Day 20

Today was Interim one and every group have to present on their choosen ideas and all the pre production stuff. When i reach into class today, i thought our group had a very thick proposal but after Rowell enters the class. I realise ours can't compare to theirs.

Anyway, presentation didn't turn up so well for our class as many of us are too "ambitious" in our story. The only problem which Siew Ching voice out to ask us about our idea is the time issue. Actually, before today presentation, i had alrdy notice that our video timing will be overshot. So, we had already decided to take off or cut short the dialouge in our script.

After today presentation, i learn that something simple can also be shot in a way to make it look nicer. I hope i will be able to do that the next time. Currently, i learning lip synchronising for animation from a website which Faizal gives.

http://www.flashframer.com/create-a-realistic-flash-animation-lip-sync/

Let me share this. Hope it will be useful to the peeps who will be reading our blog. Things to remind myself "Please do not miss out class time the next time when planning for call sheets! Don't think everyday will be a free day with no lesson!"

-Xian Ming

Day 19

Proposal
Proposal was due very soon, and we hadn't really finalised anything yet. I wasn't sure if we had to submit EVERYTHING, or just our progress report. Well since Janice's group was doing everything i went with the safer option. Took pretty long, and i was the only one still touching it up when everyone else was done and watching Family Guy on Sham's laptop.

Scriptwriting
After SC explained to us the proper way of how to write a script(because books>teacher), we had to tweak ours a little to suit the desired format. also while writing the script we came up with a few song choice selections which we think are appopriate for the video. it also has that 'MTV' element from XM's idea by having current or recognisable tracks in it.

Animatics
Today we also recorded the entire dialog sequence for our video. spent well over an hour just recording, and gave us an idea of how long the production part of this project is gonna be. it's a shame that most of the dialog wouldn't be used for the animatics, since those took WAAAYYY longer to make than i had thought(what i got so far took like an hour to edit!) but the recording session served as a good rehearsal for the group anyway. also, some important tips to remember:

• record an entire scene in 1 take. editing can be done alot faster when 'cutting' one big clip than 'pasting' several clips together.
  
• the 3-10 rooms are not soundproof.

im sure there's more but i cant remember what they are right now.
--faizal

Day 18

Wow! amazingly  Faizal finished all the drawings of the storyboards. Well, i guess this is a good training for his future job in animation. : )

Ok, as Xian Ming said, we went to the Creativing story telling classroom and animation lab to take pictures of the scenes for the mood board. 

I did some modelling as a student in the pictures. : )

Then we headed back to our working headquarters at level 6 mac lab. XianMing was compiling all the storyboards and framing them as animatics. I went to borrow the pd150 panasonic handycam to film some clips for video editing. Captured some night road scenes while i was at the bus stop. : )

 

Today after faizal did some modifications to mood board, I continued from him. I categorized and arranged the different scenes together. XianMing was modifying improving the script.

Faizal was preparing the slides for presentation on Friday.

Then went around to film the interesting lifestyles of MOI students in the Mac lab. The bad thing today is that the fire wire was not working, I would have to go to the equipment stall to ask for help.

- KIM LUK

As always, GUNGHO > GUNGHO EVERYONE!

Day 17

Our group meet up today at mac lab and continue doing our group work. First, we went around school to take photos for our mood board. We took more then enough pictures so that we will have lots of choices to choose. Before we actually meet out today, i had done some editing to the script because our format has some minor mistakes.

Next, I had done the schedule and research on the format for Call Sheet online. While Faizal did the power point presentation and Kim Luk did the merging of pictures in photoshop for our mood board.

After everything, we went home and i will need to complete scanning the story board and putting the pictures in Adobe Flash at home tonight.

-Xian Ming

Day 16

Spent most of today storyboarding...which was alot more time-consuming than I thought! really makes me admire those who have the patience and creative energy to make stuff like this or this. probably wasnt the smartest idea to put up those great examples and have the risk of being compared with mine. hahah. but after scriptwriting and storyboarding the workload really takes a toll on ya. and keep in mind this is still 'PRE-production', havent got down to the hard part yet. oh well. it's good to know what the industry'll have in store for us. haha.

-Faizal

Day 15

Today our group met at the mac lab at level 6, the place which is infested with the whole MOI year1, as always. 

Faizal was doing all the drawings for the storyboarding and I was drawing boxes for him to do the storyboarding. Hahas.

XianMing has done some timeline schedule for the group process.

