Week 5

I showed in class on Tuesday the footage I had shot over the weekend of Alana and Caroline, I just put a quick edit of the different locations together of each dancer. Jenny wasn't happy at all with the footage of Caroline she questioned whether I had listened to her the previous week and it really did not make me feel good. I had listened and had tried to take on board what everyone in the class had told me - feet were included, more full body shots, less head space etc. I think Jenny's big qualm was the fact that I filmed with trees and bushes in the background again particularly in parts where they got in Caroline's way and I can see why she was upset with me.

She seemed quite happy with the footage shot in the indoor pool and said that was better but I think it might have been it's not fantastic but it's better than the other footage. However we came up with the idea that if I used the outdoor footage of Caroline her text could be I dance because... I like to escape. As in she escapes to the jungle in the middle of the city.

Alana's footage she was much happier with particularly the part shot on the grassy knoll and she even applauded me on this.

Overall she said I was going to need to do a lot of colour grading on all the footage and would like to see me one on one to show me which I was happy about.

On Thursday I filmed Emma dancing, she is also trained in many disciplines but we decided she would do more of a contemporary style. I decided to film against the bright blue wall of the New Residences on campus as it was plain and simple and couldn't move!

Emma came up with a bit of a routine and some flowing dance moves and explaining to her what I wanted was made easier because she is a dancer as well as a Proddie and she had a good grasp on what I wanted! She was going to be the easiest person to film thus far. However the first problem was the camera hadn't charged over night the cord must have fallen out so we only had 10 minutes of battery which meant stopping and re-charging and the second problem was the day got cloudier and cloudier and then whilst filming again it started to spit. I used a pizza box I found on the ground to prevent the camera from getting wet but then we decided Emma was getting too many water marks on herself and the continuity would be lost.

Another break and the clouds and rain cleared up and a brilliant sun came out, this was good and bad. Good for the obvious of no rain and nice weather, bad because it was so much brighter that the continuity was well and truly lost. Still the footage of Emma was really good.

Friday I met Jenny in the computer labs to learn about colour correction. We imported some footage I had filmed into Premier and she showed me where the tools were to fix the colour and basically it is like doing the Levels on photographs in Photoshop which I know how to do! Jenny though wanted to blow out the contrast and play about with extreme colour or even black and white to give it a more artsy look. I hadn't realised this is what she had envisioned for my work. I wasn't keen on blowing out the contrast but I was not opposed to making it black and white but I was a little down because the bright colour in Alana and Emma's footage I thought was great!

We worked out that I needed to start my rough edits where I would:

• Edit footage together including space for titles
• Play with timing- speed it up and create stop motion look
• Implement colour correction
• Export from Premier 
• Import into After Effects
• Create hand written text with graphic tablet within frozen frame of footage.

We also talked about music I might use and lately I've been listening to a lot of Fatboy Slim and Groove Armada which both she said were good choices.

I also sourced a few more text and clips for my MPI304 seminar as I wanted to get a head start. I worked out how I could get clips of You Tube to show using a website called Zamzar.com and sourced a few good websites on Tim Burton which included:

• http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000318/ 
• http://www.timburtoncollective.com/
• http://minadream.com/timburton/

The official Tim Burton website was rubbish because it's basically just to sign up to be on a Christmas mailing list there is no information at all on Burton. 

For COM123 this week we had to see the film Love the Beast it was interesting but the synopsis didn't give a full description and I didn't realise it would be a documentary about Eric Banna's love of his Ford GT Coup. The film follows him rebuilding his car and rally racing it and sourcing out famous opinions of Dr Phil, Jeremy Clarkson and Jay Leno about how his car was the campfire for him and his friends growing up as teenagers because they all worked on it together. Was a nice film and had a flow throughout it and the real footage taken from within his car when it crashed was scary and way to real for me as it stirred up old memories of my own crash. It was interesting but some times a little cliche. 

This week was not very eventful with the amount of work I did but that's OK sometimes you need to slow down a little bit.