example: I tried to navigate this with the keyboard and found I had to press the tab key 16 times just to get to this page. I then couldn't even see what I was highlighting most of the time, I finally managed to get on the flash window to start choosing my number. then more hell started, it was more difficult than I thought to choose a number - when I pressed up on the keyboard the selection square would either 'decide' to go upper left or upper right - I had no control over this. it was exactly the same if I pressed any of the other arrows, all in all it was bloody frustrating.

We then had a look at trying to make the text bigger on the page for people who had problems reading small text and also tried to change the background colour for people who had difficulty seeing black text on white, as you can see the text started overlapping and there was no change to the background colour whatsoever, also there where so many flash applications in this page that the majority of it didn't even change at all. Not very good at all. We also took a look at a program called Lnxy that changed pages into brail for people who couldn't see but it had so many links and other crap it would be almost impossible to access, even when you selected an option on the page it would redisplay the whole thing again... madness! Afterwards we had a look at what this page would have looked like to a colour blind person or to people who couldnt see very well. For the colour blind people it would have been damn near impossible to read the numbers on the balls, for the people who needed more contrast I believe they could have seen it easier if they just turned the contrast up on their monitor and got a decent pair of glasses, also there is a magnifying tool that comes with windows so there is another solution.

Heres are the answers for the sections (anyone reading this blog probably wont understand them so just ignore it, it's for the lecturers)


2.1 Monday, charities lottery
2.2 yes
2.3 yes, text that embeds flash features

Step 3

1. no it is not obvious you have changed the page
2.1 no its difficult
2.2 Pi553s me off, it's difficult.

Step 4

1. I could not see the selection box very easily and it took me 7 clicks to get to the 'play lottery feature'

2.1 no, its random
2.2 no, the flash controls are not very use-able
2.3 again pi55es me off!

Step 5

1 Not really, you could always up the contrast on-screen.

Step 6

1.1 some text changed but not by much... all the flash text did not change.
1.2 Flash text is fixed an seen as a picture not as text. also there is not much space left for text to expand.

1.3 Yes I expected the flash sections to remain the same. it is however not the desired result the user would want.
1.4 Flash sections
1.5 yes definitely for colour blind and hard of seeing people.

Step 7

1.1 poor - some sections could not be accessed
1.2 unusable - you could not use this page without plug ins
1.3 poor - extremely difficult to navigate using just the keyboard
1.4 poor - usable but not very nice for the user who has colour blindness
1.5 Ok - Most things could be seen by changing the contrast on screen or using a simple magnifying tool (however it is difficult to navigate when the screen is magnified)
1.6 it did not change much at all because of all the flash related features, trying to change the text colours did not work very well either.

Identities project - work so far


I have been working quite a lot lately on our Identities project and will show you what I have achieved so far.

I started by acquiring the E4 logo from the internet, a pretty easy task at first until I tried to experiment with it in Flash MX - it was a sharp Jpeg image at first but when I tried to 'Trace' it automatically so I would have points I could manipulate it turned my once smooth image into a bunch of jagged lines... yes it still resembled the E4 logo but was not 'clean' enough to be used. But never fear Illustrator CS2 is here, all I had to do was fire the baby up, stick the Jpeg in and with the handy Pen tool manually trace the image (which took roughly 7 minutes) - I smiled at my new vector image which could be zoomed in infinitely without loss of quality- there was a few lines that needed to be touched up but it was still a workable model to experiment with but I intend to make it flawless for my future use. So first I set about experimenting with animation (the reason I chose the E4 sting project in the first place) I later found out that I could have acquired a vector image version of the E4 logo from their website. I am also planning on changing the colour as it is more pink than purple (I would like to thanks my tutorial group for pointing this out) I will keep the pink version if I do a valentine theme though.

Animating using Adobe Premier

I chose Adobe Premier to Animate my first piece of work in because I believed I would have more effects and smoother movements than I could get out of Flash (which was my initial intent) I could also import higher quality sounds which would not be compressed as much when compiled to the final version, also I had the option of editing all the components if I wished on the university computers before I wrote it to DV tape. I started by creating all the simple components I would use in Illustrator CS2 first and exported them in PNG format (So I could keep transparent backgrounds) I then put all the components into the Premier Bin and started to slap them on.I found that Premier was flexible but required a hell of a lot more layers and skill to use than I would of had to do in flash as would probably only need three layers in flash but with premier I needed a layer for almost each component ( I probably could of narrowed that down if I made the field a single component which consisted of three individual components) I came up with this






If this movie does not play click here
I Would like to thank Adrian Snodgrass for helping me fix the size problems I was having with the window of the player.