We have managed to finish some work in this week; Script, modifying of concept and transitions between introductions of modules in the video.

I feel that  most credits should go to Faizal and XianMing. Both of them were great in contributing ideas in the group assignment.

I am not the type who would give marvellous ideas. Well, I shall do my best to try to assist them.

Plans: 1.Getting a walcom pen for drawing the animations. 

            2.Getting actors

Changes in the concept: we have decided to create two animated characters ( an angel and a devil ). Faizal is a potential future cartoonist. 

GUNGHO! GUNGHO EVERYONE! - KIMLUK

Day 14

We had our group meeting today at one of the mac lab at level 6. Reach school by 12.30pm and continue of where we had stop yesterday. Faizal continue his scriptwriting while i went to experience on how to use Final Cut Pro to edit as i did not done much of editing for my Video Fundamental.

After experimenting on how to use Final Cut Pro, i found out that it was quite simple to use. I tried using our class personal video to experiment on editing and i think i am more confident to editing as compare to last time. After experimenting with Final Cut Pro, i went to the library to borrow books on scriptwriting and film making. I hope it would be in some help for our video making. While i went to the library, Faizal continued on scriptwriting. After he finished with the script, he let us read and ask us to edit where possible. Done a bit of editing to the script and we are done for the day. I will be doing the schedule for our group at home later on.

I learn some new stuff about Final Cut Pro today.

-Xian Ming

Day 13

Today we did a bunch of scriptwriting. First we had to settle on an idea. Xian wanted to do the SAW one but because of time and budget constraints, as well as possible irrelevance, that idea had to be abandoned. Eventually, they settled on my 2nd idea, the one which is a uses mixed media, like roger rabbit or space jam.

We consulted with SC about the basic outline of the chosen idea. She said the transitions were most important, and it kinda reminded me of what was on The Incredibles DVD, the voiceover said 'no scene stands alone' in a movie.

While writing, we designed the angel and devil characters for our story. Their designs were loosely based on characters that were in my sec 2 literature play, with a few alterations. Initially there was only an angel character, but by including the devil character, some comic relief would be added to the video. Their designs were kept simple and I kinda thought of Danny Phantom characters since they're easy to animate.

Once we were done with the transactions we were ready to write the script. Spent a great deal of time on it and realised that there's alot to do actually. But i gots faith in my groupmates can do it. jia you!

-faizal

Day 12

Presentation on Monday was a failure and a big headache. 

I am affirmed that my individual part in Moi Project1 will fail.

Yes, I presented my concepts but i failed to present how the different things taught in the Course modules could be introduced to the target audience, which is the content SC is looking out for. What is worse is that it's the same mistake that is in my proposals! 

Well, what's done can't be undone unless there is another chance of redoing but i guess not. In real life, chances are very hard to come by.

Tuesday

Today went to see & listen to the presentations done by others. I feel that most of them will pass or get a good grade. Probably, because learning from the mistakes done by us or they are just really just that GOOD : )

Ok! I shall now just do my best in the group and learn more from it.

Oh ya, must save the blog entries

GUNGHO, GUNGHO EVERYONE !

- KIM LUK

Day 11

Today was our group presentation along with 2 other groups. I feel that it was not very successful as most of us did not present our idea content. We have overlook the importance of the content and i guess we will get a very low mark. This will be my last time and i will never forget to include my idea content in my presentation the next time.

After presentation, my group decides to us Faizal's idea. Most probably will be the "Jokesaw" idea. It will be change if we feel that we do not have the time for that as it involves lots of work which require us to set up the scene. To me i feel that both of my idea were not as good as Faizal's idea. I will take P1 as my opportunity to learn things from him.

-Xian Ming

Day 10

Friday the 13th! and also consultation day. Spent a good amount of time yesterday thinking up proposals to ask teacher about. Only managed to come up with one by last night, a live-action/animation movie. Luckily though I expanded on an impulsive idea I had earlier and managed to make a decent story out of it.

So today in class we were breifed about how we were gonna submit the Part 1, individual part, of our assignment. It's pretty much the same format as our Third Age exercise, so no worries there. We were then told how to prepare for Interim One, which was groupwork. I finally learnt what 'pre-production' meant, I guess, lol. I was initially shocked to find out how much we had to do over six days, including:-

• final proposal
• storyboards
• moodboard
• visual references
• script(woah so fast ah)
• trailer(optional but still)
• and powerpoint

• oh yeah also TIMELINE as a production schedule

I guess it could be worse, haha. And seeing as how it'll be a group effort hopefully the production time'll be cut down.

