Screening reflection.

Today screen was kind of a help to me. From others work, i watch and pick up on some skills. Some of their works really amazed me and left me a great impression. Whereas some of the others, give me a big shock. What i mean is, i discover a lot of joker from our course whereby they are very quiet normally. Everyone really put in alot of effort to do this P1. Overall,i feel that we had done a great job.

Working with Faizal and Kim Luk is a great experience for me. I found out that Kim Luk photoshop skills are great and faizal's animation are still as good as ever. I feel that i didn't contribute much as i doesn't have a strong area to start with. I learn alot from them but still dare not try it because i am scare to have ruin the video.

Apart from that, i also found out about myself is that i can only be an actor and not the director or editor. It is because i found out that editing and directing to me is really cannot make it issue for myself but i am willing to learn from scratch again.

-Xian Ming

Day35

Well, there is a begining and there is an ending.
IT's been a fruitful process during these two months, working with Faizal and XianMing.

Credits to Faizal: I learnt how to paint with photoshop from him.
some animating techniques from him and lip dubbing.

From Xianming: I learnt more editing techniques

Well there still alot of things i had learnt from them which I can't call upon.

My Reflections:

Getting angry with group from group members is very normal when things are not running smoothly. We ought to solve the problems together instead. It is also imortant to respect team members. Reasons: some might tolerate or some might fall out with you and never want to work with you in the future.

* What matters in a group is not always about being the best but is about how they overcome the obstacles( whether emotional or technically) and learn together as a group to achieve a common goal.

Today's screening was interesting. I could see many different results and processes from other groups. Some have very simple but effective masterpieces. Whereas, some have amusing effects. Faizal was busy doing his video fundamentals. So both me and Xian Ming presented when we first to present. Xianming spoke it all. Hahas, I' don't whether this presentation have marks or not but i am speechless if there is no questions shot at me. I am proud of the result of our work eventhough it might look inferior to some others.

Goodwork Xianming and Faizal... we have rooms of improvement

Reflection

Today was a hectic day as everyone were rushing their final rendering, burning and editing of their final work. The first render that we done had a huge file size. We are unable to burn into the disc so therefore, we rendered again using a smaller frame size. Therefore, causing us to be late for submission. F*** render! Overall, i learnt alot from Faizal but sometimes, things doesn't go well and i would be angry with him. BUT P1 IS OVER! Hope that things would be better if i ever have chance to work with them again.

Overall, i feel that i'm not that good either as sometimes, i would show out my temper and even informed Kim Luk that i would be late. Causing him to be in school very early alone. That was the start of P1. I'm sorry for not giving my all for this project.

-Xian Ming

Day34

What we did today was piecing every video shots and scenes into a whole with adobe premier. Hovever we have not recorded our audio yet. Yes me and my group discovered that the colours of our video paler than the original uncut clips. Then I happen to read the mail by Yoke Ee. She advise us to render the videos with the compress setting as animation/ none for Adobe premier and others except for final cut pro. So this was why our video was pale, its because of the compress setting. We always thought that it was H.264. And darn, we deleted the working files for the keyed out shots.
We have not design our CD cover yet.

-Kim Luk

Day33

First thing I did was to borrow a firewire and redhead light from the material store. During the afternoon, I went to the Hereafter Studio to extract more footages from the Handy-camera. I used Xianming's laptop to log and capture the footages as we could not use the desktops in the studio. Faizal and Xianming were editing the rough cuts. Then after the transfer, we cut the footages during 6 to 9pm. Lastly we did some shootings for our opening and ending of our video with the help of James Boo( thanks ). I am not good at acting. :) hahas. Thats all i can say. Then we ended around 10 pm +. Finally I headed home to do our interim2 report while Xianming do the rough cuts.

A team needs support and help from each other. Thus we are now still a team. : )
GUNGHO! GUNGHO ! GUNGHO!

- KIM LUK

Day 32

Today our group went to shoot was left for our shooting. We also decided to re-shoot the whole of green screen scenes due to the shadows. But it was not done today as the TV studio is not available for us. So, i guess we shall do it tomorrow. Got a few peeps from MOI to help us in our filming today and it was kind of fun. Apart from having fun while shooting, i fear that our group had no time for editing. Also, i'm quite stress to do the editing because i am afraid that i might screw it up and cause it to be a lousy work.

After so long, our group still had the claymation part to do and interim 2 is on thursday! I'm sure that we wont be able to finish it by then. After putting some of the rough cut footage together, i feel that our video are too long and needs to cut away some scene. But cutting away some scenes means that our video wont be as good. Hope that it could turn and well for everything. I shall use all my energy in the editing even if i don't sleep.

-Xian Ming

Day 30

Friday the 13th!
Faizal and Xianming went to do some voluntary acting for Jeremy's film except for me. I guess they have learnt some experiences from it While they are away, I spent the afternoon with the desktop in the 3d lab, figuring out how to key away the shadowy parts of the video. Well i was hoping to solve this challenge so that we don't have to reshoot the entire green screen part. Then there was a powerfailure. Everyone went whining about not saving their works.

Then Faizal and Xianming came back during the late afternoon. Faizal did some animations and i realized it was Xianming's birthday. Xianming went off early to work. Meanwhile i went around to look and learn from other coursemates' works.
Faizal finished animating the animations of the video. Well, I did not managed to key out the minor shadows. I thought it would be better to reshoot again but this time round with strong lightings to get rid of the shadows. We are now progressing on to make the claymations for our video.


GUNGHO, GUNGHO,GUNGHO!!!!

