Project 3 - Ideas

Alright, it's been a while now since I haven't worked on my project so its time crank up. I gathered some ideas from some of my friends and colleagues. In the first place, I was thinking about how will it relate to the actual short film that we made for our last project. Then I thought about some of the shots that we did. Like the point of view shot, which would be a great interactive part for the audience and the device they will use. Then the next thing I thought about is the actual device that I'm going to use. Well first thing I know about is the use of shoes. It is wearable and you can fit the keyboard or mouse hack as the input the device on the inside of it. One good example of this is the use of a foot mouse. 

Another option for me is to use the shoe itself and put the keyboard hack inside the shoe to be plug in to the computer by USB. It will adjust the movement frame of the video and probably adjust the lighting/contrast and saturation of it. It might add some sound as well for more excitement.




It could make it to a further more development but this is the base of the concept. It's about putting the shoes into the character and feel what it's like inside the creepy house.

Project 3 - Wearable Device

I have no idea on where to start, but I'm getting excited about the up coming product of what I'm about to make. In this project we were told to make a wearable device that will re-tell, re-interpret the short film that we had made on the last project. I think that the concept of the short film that we have take and not the actual film itself that we're going to use.  To start this we have to hack from old/new keyboards that's wasn't used. Getting the keys from the chip is not really that easy. Some of the key's doesn't work (the letter keys). I might even buy a new keyboard because of that problem. One of the issues is that, I'm worried about the testing since I have one spare which it only works on windows platform. I'll check one more time if the other keyboard will work and if it's not I'm going to buy a new one. After that I'll hack it and solder the wires on it. Then onwards on building and designing my idea. I do hope I would have enough time to do that with the programming in MAX/MSP. I still have to think about the concept first and layout my ideas in order to draw the design for my cool wearable device.

Max Msp

We tackled about this sort of programming language called Max Msp. I think the basics of it is kinda easy. but it get's complicated when you explore the whole program. In this we apply what we learned on our programming subjects. I just need to get more tutorials in this one so that I could make cool stuff in our next project. I feel that I'm getting into it and understands how does this work with other softwares like Animata, Processing and Arduino. Although it still have some flaws on it that needs to be experimented and test, it's still is one of the best package that can be done by any users who want's to make cool gadget and devices.

Project 2 - Conclusion

I found out that there were a lot of setbacks in the film. One of the example is that some of the audience don't know the relation of the main character to the girl that killed her. Another one is that when I was texting, they can't see much of the message. Which means it doesn't say why the girl killed her at the end of the second scene. There's also problem where the main character got the picture in the hallway of the house. It suppose to show the picture of them together of the girl so that the audience would understand that they were a couple. The last one is that in the diary, it should show some pictures of the main character with some other girl. In that way the audience would clearly understand why the girl killed her after he see's the diary. So as you can see we still have many things that we need to do. If only there's more time, I could have taken more shots and add those details to the film. But nevertheless our film was really good I'm kinda satisfied of the result overall. 

One more thing I found this movie recently which is really similar to what we did.

Here's our movie! Enjoy! :D

Project 2 - Finalization

During the 2 1/2 post production days, I wasn't satisfied with the second scene because there are a lot of set-backs within the actual footage. One of it was, Caleb (the first guy getting killed) going with the other girl (Rachel). When I took it, it was really shaky because they were walking too fast, and I try to catch up with them. I wanted to have a more detailed shot by taking them a picture in a cafe or holding hands together in a park. The problem is we can't manage to shoot anymore with them together because of their own personal schedule. The solution I made is just to make a montage of pictures from the footage that I took and make it like a targeting point. I imagine on how would a wolf attack on a person, so I manipulate the snapshot in Photoshop and make a zoom blur to the picture except to the two of them. The pictures that I made interprets the girl that she's stalking at their back and about to pounce soon. It was quite effective and decided to put it in the video. 