Something important to note that teacher said was that what you pitch doesn't neccisarily have to be included in the brief. In other words, being "extra" might actually impress the clients in this business.

Presentation's on Monday(Tuesday for some lucky few) so I'd better start getting to work. Just a few more points to remember:

Objectives:

• attract target audience
• apply what you learnt
• *bonus points for applying Creative Storytelling and making the video a story instead of just a glorified slideshow

ok, just about done now. "happy" holidays!(weekend onli but nvm ah)

-Faizal

Day 9

Today we assembled in Lt24 to know what are the changes in the assignment which had been given to us. The major change was that the final assignment is to be submitted in only a "video format", which can include some animations in it. We have to save all the blog entries into a hardcopy for submission also. Well, the rest about the assignment still remains the same. 

I thought the lecturers would not let us see some previous moi project. But to help us in our work, some moi project videos were screened to us, and i am glad to be able to understand more about the assignment.

After seeing the short videos, I am amazed by some of them. One of them was the one the video done by  Jeremy Ho ( Jem ) and his group. I felt that it was quite inspirational in its mood. Maybe I would want to work on something like that.

For my individual work,  i am racking my head for questions to be put in surveys for research. I need to buck up if not I won't be able to analysis and look for solutions, then I will fail! ( thing which i don't want it to happen. ) 

Status: still stuck at level  1

Gungho everyone! GUNGHO!   - Kim Luk

Day 8

Today was presentation Day for our Council for Third Age Exercise. It was enriching as i get to know the standard that i have to set for my final assignment. It also allows me to know the other group standard as well.

Through this, i learn that researching is quite tough actually because all our solution require good research as backing. This way, our client would be confident to spend their money on us. Research cannot be only in one aspect because some people might like it and some may not.

After the presentation, i feel that my group did not do very well because many question were being asked by the lecturer. We will have to buck up!

-Xian Ming

Day 7

Today Xian Ming, Kim Luk and I went to the library and did some fine tuning of our proposals. And by fine tuning I mean writing a bunch of new stuff inside, because I thought we were close to being done a few days ago but the format was all wrong. Luckily, we did most of the work yesterday and today was compiling everything and adding some more to it. I think this exercise is good process for our final project, and will also help us with proposals in the future.

-Faizal

Day 6

Today is a disappointing but fruitful day anyway.

We were unsure if we had the right proposal format for a design concept, and what we had was the business proposal format.

Having a GOOD* & right proposal is important as it is the ticket to the client's riches; whether he wants to decide to use our work.

One takeaway for today: never rely too much on the internet for research, look for other source channel like the school library.

Here are steps in the proposal:

1.Design problem

2.Target audience

3.Analysis of research

4.objective

5.strategy

6.medium

7.concept

8.synopsis

We have focused on two ideas for the " Young & third age bonding": young&old day(YOday) and

young & old recreation centre.

Group status: working on proposal and presentation, researching

-Kim Luk

Day 5

Is the last day of the week and so far our research for "Third Age" have been going on very well. Our group had done research on everywhere such as survey and Forums from "AsiaSoft". "Asiasoft" is a gaming company which most of the gamers would discuss on game issue and their daily life at the forum. So therefore, many different kind of age group of people could be found there. Our group had decided to post questions targeted for youth in the forum for discussion so as to get as many informations as we could.

The link are as follow:
http://www.playpark.net/forums/viewthread/5781/

Please feel free to discuss with us as this might be a help to you guys too!

So far, our group manage to come out with 2 ideas for our proposal. We are now generating ideas and noting points from our research so as to help us in doing a better job. Now, our group has done point form notes for our proposal and power point presentation and hopefully could finish by monday. Since the dead line has been postpone to wednesday, monday would be the best deadline to finish everything so that we would still have time to do some changes when there's problem. Personally, i feel that the bondings between younger generation and the older generation should first start from family and then to the older generation outside.

-Xian Ming

Day 4

Today for class we talked discussed about the >60 Centre which is relevant to our first exercise. Teacher was saying how any concept or idea can be put into any medium, and MOI students shouldn't avoid print media just because we're mainly film students. We looked at a couple of brochures and books, and we saw how even films can be made to help people understand the situations of the elderly.