- KIM LUK

Day 29

Supposingly,we are suppose to film what was left today but it was cancelled due to my work. I have forgotten that i actually do have work today. Apparently due to lots of things, our shoot was push back. Without wasting more time, we start parts of our editing of video.

I have learn how to mask and make away the green screen. A lesson learnt, NEVER CAST ANY SHADOW WHILE USING GREEN SCREEN! Now i have known that green screen is the hardest thing. I think i will try not to touch green screen in my future project.

-Xian Ming

Day 27

We went to shoot green screen for the effect of our group video today, and Xianming was the actor.
Many people were using the studio. Thus, the studio need to be booked for using. Luckily Jovi's group booked the studio for that day, and we shared the studio with them. There were other groups there too. We had to wait for the other groups to use the green screen before we could start.
I was watching how Featrice and Caster's group were shooting their video with the green screen. Whereas, Xianming was busy doing his H&C waiting.
We started quite late in the evening around 6.00pm. Fizal was scared of heights, he needed someone to hold the ladder before he could stand on the ladder to shoot.
Everything was quite smooth. There were some shots which require aerial top view and we need to have Xianming lying flat on the ground. We had to untie the green screen and lay it on the ground and hang it back again. We ended at 9pm plus.

Once again GUNGHO GUNGHO GUNGHO! everyone

- KIM LUK

Day 26

Supposingly, our team are to borrow a camera from school and start with our filming. But this turn out to be different as the storeman, Mr Eric was on MC. Not our luck maybe. Apart from that, Faizal did some pasting of our new story boards into photoshops so that it could later be printed and use it during filming. Nothing much to post today.

-Xian Ming

Day 25

Sadly, there aren't any more P2 cameras. And filiming is pushed back to Monday with all the changes we had to make. Nice.

Did a lot of animation today. Pretty worn out, but it's times like these im glad to be working in a team. Kim Luk painted a bunch of stuff including the animation's backgrounds(guy has talent, woah) and xian ming helped to colour the animations. hopefully filiming can be finished by wednesday and then we could move on to post-production, which i suspect will take quite some time. dont really know how this is all gonna turn out. hopefully well. :)

good news is we finally decided on the sequence of events. there's no proper scripts but we do have a non-timed animatic and a pretty clear idea of what we're gonna do. I'm glad that we didn't go with that angel/devil idea after all, coz it would have had ALOT of animation in it, not to mention it being much longer than 7 minutes, which turns out to be no very long, haha.

--faizal

Day24

Well, we changed our story content. No more angels and devils. Hahas. I guess we were influenced too much by our seniors' works, we were to engrossed into showing what is MOI about and the courses taught in the course. 

3/3/2009 we found out from Yoke ee that we can make different kinds of videos which have contents unrelated to MOI, but we must show how are we going to put all our learnings from different modules into the video.

5/3/2009 we consulted Yoke ee again today. We told her our new idea but she commented that our animations were long and time-consuming, also our story message was abit unclear. : )

Faizal kept asking her how could we improve our story. I guess that is our job.

We are now re-improving our ideas and thinking of how to deliver our message of our story.

During the afternoon, Xianming & Faizal were thinking of how to improve on the ideas while I 

painted some pictures for our  video.

Well, 3 more weeks left, we have to strive and slog. GUNGHO! GUNGHO! GUNGHO!

- KIM LUK

Day 23

Our group had a meet out today. Instead of waiting for Yoke Ee to reply us on the comment of our script. We came out with a totally new idea but with some aspect of our previous idea inside. So, we discuss the about how the story will go before putting our pencil down on story board. 

After discussing the story line, we discuss about the transition between scenes. Finally, we drew a rough sketch of story boards down and a very rough script. These are done so that we could meet out Yoke Ee tomorrow to consult on our new idea. Once the new idea is accepted and refine. We are ready to go and shoot. Im so worried that our group have no time to finish P1 because i keep seeing the other groups walking around with camera and start filming.

We have to rush!

-Xian Ming

Day 22

Consultation today. Turns out we had to change our idea. there was nothing neccesarily wrong with it, just that, it didnt HAVE to be a 'introduce module then explain it' kind of deal. That's what Yoke Ee meant by saying all our proposals were similar. And in this case having such a thick proposal binding didnt work to our favour. One thing that really got to me was that rule of thumb says "1 page of a script is roughly 1 minute", and we had about 15 in ours sooo, yeah. you can do the math. so we spent the day trying to think of a few ideas and tried to keep some of the characters in it while changing the story. we considered making it part claymation too since that might up our chances of getting a p2 camera, haha.

feel pretty bummed out that we worked on stuff for the past 2 weeks that wont even BE in the final, but i guess the time wasnt that wasted...it was a learning process after all, and i was sort of relieved that there's not so much animation in it as there was before.

--faizal

DAY 21

Today is the first day of interim1. : )
First thing we did was to borrow walcom pens for drawing our animations.
Then we headed to the Mac lab to experiment with the green screening, using animation with a green background on a background image. We used aftereffects to experiment the green screening, and we managed to put the animation character on the video.
Then we continue to experiment on how to put shadows on the animated character without affecting the background.
During the late afternoon, we headed to the animation lab. Faizal did some drawings on the story. Whereas, me and Xianming were experimenting on flash and after effects.
Can't wait to do more work for the impending production.
Tomorrow we will be consulting Yoke ee before we can start production.
We are still reviewing our ideas and improving on it. : )

- KIM LUK

GUNGHO, GUNGHO GUNGHO everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!