3208 Doodlez

Today I will be filming 2 more flashbacks for the game show. It was delayed for days because of the rain and all. Plus these boys are super busy. But other than that, the Game show video is on track I feel.

Here's what happened so far:
1. Filmed the Bachelor 2's flashback with the Bachelorette. Got many different areas of filming. Library, BK, Lover's park... etc...
2. Passed the clips to Sharon and Jalea to begin editing a few days ago already. We are splitting the work up. Tedious to go through 300 over clips alone right.

As for the first one... I had a creative epiphany days ago. Got me thinking about something really simple but very related to an ad feel for CNM. This will be a surprise... Shhhhhh....

As the title suggests, BEEN THERE, TRIED THAT. -.- The woes of my superhero scenes.

Haha.... Guess what. I actually shot the fighting scenes twice. One time at Lover's Park behind Central Forum and another time at the walkway to LT11. Both times... we got harassed by bees and mosquitos during the shoot. Jalea was badly bitten by mosquitos and Bibi.... well, let's just say that she does not EVER want to act for me ever again.

Anyway, so here's what happened so far:
1. Finished filming all the scenes needed for this Assignment.
2. Currently sieving out the clips and editing them too.

And we're doing all this WHILE doing the final project. Yep. So it's super tiring for all of us.

Will be continuing now. Tataa..

I invited my dear friend Bibi (someone who I owe very much) to act out Assignment 4 with me. Since I'm crazy and all, I thought it'd be in everyone's best interests that I become the VILLAIN. :)) *evil grin*

Well that would make her the HERO. Obviously. She asked if she could wear a mask. -_- She's enthusiastic I feel.

Ok gtg. Tataa...

I just had this sudden urge to immerse my entire kentic typography assignment in water... metaphorically of course, but somewhat literally... Learnt something about 3D Falloff and Sudden Target recently. Now I'm excited to edit my typography. Will be changing the look completely. With the new downloaded presets, I should be able to overcome that camera problem of mine.

Wow. I'm getting excited already. :)

Here is my very sketchy attempt at making a comic book layout for the many different video clips that I will be creating. Each segment will be a video on its own, with a comic layout overall. If I have the time, I will do this comic book layout. If I do not have the time, it will be simple transitions from one clip to another as per normal.

Ok, I finally came up with a good story (I hope). So here goes...

National University of Superheroes Showdown:
- The evil villain is at her lair, concocting an evil masterplan to destroy NUS. Sounds effects play in the background as she shows the audience her blueprint and a quick calling card that says, “Destroy NUS”. Why does she want to destroy NUS? Because it rejected. Mind you, it’s the NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF SUPERHEROES. And this villain was rejected. For very obvious reasons.
- She flies off from her lair and heads towards NUS.
- Meanwhile, the protector of NUS, a superhero, sensed there’s danger. She braces herself for a fight.
- The both of them met at a desolate location in NUS to fight it out. Some dialogue here.
- Close-up of hero and villain’s eyes changing colour to show anger. (Blue for hero and red for villain).
- Villain starts first by developing a fireball and throwing it at the hero. It almost hit as she tried to protect herself. It stopped right in front of her. She flings it away.
- Then, the hero created lightning from her hands and aimed it at the villain which led to an energy wave at the villain’s spot. The villain screamed in pain and looked up. And she did a force field that knocked the electric wave off.
- They both took some time to recover. Taunted each other with more words and dialogue.
- They both geared up for their ultimate move. Energy blasts from both ends both pointing at each other and meeting halfway. The blast was so powerful it’s very hard to make it last from both ends. So they both broke it off.
- Till next time, hero. And then the villain flies away. To be continued… The End.

I actually had grand masterplans of making it looks like it's in a comic book... But of course, 3-D version and all, with the page flipping and the video segments play out in their little areas of the page just like a super duper interactive-to-the-next-level comic book themed video. But I doubt I have enough time to produce something that awesome and spectacular, when I've got Final project and editings of 3 other Assignments to do plus a Portfolio and all my other modules begging for my attention (I'm also leading another group doing an ad for the shoe brand Charles and Keith, and my goodness, that is also a lot of work).

Here are some rough sketches for the storyboard:

Oh btw... I forgot to mention.... Everyone can comment my posts now.. :)

Awesome. This is a pretty cool assignment I think. I start popping up with all sorts of cool superhero effects. After looking at the many tutorials on visual effects, I came up with a list of possible special effects that can be used in this assignment. Listing them out would better help me visualise what could be possible in a video and how they can be integrated and combined together to have a decent flow of events.

