Week 7

This week I mainly focused on getting my MPI304 seminar together as I presented on Tuesday. I am the worst public speaker in the history of man kind but I felt the best way to do well at this was to be prepared. I practiced my speech over and over again, made my Power Point and made sure it worked which meant checking all the clips I was showing worked as we could loose marks for technical problems. For some reason the clips I put into my Power Point would insert but would only play the audio no visual, this freaked me out of course. I spoke with Hannah and worked out the best way to view them was just to create a link to the clip on my thumb drive rather than trying to insert it.

I wanted to check everything worked in the theatrette and put my presentation on the computer to check, luckily I did because the one clip I was showing the was on the internet did not want to work because  Flash Player 10 was not installed and it would not let me. I found Patrick who was more than happy to install it for me. 

Knowing that everything worked eased my stress and made me feel more prepared. The presentation itself went fairly well, a few technical issues where I thought I was safe to minimize a clip playing and continue talking only to have it start playing again, luckily I was quick in resolving the issue and hopefully it won't hinder me too much. My presentation went for a good 19 minutes which is great and on a personal note I was quite impressed with myself for not speaking at a hundred miles an hour! I feel my presentation was interesting and informative and was not just endless talking on my behalf but having many visuals makes it less boring for the audience as well as not having endless text on each slide.

Because I had to present this week I was not expected to have done any work on my MPI303 subject so that sits waiting for me to look at the footage I filmed of Marty.

For COM123 I saw the film Inkheart which was very enjoyable. It's a children's movie about "silvertongues" who are people that when they read allowed from a story book whatever the read comes to life and the film rotates around a certain lot of bad story book characters one particular silvertongue accidentally let loose and they do not want to return to their book. Was quite dark in some places and I got scared a few times but I enjoyed and it was well done.

Update on exchange is that I emailed Johannes with the syllabus' of the two subjects I need him to approve and am yet to hear back from him. Fingers crossed!

Happy Easter to everyone and enjoy your holidays or should I say non-contact period!

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.