I talk about, in the last blog, having a problem from rendering videos because of the file size is too big. It's because I often make some layers of colours in After Effects and exporting as QuickTime .mov. I ask Gabriel about my problem and he told me that exporting in H.264 would be the solution. Even it has many plug-ins on it, it will compress it to a smaller size and still runs smoothly in any video player. Added to that, Gabriel thought me a super-effective way of putting effects and stuff to one shot even without going in and out of Premiere Pro and After Effects. All I have to do is just right click the footage on the edit, and click replace composition to After Effects. My work got easy and I crank up working on the colours and transition. I worked on two laptops (Chris and Sam's) so that I wouldn't get behind schedule which I would thought. As I imagined the rendering takes ages. Took me 4 hours to render one scene. As productive person as I am, I did the other scene to the other laptop so that it would be a less work on the next day. I took Sam's laptop at home and work on the ending scene. I prefer working on Sam's laptop, it's because the speculation of the computer is better than my own computer. After rendering the ending scene I started choosing my audio.

What I did for my audio is that I wanted to get an dark mood atmosphere on the start. Referring to the last blog, I already made a preview of our film and chosen some of the audio that will quite fit well. In this case, I hadn't got much trouble finding some audio for the opening scene. I have my stock audios on my hard drive which I got from videocopilot. I bought Pro Scores last year when I was doing some of my own animation back in the days. I searched in my resource for dramatic sounds as well for the scenes where the story in diary comes in. The sound editing took me half of the day since I already visualize on what am I going to put. Chris recorded her narrating sound the day before I did the sound editing. I also recorded a little bit for extra sound effects with my voice, but I change the pitch and added some echo on it. To the last minute I went on doing the credits. I already started it when I was at home and even my group didn't know what's going to happen on the end. They were just surprised on what I did. It was really awesome. I put the animation of the blood with the title and timing it when the girl hits the guy with the brick. It's was the highlight of the film. 

Project 2 - Problem Arises

There were several shots that I wasn't satisfied to be included in our short film. I wanted to have a more meaning into it but the hindrance that making it not possible is probably the schedule that we had to shoot. One of the thing is, like when I wanted to shoot the whole house with the lights turn off in the first scene and one of my group mate said we can't because of her relatives is doing something. I just make a substitute for it although on what I had vision is not going to work. Another thing is some shots that are really not good, like for example the camera is somewhat shaking. They only do it for one shot and doesn't do for more because my group mates saying that they're running out of time but which I think they were just too tired shooting. Also matching the same sequence to another is also another problems that we have to deal with. There's one shot where the main character has his eyes close-up with an emotion of worried while the other is in shock and it's really different from the other shot of his eye where he got shocked. Even though we have storyboards to follow, some of them still forgot what to shoot so what happens is that we have to shoot those scenes to the following day, and makes it delayed to our production schedule. I think that they put so much workload for me to think about everything because most of the time I'm the one that decides on what's going to happen in the shoot, but I always deliver a good shot anyway in my perspective. I just hope that I can have a substitute for this problems and still make a good quality story from the film that were making.

In the technical aspect, I'm trying to render the videos that I have finish putting some color correction and it makes the size so big that when you try to play it will skip some of the frames. I'm still in the process of managing as much as possible to become smaller size but with my color correction on it. HD is already big enough so my solution would probably as much as possible, less plug-in effects so that it would run smoothly in the video players. 

Project 2 - First Shooting Day 1

We shoot officially for our film and find some problems technically with the lighting and the schedule since we only use the house of our groupmate. I try to manage the possible things we can do. I also had some idea of changing some shots in some the scene because of what I think it's better. But here are some of the good shots that I think would be allright.

I like this shot in a sense of uneven of the angle. Like there something in the background that you wouldn't know.

in this shot I personally like this because this is something that a horror is always seen. a back shot with a dark background on the side. It's typical but it really gets the point where there some unknown elements might come behind or in beside of the character/

the effect of the lighting is somewhat astonishing even for an ordinary light. I try to brighten the exposure and give it of a suspense look so that this opening shot will be a good beginning for a horror film.

even though it's really dark, there still some lights that coming from outside of the house that makes the sense of entering into the darkness. I also got this element in a horror which characters always go into the darkness without turning the light on.