Special Effects which are possible with After Effects:
- Energy ball
- Lightning strike
- Time Freeze
- Super speed
- Soul-sucker
- Fly
- Transport
- Fire
- Blast
- Invisibility
- Healing
- Cloning

My favourite ones are the Energy ball and Lightning Strikes... :) Because I can look really powerful doing that. Hehe... I love looking all powerful. There is also Shockwave and Energy blast which are related as well. I can perhaps use these few effects in my video.

I also intend to do a Time Freeze, Invisibility and Fly as they are one of the more straight-forward effects which are easily learnt from tutorials. But we'll see if I got the time and energy to do all of it. Haiz. So much work. So little time.

So then I thought of an epic battle scene at NUS. Hmmm.... A good story perhaps? But the context needs to be more relatable to the NUS audience, namely the students, so I thought of a simple fight between two students over something really stupid or some weird vendetta. I don't know yet.

Will be continuing this story soon.

Next week should be the last week of shooting for my group! Yayy!!! But due to the erratic timetables of everyone, it might be carried over to next next week as well. But fear not! My weekends for the next 2 weeks will be dedicated to 3208, now that my other modules have eased up on the assignments. *cringes, fear of jinxing it* And then it's time to begin editing the videos. Let me ease my thought process into the 2 videos:

NUStory:
1. Alrite, everything is going as planned. I got good shots for this documentary so far. More to come next week when I'll be filming myself and the remainder of the scenes with my friends.
2. The idea about transitions must be complimented with sound effects and proper camera angles.
3. The scenes left to shoot are as follows:
- Kee Onn's tutorial scene with me
- Bibi's fun scene with me all around NUS
- All my personal scenes with the camera everywhere (Sci, Biz, Comp, etc.)
- A reshooting of a scene with my 2 friends at Engine canteen. Too noisy that my voice was drowned out. Argh. It's so sad.

Making Choices:
1. Ok. We have completed the BIG GREENSCREEN scene with all the actors and actresses, including me of course. :P And a certain lecturer dropped by to say hello too... *wink wink* hahahaa.... The shoot went well. Managed to get good shots of everyone. We ended at around 9pm, which means that it took up about 2 hour plus to do everything. Not bad I think. Hmmm...
2. Now all there's left to film is the intro scene (which I added recently, not in the script I put in the pre-production script) and flashbacks for the 2nd and 3rd bachelor. Yep yep.
3. I've also planned out a simple storyboard for the editing of this particular video. It's very different from what I've seen so far but it's very common in comedy shows. I am going to try to pull this off. Will show you guys the storyboard very soon.

I better confirm my filming schedule with my people now.. Phew.... The number of SMSes I sent out this month are going through the roof. Gosh...

Alrite people. Here's the break-down.

1. I've been getting 3208 nightmares where I spent days working on after effects. Plus I actually sleep-talked about after effects to my boyfriend over the phone. Now that's creepy. 0_o He thinks I'm obsessed now.
2. I realised it's still not too late to really work on my Assignment 2, 3A, 3B, and eventually... Assignment 4. Which brings me to...
3. I've been looking up on after effects tutorials here and there everywhere, expecially video copilot (I LOVE YOU ANDREW KRAMER). Been learning a lot of good effects that I could use for Assignment 3 onwards. Hmmm... Which now brings me to...
4. I am going to revamp my Assignments 3A and 3B completely. Using the same materials (such as my photos, that little script I wrote out, Damaged lyrics, and etc.), I am going to step up my after effects skills now and I will attempt to create something more awesome and mind-boggling.

Yes. I am going to do more 3-D effects now... LOLS. Wish me luck. :P I will describe more of the changes I plan to make very soon. As for now, I got a Final Project shooting plan to do.

Ok, so I did the the whole layout and everything. Plus all the syncing between the audio and the text. Quite ok I guess... For a first-timer at kinetic typography. :)

A list of what I did:
- Created 14 different compositions for each line of text, and in each one, I animated them according to the audio.
- I planted the 14 compositions on a large composition (about 2000 pixels wide and 2000 pixels in height). I decided not to play around with 3D and stuff as I did not have enough time plus I'm still learning how to look at the canvas in 3D. It's somewhat mind-boggling. :S Grrrr....

Now, I need to do next to plant cameras into the main composition and animate them to show the respective portions of the composition.There is no overlapping of text so it should be relatively easier I guess. Yep. Will be doing that later...

Tataa...

*Previously on Assignment 3B* (in that narrative drama series style... hehe...)

I've thought about it... hard.... and then I thought about it some more.... Haish. What a tough decision. The feeling of freedom as opposed to staying true to NUS.... Which should I choose?