The first one we watched was 'This Is My Ah Gong' and this film brought to light how important it is to establish a good relationship with the SIP production house we'd be allocated to, since the student who made it got help from someone there to compose the soundtrack. The second one I dont remember the name, but I liked it better than the first. However, eventhough the 2nd one might be better story-wise, the message of the movie has swayed away from the original request from the client. The first one fulfilled what was stated in the brief and that's why Identifying the Design Problem is VERY important!

So after the lesson we had some time to discuss about our project. We already had one idea in mind that was approved by teacher after a little tweaking. And then the challenge for us was to come up with something else, since all our previous ideas could be categorized under that 1 idea. After throwing around some suggestions, we decided to have our 2nd proposal as an event instead of a building, like the first one. It could be a neighbourhood thing, which means even after the event, the younger and older generation would acknowledge each other if they ever see each other around. We thought the idea was pretty solid but an important thing teacher reminded us was to make sure that asides from bringing the teenagers and old people together at one place, we have to make sure to make them interact and talk to each other, which can be done by having games or seating the different groups with one another.

-Faizal

Day 3

This is my virgin post on blogspot. : )

Today we gathered at LT24 to watch ex-moi student Vitric TNG's films. 

He also shared with us about his experience of how he became a film-maker and why were his films so " depressing"- as the audience view it as.

What i see and learn from him is his passion towards filming. Eventhough he initially did not thought of becoming a film maker. He even volunteered to spend time at the ticket booth of the film festival so that he can watch all kinds of internaional films.

Also he has a heart which is rooted to design school, for he came down today for the sake of the potential film makers from the school.

During the afternoon I met with Faizal and Xianming to discuss about the " Third age exercise".

We have decided to work on:

1. building a cybercafe in an oldfolks home.

But we were unsure that if youths would go there for the sake of the internet or for the elderlies. Thus we are researching this case, partly by posting  an online survey. 

Heres the link for the online survey-  http://www.eSurveysPro.com/Survey.aspx?id=835c7193-6d2a-420f-b905-4d77e8cccc58&cid=bfd091a0-d62d-43e4-bbba-5f444af7b948

However, i feel that a youth and elderly triathlon race is a good chance for them to practice a healthy lifestyle and bonding. Eventhough it might be a physical problem for the elderly, we could work on how to solve it. 

-Kim Luk

Day 2

When we first step into class today, we were given 2 Questions to discuss in our group.

1) Steps in Design Process
2) Role Of a Designer

We sat in our group and discussed. After the discussion of the question, Siew Cheng brief us more in depth on our MOI Project 1 assessment criteria as all of us seem confused about it. After explaining the brief, she carried on explaining on the question she gave. She told us that interim 1 would be to confirm our final ideas and to elaborate on why we have chosen the idea and to present to the lecturer and interim 2 would be presenting the progress on our chosen ideas to the lecturer. Lastly, she explained to us the process of a Design Problem before arriving at a solution.

Design Problem

A clear statement that gives the general outline of the problem to be solved, as well as the purpose of the proposed solution.

Design Process
1)Research
-Quantitative Research -Qualitative Research
2)Explore
3)Challenge
4)Validate
5)Solution

Research
Quantitative Research
- Research from many different group of people.
Qualitative Research
-Research that ask quality question so that we would achieve quality answer.

Explore
Come out with few ideas to the problem.

Challenge
To choose an idea out of the few ideas we have

Validate
To see whether the chosen is working.
If its working, show how it is working.
If there's problem, show the problem and how are we going solve it.

Solution
After solving all the above process

Actually, i personally feel that the process does not stop after we have arrive at the solution. In fact, the process should start again after we had the solution to see if there's any loop holes and whether it's the best solution.

Xian Ming

Day 1

Today's the first day of our new module, MOI Project 1. We were gathered into LT25 and lectured on what the assignment would be. It would be in the form of a audio/visual medium, like powerpoint, and the content would be similar to that of last year's batch, to summarize our journey through the first year of MOI so far. However, what suprised me was that there wouldn't be just that assignment in this module, as there would be individual and group tasks. Suddenly I realised why this module lasts two blocks, because of the workload.

When we got to class we were lectured more about the ruless, and given a few more notes. One of them was reguarding our first exercise, which was to create two possible programmes to promote bonding between younger and older generation Singaporeans. I thought this was quite an interesting task as it is an actual competition that we will be using for classwork. Kind of like ComDI. After the lucky draw to decide which group we would be allocated into, and discussing the blog name and URL, we were done for the day. Class ended a little early, so my groupmates, Xian Ming, Kim Luk and I went to the library to do a little research before Kim Luk had to go for his next lesson.

--Faizal.