3208 Doodlez

Ok, I'm in the lab copying the last disc. Right after this, I'll hand it in and this marks the end of this module. But before I say goodbye, I will do a quick recount of the events that happened for the past few days.


Short summary:
- I used Encore to do the DVD menu. A pretty simple menu I think. I wanted to do something more.... cool and extravagant... but alas.. no time!!! arghhhh!!
- I uploaded Assignment 4 on youtube 2 days ago and I am rather impressed at the quality of the video. Still quite good! wow... not bad...
- I edited the other Assignments and put them all in the DVD as intended. Yep yep. would like to post them on youtube now.
- I edited 10 clips worth of Learning Journal on After Effects and it took so long to render it that I couldn't do anything on After Effects as it renders! arghhhh!! -_- and the whole com lagged. Sheesh. I should have done the work at AS6.

Here are the links to the Assignments:
Assignment 1: http://nm3208.thruhere.net/
Assignment 2: http://nm3208a2.thruhere.net/
Assignment 3A: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTyLEoofzII
Assignment 3B: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMSmGj-1R5c (they disabled my audio!!! argh!!!)
Assignment 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNUbHM7U9es
Final Project (CNM): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-34kllLars
Final Project (Game Show): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9hK6v8VpIw

Will be updating this entry soon.

Here is the final video on YouTube:




Hope you enjoy it! :)

I just filmed the Learning Journal earlier today. It was SUPER FUNNYYYYY LA. Haha... Imagine talking to yourself in front of the camera while you're lying down.

>_< HAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAA.... LOLS. I really felt like I was going through a psychotherapy session with myself. It was quite.... therapeutic. Recounting what happened for the past few months and all. Haha...

I said quite a lot of things I realised. Each clip was like... around 5-10 minutes long. Yeah... I tend to ramble on and on and on and on and on.... AND THERE'S NO ONE AROUND TO SHUT ME UP. Yep. So there you go. One long Learning journal set of videos.

Ok, going to do more editing. Cya..

Ok, I just printed out the DVD cover design plus the accompanying CD design as well. Looks good in my opinion. Here's what it looks like:

Ok, here's some updates on these 2 Assignments.

1. I did the proper colour corrections and touch-ups with the curves and all. and OMG it looks so much better than before! WOW! :)))
2. Will be changing the Assignment 2 website a bit to suit to the theme more. Making it look grundgy and dirty and wat-not. But the pictures will be the same. I just have to do my aligning as per normal. I got used to that since Assignment 1.
3. Assignment 3 will have to stay the same in terms of pictures and lyrics I feel. I couldn't make it rhyme without changing a lot of the other stuff. It's like a snowball effect I'm afraid. But still, it's good enough to fit into the theme. So as of now, I'm just going to pour in more After Effects magic on it. The last time I did this assignment was during the time when I was still quite a noob at After Effects. But now I'm more comfortable with it, I really show try to do more about to make it look awesome.

Ok more to do now.

The name of this entry gives a little insight to what my theme will be for my portfolio. Bought the 'props' already. I'm getting help from Bibi on certain 'psychological' matters. And I'm ready for my session with the psychiatrist.

Hehe.

Won't tell you just yet... :)

Ok, we have finally reached the end of this whirlwind of a module! :) YAYNESS!!! I must say, I am both happy and sad that it is finally over. I really love my classmates. I really do. They make this whole module fun, on top of having a great lecturer Julian as well as the cool assignments that we had to do.

Despite the heavy workload we all had to endure over the past 12 weeks, I must say that I truly gained A LOT from this module as it exposes me to software and techniques which I would have other wise not have even begun to imagine or grab my hands on. I'm pretty glad with what I gained from this.

I'm happy that I'm no longer afraid of using After Effects. I feel quite comfortable using this software now. Premiere Pro is okay but I didn't get much chance to use this as most of my clips for the final projects had to be (in one way or another) be edited in After Effects. And so, it just felt more comfortable using After Effects teh whole way. But I daresay I'm comfortable with video editing software in general so it's not too bad I guess.

Ok, so its PORTFOLIO TIME!!! WHEEEEE!!!! :)

Well, I was offered to join the other girls in my class to do a collective portfolio with a "Survivor: Heroes VS Villains" theme of some sort but I rejected the offer as I wanted to do something different. Plus, I really wanted to learn how to create my own DVD menu from scratch by myself instead of having to rely on others to do the designs and effects for me.

Anyway, I really wanted to expose myself to Adobe Encore. I think it's important that CNM students like us should learn as much as we can about the various forms of medium and how to create them. How else can I effectively manage a team of designers one day (or advertising campaigns and the works) if I myself do not know how to create the essentials myself? What kind of a leader would I be then? I do not aim to simply do video-editing and designing all my life of course, although that's what I hope to start out with. I do have visions of going into the broadcasting industry and managing projects from a managerial standpoint and not from the "sit-down-and-listen-to-superiors-telling-you-what-to-do" standpoint. But I gotta start from the beginning and climb my way up. It's humbling and a necessary rite of passage I feel. Only then can you be a effective and respected leader.

