Week 8

I decided to give myself the first week of the break off to relax which was lovely. I saw my family and friends and enjoyed Easter and went to Melbourne and Bendigo which was all good fun.

Came back to uni on the first Saturday because Tez, Kitty and I had the photography studio booked for the Monday and Tuesday. We needed the studio to complete Assignment 2 for PHT220 and we thought if there were 3 of us sharing it, it wouldn't look so bad to have it for two full days, this also allowed for us to help each other with composition, moving lights, holding up bounce cards etc. and we chose these two days so we knew we would have a few days to touch them up in Photoshop and submit them for printing allowing the 5 working day turnaround for printing. It was all about managing our time effectively.

Not long after this I developed an extremely painful toothache and after a spending the weekend not being able to move managed to get into a dentist and be told I need a root canal done which they started then and there. Good bye more money! Because of the pain I was in no work was completed for any subject really, though I did watch quite a few movies which I can write about for my journal in COM123 so I guess my time of sickness was not completely wasted.

In the week I had off I got myself up to date with my journal entries from the previous term's movies we had to see weekly at the cinema. I also updated this blow with things I had left out by accident. Both of which I did in my down time because they weren't too strenuous to complete and I also felt guilty for taking time off which is not a good thing either.

In the third week I concentrated mainly on my MPI303 documentary on dancing. I started with the footage of Marty and cut together the footage in Premier including titles and freezing the section of footage I wanted to write on. I then attempted to make it look stop motion like and was not happy at all. A fellow student saw what I was trying to do and suggested After Effects. After playing around for awhile I decided that I was happy with how the stop motion was looking with either of my attempts in Premier and After Effects. I feel I was hasty in emailing Jenny and asking her if I could put this down to mistake learned from which she said was fine. However I think it was a bad idea to be working on it so late at night when I was tired because the next day I had another look at it and decided I was really happy with the After Effects stop motion look and wanted to run with it.

I then thought about stylising and the same student also gave me the idea of using a graphics tablet and just drawing over the footage. After another quick run through of how to use layers and draw etc. with her I was set. All I can say is WOW! I love After Effects! It's just like Photoshop for footage!!!

I finished all the visual stuff for Marty's clip and moved on to choosing a song to put with it and I wanted something quite dancey and seeing as he is a Presets fan and I think what he was dancing to originally was a newer Presets song I decided to choose an older one that we both love called Are you the one?, which I edited to fit the clip in Garage Band.

My plan is to continue to have each dancers clip black and white, make it stop motion look in After Effects and then draw over the top with a different colour for each dancers. This makes it stylised and connects them all still.

I moved on to editing Alana's footage and going through it all in Premier I couldn't work out why it looked so crap and my filming was so off and I managed to crop so much of her head and arms out. I didn't know what was going on so I imported Emmas footage to see if that was any better and low and behold it was worse, I couldn't work out how I had managed to crop her head of in every take I had of her.

After a massive freak out and not being able to get hold of anyone that might know I felt I just had to continue on with what footage I had, because there was no way I could re-shoot. In the Tom whose camera I filmed with called me and I told him how stressed I was because it had all gone so horribly wrong and he told me it sounded like I had imported it incorrectly. I went back and sure enough I had chosen the wrong project file to import in so everything had been zoomed in on and then I was left with better footage and everything felt better!

I was later showing the clip of Marty to someone and they said that it was interlaced and this required me to go back in to Premier, export without interlace, which in this time someone else had asked me why was I working in 720 by 576 and then convinced me it should be bigger and then I couldn't make it bigger because I was exporting as an AVI file and I got another friend who is a Proddie to come and help me export it bigger without interlace and we couldn't work it out so I ended up just leaving it that size and exporting with no interlacing.

Then it was importing it all again into After Effects and I had to work out how to copy the effects over to this new one which took some time and more people helping and then at some point I lost 2.10 seconds of the original cut I had which then required me to move individually all the brush strokes in the layer effects over.

Now the music goes longer then the footage and I do not want to cut it down because I have it finishing on a good spot so my plan is too hold the frozen frame for longer, this allows you to read the writing for longer as well as the fact there are no effects after this point so I won't have to shift any pf them over to make them appear in the appropriate spot. I am still working out appropriate music for Alana's clip.

This was the first week back for this term and I couldn't go to class because I became sick, which is very unfortunate but my lecturers were very forgiving and OK with this and luckily my Photography assignment was done so I got Tez to submit it with my medical certificate.

I also had been quite stressed out over the holidays and this week with trying to organise to go on Exchange. I have been having a difficult time getting hold of the right people to answer questions as well getting people to approve things and as of this week 8 it looks like I won't be going any more because I cannot find a third subject to be credited for whilst I am over there, and it's very stressful having to nag people all the time and not knowing the outcome and I am frankly over some people's behavior. I am clutching at straws at the moment and if this last attempt for help fails I am defiantly out, which has made me feel very down and unmotivated.

It was all very dramatic and although it might not seem like I did much over the holidays, I had to teach myself more about Premier, learn After Effects and battle being sick. I think in hindsight listening to too many people and being tired and working late are not good combination. I have learnt a lot from these experiences and hopefully now I know what I could expect it won't happen on the next clips. Also I can understand how a blow of disappointment can make you feel unmotivated and that you need to continue with things no matter what, which I am slowly working on doing. I know what I have to do and now I need to get myself motivated to do it.

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.