*ponder ponder ponder*

I made my decision. I am going to choose the option that could allow me to be most expressive and creative. I choose....

'Damaged' by Danity Kane. :D

Do, do you got a first aid kit handy?
Do, do you know how to patch up a wound?
Tell me
Are, are, are, are you, are you patient, understanding?
Cause I might need some time to clear the hole in my heart and I

I tried every remedy and nothing seems to work for me
Baby, baby this situation’s driving me crazy
And I really wanna be your lady
But the one before you left me so

Damaged, damaged, damaged, damaged
I thought that I should let you know
That my heart is damaged, damaged, so damaged, so damaged
And you can blame the one before

So how you gonna fix it, fix it, fix it?
(Baby, I gotta know)
How you gonna fix it, fix it, fix it?
(What are you gonna do baby?)
How you gonna fix it, fix it, fix it?
(Baby, I gotta know)

I edited the original MP3 and faded it out nicely to be exactly 1 minute. I picked this one in the ended as the beat is firm and strong, and in my opinion, it helps with the accuracy of the text animation and the lyrics to the song as they are sung. I have done previous videos which included syncing meticulously with the song, and it is tough when the singer just blurs his words when he sings. My previous work had included "5 Colours in your hair" by McFly, "Pump it" by Black Eyed Peas, "Hey Ya" by Outkast, "Superstar" by Jamelia, and many more than had all sorts of pop songs. The funny thing is, these all happened WAY BEFORE I learnt about copyright. -_- I was such a small little girl when I created those videos. No wonder a lot of my videos got banned after a few months on youtube. Hmmmm...
Here are just some of my rough designs for the typography which I plan to do:

Today, we went ahead and filmed more scenes. This is a quick list of the scenes we covered:

1. Narrator scene with Friend 2 in the library while studying
2. Narrator scene going crazy in front of books
3. Narrator scene with Friend 2 outside library, prelude to Engine canteen scene
4. Narrator scene at Burger King as a flashscene to show The Deck

So far so good. It was tiring but fun at the same time. Haha... I could say that the shots turned out to be good. Yep. Plus we noticed that there are more people filming here and there.... And it's not the 3208 people... Some other module perhaps...

Tomorrow, I will be going down to Sheares Hall to film a bit of a jamming session after lecture, as a flashback for the 'Bachelorette'. That should be interesting to do. Hmmm...

Wednesday, I'm going to film Bachelor Number 3's flashback scenes around campus. Hehe.. I got some new scene layed out for him. Yep yep.

One more change. The game show filming has been shifted to Friday night due to some addition to cast and minor adjustments to timing and all. I got 8 people to coordinate so it's not that easy really. Phew! >_<

Next week will probably be more solo filming for the narrator (aka ME) and Bachelor 2's flashback with Bachelorette. Oh, and an extra scene for Bachelor 3. And we will be reshooting the Engine scene with Friend 3.

Yep. Ok I gotta go and do my 2,500 word term paper due soon. Tata... :)

Here was what I presented to class the other day.




Well, I'm hoping to really improve those transitions, making them less annoying than they are right now. Yeps.

Ok, after my first few days of filming with my group, I learnt a lot of valuable lessons. I'm looking through the videos I gotten from one of the scenes and I think we need to do reshooting. Yep. But the others are fine.

So far, the scenes we have covered are:
- Bachelor 1's flashback @ Rugby match
- Friend 2's flashback @ PGP
- Engine canteen dialogue with Friend 2

The last scene in the list.... I'm gonna hope for a reshooting. Now, here comes the part about 'valuable lessons learnt'.

Valuable lesson number 1: Make sure the sound is clear enough to be heard. Too much background noise is no good. Big distraction. And I realised that my handycam's capabilities in capturing audio is not so powerful.

Solution: We're gonna reshoot the scene and this time, I'm borrowing my brother's iPhone to record the sound. I will be putting it very near the actors so as to capture as much of their voices as possible. And then, afterwards, we can merge this audio together with the handycam's audio to amplify the actors' voices over the background noise. It will take precision and accuracy for it not to be all echo-ey and stuff.

Valuable lesson number 2: Make sure you know what you're doing when you film. From what happened with the canteen scene, there were so many ideas on how to angle the camera and such from so many people. Hard to decide on which angle was best. We tried all sorts of angles. Bleah. In my opinion, it did not look good. My faces looks weird. I am SO not photogenic. :(

Solution: We really followed the different rules that apply to filming shots. For example the 180 degrees shot. We even tried doing different degrees of filming a character, whether it is a full body shot or a half-body shot or a close-up. But we realised a half-body was good enough for most shots.