The past few days had been hectic with presentations and assignment deadlines, so right now I'm going to get down and dirty with this final portfolio. I have this theme in mind but I do not want to reveal it here just yet. At first I thought of a bloody revenge theme but then...that would be similar to "Trapped" and such, right? The main idea there is portraying a specific emotion throughout the theme.

I choose to be different. I'm gonna try to see this from a different perspective altogether. I'm sorry but I really can't help myself when my creative juices are flowing. I don't usually settle for the ordinary. I love to brainstorm for new and original ideas. Makes my day just thinking about it. :) In my opinion, although I find my classmates' collective Survivor idea to be pretty awesome, I do worry for them as there are 8 of them and there's bound to be an uneven distribution of work. Some may end up not even knowing how to make DVD menus. But I can't assume of course. Not my place and business. I sincerely wish them and my team members Jalea and Sharon all the best. :)

I have found a few resources on helping me with this project. I already managed to source out for a printing company that deals with DVD covers and such, so yep. Good. :) Plus, I have been watching tutorials on how to make DVD menus for a while now, and I am going to start working on that very soon too.

But first I'm going to decide how I want to portray my Learning Journal as well as how I will arrange my Assignments. I will not be putting them in chronological order. It will be changed up a bit to add to the story and theme. Hehehe... I don't want to reveal this just yet.

Video 1: Creating New Magic



Video 2: Game Show (Making Choices)

So here goes. I have not blogged in a very long time about the Final Project and there has been quite a lot of changes that happened to the 2 darling videos that me and my teammates worked so hard to create. I'll break it down into two parts to quickly summarise the things we did.

Video 1: Creating New Magic

- Had a change of heart about the whole idea for this video. We decided to go with something a lot simpler and related to CNM instead. The main reason for this was due to the limited amount of time we had to edit the clips from the first video plus filming the narrator scenes starring myself. I did not have enough time to edit and neither do Jalea or Sharon. So we had to scale down our idea pretty quick and come up with something simpler.

- Got this cool idea to use the slogan that we created for our CNM revamped website, "Creating New Magic" and we created a video that showed clips which are 'otherwise' considered to be magic, except that we created all of the effects using After Effects.

- It turned into a 1 minute video that shows different parts of NUS but with a CNM 'magical' twist to it. The effects we put in varies in type. Sharon did the Fireball effect, Jalea did the sketchy road effect, and I did all the rest, including the rendering of the entire video.

- I used Video Copilot's plugins such as SureTarget 1.5 to create the overall flying effect of the words and videos. Had a particle simulation in the background. Then for the most part, the effects I did later on were a mixture of presets and a lot of effects put in. There is a lot of motion tracking throughout the whole video as it requires the effects to look in sync with the video movement. Plus, I tried as best as I can to make them look as realistic as possible.

- Problems faced: THE RENDERING. It kills me to see the rendering failing on me time and time again. I had to have faith that it will work everytime, even if it failed after 19 seconds into the clip. -_- It was so troubling! Arghhh... But alas, the 15th time was a charm for me (after having After Effects crash on me for about 5-7 times in the past 4 days). I had to redo huge portions of this video simply because I did not anticipate it to crash on me at particular times. So thus, a good deal of work was not saved each time. Yep. I basically had to rebuild the video from scratch using bits and pieces from other project files.

- One solution I found out to work on the video was to render the different effects individually first and then add in the .avi clips into one main composition together with the background and particle effects. Easier for me to modify the video and I realised that my chances of successful rendering are a lot higher. :) So win-win for me. Yay!

Video 2: Game Show (Making Choices)

- This video follows exactly as stated in the pre-production documentation. So I guess I'm quite happy with the result since it all went as planned. It exceeds a bit over 3 minutes but I feel that it's not too laggy or anything. Sharon helped to organise the clips from the greenscreen session and Jalea organised the clips from the flashbacks. I patched all of it up together in the end.

- I keylighted all the greenscreen clips as best as I could. It's a bit rough but it's the best I could do in the short period of time I have. Used a lot of masks to hide the imperfect portions and used a combination of simple choker and matte choker to smoothen the edges. Then, I added in the respective backgrounds. I asked Jalea to design then in 5 different colours, one for each of the characters in the video. I felt this is appropriate as it can reflect a bit about their character and personality or to simply differentiate them from one another. Plus, it looks nicer.

- Most of the music came from danosongs.com, created by this very talented guy called Dano I think. Royalty free of course. It was a tough job sorting out the audio and putting them in proper decibals because the RAM preview in After Effects is super laggy and ridiculously slow to the extent that It is very hard to even put preview audio and clips together. So I basically worked 'blindly' throughout the whole process of video editing, just praying that the audio turns out right.

- Problems: Other than the huge problem I talked about earlier, RENDERING is still a huge problem here. BIG BIG problem. It took me nearly 20 tries to get a successful rendering. As usual, my com crashed a few times while trying to do a RAM preview.

Ok, so I feel that this entry is turning out to be a very long one. Hmmm... Will be embedding the videos up here later.

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...