Needless to say it was a successful test and I learned quite a lot about the capabilities of Adobe Premier, it was definitely not designed for animation but could still prove useful in the future.

I am also currently working on a sketch/Flash MX animation - I have found a link that has an example similar to what I'm going to accomplish - The story is crap in my opinion (not very good surrealism at al - the word I would use would be 'Lame') but the technique is pretty good.

Here's the link

Fun with Magazine's

It was now time for me to move on to other matters, Designing a T.V guide. I instantly decided that Illustrator was the best choice to do this as it offered previews of font styles on the fly, it would also be easier to position and manipulate elements on-screen. I started by knocking on the doors of all my flatmate's and humbly asking if they had a T.V guide, eventually I acquired one (The daily telegraph - Television and Radio) and started to browse over it. The structure was simple and easy to recreate - the main problem I came across was finding a suitable font style, I came across 'Courier New' and decided it was the most suitable, however I did have to change the Tracking, leading and horizontal scale of the text . here are the two pages I produced.

I learned quite a lot about stacking large quantities of text and images into small spaces and still keeping the page looking good at the same time, I do however think that I need to further design these pieces of work and possible add more pictures, also the 'Monday's Highlights' definitely needs to be converted back to flat text instead of the 3D filter I used as it looks out of place. I have also learned to place text and images with the correct text-to-image positioning on a page, I gained most of this knowledge by reading

•
Gordon, B. & Gordon ,M. Revised addition 2005 .The complete guide to Digital Graphics Design,London : Thames and Hudson LTD

Postcards

I Chose to design three postcards for my identities project to get to know more about branding, text-style, image positioning and effect,slogans and colour usage on a page. I have seen some good posters and flyers that attracted my attention and wanted to create something of my own - there where three books in particular that helped me create an accurate example.

•Gordon, B. & Gordon ,M. Revised addition 2005 .The complete guide to Difital Graphics Design,London : Thames and Hudson LTD

Letterhead and Logo design (top design studio, Los Angeles). 2003, Massachusetts, untied states of America : Rockport publishers,Inc

•Forrester, M., 1987. Everything you always suspected was true about advertising – but were too legal, decent and honest to ask, Glasgow: William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd

The Top two books helped me with the design side of things and the book on the bottom of the list helped create the slogan itself.
I started by looking at designers of posters that I liked, I found that the ones with a more simplistic design grabbed my attention more than other complex pieces of work, here are three examples I looked at and liked.
















The afterhours package (from Letterhead & logo design) grabbed my attention the most - Simple and to the point - it said to me 'Here's our logo and here's some details if you want to find out more' it was very cunning because it grabbed your attention (with it's bright orange colour) it was easy on the eyes at the same time and was simplistic enough to remember clearly, An excellent design.

I wanted to create something similar but also with my own slogan, I looked up different types of layouts and text/image positioning in the book 'The complete guide to digital graphics design' and started to experiment. I came up with some awful designs to start off with but the more I played around with the design the more it evolved - even my original slogan 'Magic in the air' 'seeing is beliveing' became a more forceful yet refined 'There's magic in the air''Can you see it?' I decided to use the font Myraid that was hollowed out with a black and white gradient to make it look well... more magic. I also replaced two of the E's with the E from the centre of the E4 logo. the reason I positioned most of the text so close (and all bundled up) near the E4 logo was to get peoples attention to that area - also I wanted to link E4, 'The air' and 'Can you see it?'. I believe it worked quite well, I also chose to modify the E4 logo slighly by shifting the border to make it look more 3D (my intent was to make it seem more modern but I have no problems with the original whatsoever)

I think I am on the right track now and have gained some good experience, I hope to stick to my time-plan and accomplish what I have set out to do. I still wish I had never said that I was going to do a web page though but it will be invaluable experience I'm sure.