Valuable lesson number 3: DON'T SMILE SO MUCH ON CAMERA!!!! urgh. This is entirely my fault. I'm just not that natural with the camera. Must be because of my astonishingly low self-esteem.

Solution: Be more confident. And lose some weight. I'm so fat.

Next week, we'll be tackling all the solo scenes and doing the big GAME SHOW scene on a saturday. We might have to pick up poor Jia Xiang from his house cos the green screens are heavy... hmmm...

Ok, so after showing the first draft to the class, I knew what I had to do to make my Ken Burns assignment better.

Here's the list of changes I hope to implement soon enough (will spend one night burning midnight oil to do the editing):

1. Do colour correction on all the pictures, which I have yet to do since it was a rush just to complete the assignment to show the class the other day.

2. Redo-all the transitions into those zooming in kinds and do the usual motions on the pics for the Ken Burns requirement. I feel this is important as I noticed that a lot of my peers merely did transitions and movements that did not highlight the sacredness of the Ken Burns effect, which states the use of motion on pictures to highlight key aspects of a certain part of a picture in a way that looks like it came from a movie (I hope I got the interpretation right) plus the idea that the movement can say a lot about the kind of picture it is and what story it brings out to the audience.

3. Add on more lyrics to the video. I was going to add in more pictures focusing on the small things we take for granted in NUS (like the power sockets, the clean toilets, the NUS lift, the many stairs, cool activities to do, etc.) I got new pictures of NUS from my filming locations recently and some do look good, so I thought, hey why not just add it in here?

4. MAKE MY SCRIPT RHYME!!! This will be my ultimate goal. I will attempt to make my whole script rhyme. But if I can't, I will just stick to that melodious tune I had going on in the beginning.

I do intend to keep it emotional and real, as that is simply the style I chose to do, and I aim to make it look good at what it's supposed to do: to make other NUS students cry after seeing it.

I am considering Photostory to do the simple transitions and working on those videos on after effects and add the script on after effects. But if I get really good at after effects from my 3B experiment, I will consider doing more complex motions on after effects for everything. But it will also depend on how much time I have to do this.

KINETIC TYPOGRAPHY.

Wow. Haha... Never thought I'd be doing this. I've seen such videos online here and there a while back, but I didn't really take note of the fact that it's a technique called 'kinetic typography' or as others would call it, 'motion typography' or 'typo'.

I have to admit, I LOVE the idea and technique of making something that could be mundane on its own (moving text around here and there), into something amazingly eye-catching and attractive it that natural way.

Of course, after looking at the many examples on youtube and elsewhere, it's possible to do kinetic typography on basically anything from songs to president speeches to dialogues from movies and comedies. As long as it's the words that count and that's what you want to enhance (which are the messages embedded in the text), well then, you can do the whole kinetic typography thing on it! :)

I did some research on what I wanted to do, since the whole class rebelled on the idea of the president of NUS's speech. At first I thought it would be boring to do the speech and everything, but I realised that Dr. Julian was only trying to ease our burden and at the same time making it educational for us by giving us that short speech clip to do our typography on. Then, it's all fair plus we don't have to waste anymore time finding content to do typography on.

But you see, the moment this assignment was given to us, I've always wanted to do kinetic typography on some songs that I love and thought would look awesome. I immediately thought of some ideas that I would like to do already.

I thought about doing either 'Whatcha Say' by Jason Derulo or Danity Kane's 'Damaged' as both had really good beats and firm vocals in them that would look very good on typography. They were good choices in my opinion mainly cos it has not been done before (as far as I can tell, since I have yet to see versions of them on youtube).

There were songs that I thought of initially like 'Bad Romance' by Lady Gaga (like what we talked about jokingly in class), 'Down' by Jay Sean, and 'Fireflies' by Owl City. But they've all been done repeatedly by amateur designers like me, as part of school projects (so it seems).

I also thought about delving into a dialogue I particularly liked which was The Big Bang Theory's Lizard-Spock Expansion episode, where Sheldon explained to Raj about an improved version of Rock-Paper-Scissors, which is Rock-Paper-Scissors-Lizard-Spock. The dialogue is super fast and super funny, and I thought it could be a good choice as well.

I've thought about it... hard.... and then I thought about it some more.... Haish. What a tough decision. The feeling of freedom as opposed to staying true to NUS.... Which should I choose?

*ponder ponder ponder*

I made my decision. I am going to choose the option that could allow me to be most expressive and creative. I choose....