Peoples shows

Today we went to see other people productions, it was a very interesting experience indeed. I personally went to see the 'show' titled "The life of Dame Laura Knight", unfortunately I did not have the pleasure to see others as I had a very important matter to attend to. What did I think of this play, well I will try analyze it as the lecturers would. Brutal honest truth which will not win me any friends, but it is important information to know for the future.

The advertising for this event was very well done for the time limit, the card displaying the location, time of the even and price was well constructed and to the point - I was also impressed the way the team sent the information to the VLP email addresses of all the people on our course. The location was well chosen and was relevant to Dame Laura Knight, the seating area was a bit cramped but acceptable. The charge was 50p to watch the 'show' which at first I thought was acceptable but was not handled in a professionals manner, also I did not receive a ticket which was a disappointment as I would have liked something to hold and remind me of the event.
The show itself was not very impressive, I did not feel as though the team had practiced beforehand as everything was read out from a piece of paper and where almost definitely just copied and pasted from a website of encyclopedia, there was no eye contact. I did not feel any passion in the words that where being read out which made the performance uninteresting. The team did however wear appropriate outfits but the times when people where supposed to come on did not seem properly queued and the actions of the characters again showed not much interest. However I understand the people involved are not drama students so I guess the performance was satisfactory. I still don't know who Dame Laura Knight accept that she was an artist, so henceforth I believe the information was not presented correctly and that the 'key' points where not highlighted. My advice for future productions would be to take the information and write a script from bullet points from the information attained from research, maybe spice it up by not reading from a piece of paper and presenting the information with more confidence.

I apologize for such a harsh review, at least the team did there's though which is more than I can say for myself, good job.

Harold Shipman Project

Ouch... Well this one did not turn out as planned, unfortunately we where not prepared enough to deal with this situation and ended up pulling out.

All was going well at first, We identified various peoples strengths and took advantage of that, we formulated a plan and story quite quickly out of such a sensitive subject. Rimante and myself wrote the script and did the theme, Gav was also quite useful in this area when we initially discussed what issues we where going to address and how and constantly tried to keep in touch with the rest of the group.

All went well up to this point - unfortunately we did not acquire our intended location (Old age home), this was due to the fact we where having problems getting through to the 'head' and arranging something, we had a backup plan to do it at a local hospital but that didn't surface either.
It was quite unfortunate because we had all our actors too who boldly volunteered for this task - Rob would play the role of the psychiatrist, Kamal would be the street-wise cop , I would play the role of the presenter , Rimante and Ben would play the role as the bodyguards and Gav was going to take care of the technical side of the show. Ben would also provide pictures for the slide-show.

I am quite sad it did not take place but there was not much chance it was going to happen. Again I blame it on the lack of communication. but I do think it was a better idea to pull out instead of trying to make a half-decent show that was not rehearsed properly or correctly set up.

I will however be looking forward to going and seeing other peoples shows, I am quite interested in seeing 'The life of Dame Laura Knight' - I am impressed with the advertising of this show, I mean why not use the VLP email system to get to everyone, its fast easy and effective... and its something we would all like to know about - very good job guys for seeing and using this system, you got a paying customer right here.

Group Movies

We went to watch the entire multimedia Narratives movies on a big screen!!! It was excellent to see our productions in all their glory with stereo sound, unfortunately there where some hitches an one group did not have this luxury.
I really enjoyed watching everyone else's movies, I am not critic but some I liked and some I didn't but it was still very interesting non the less.

The most memorable one (apart from the name that is) was the one where everything turned into a comic book, it was a good story and the technique was well thought out and displayed. I also think our production 'Mr Pickles and the lost coin' was a great success and had quite advanced techniques compared to others I viewed, also our story was easy to understand and comical - we received laughs from the audience at the intended points in the movie henceforth proving that our planning was accurate and most importantly 'Worked' it was very useful to get feedback from the audience in this way.

Blast from the past

My good friend Andrew Tomlins recently posted one of our old projects we did at College on Utube, it was fantastic to see after such a long time... I thought it was lost forever. he is also posting the DVD addition to me (apparently it 1.6 gig). Anyways enjoy.

Credits go to - Todd Gledhill - Directing & script
Andrew Tomlins - Editing & camera work
Ian Sanders - Acting
Katie Notley - Assistant director

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.