Cannibal evaluation

Entertain and Evaluate: Evaluation: Kelly Cantrell.

“Entertain and Evaluate” is the brief title, we were given a few choices from the roses awards briefs, there was the choice to make museums sexy, make the role of an undertaker seem appealing to school leavers, integrate cannibals into society, make the British holiday seem more appealing etc. I can’t remember the others, oh something about Electric waste? The only ones that seemed appealing to me from the start were the cannibal and the undertaker one, (Oh there was a lifeline one too) maybe I am just obsessed with death? But then surely the lifeline one would have appealed to me?

I think I liked the cannibal and the undertaker one because I felt more ideas coming to me for those 2 when as a group we had to make some “brainstorm” charts, I had lots of fun quirky ideas in my head for those two.

I had a look at the undertaker brief and thought about contacting funeral directors and speaking to kids in some schools to get their take on it and I planned to approach it from a serious angle, however I soon got bored of it and didn’t welcome the memory’s it brought back of my nana’s funeral a couple years back.

So sticking to my serious angle I went for the cannibal brief again, it would be too tempting to make it into a joke so I wanted it to be very serious.

I began by researching cannibalism on the web, (so not exactly first hand research but it was a start!) I found out a few things and decided to over-exaggerate them in order to attack to stigma of cannibalism, It wasn’t long before I had a whole marketing concept planned out, a company name, slogans, partnership schemes, starter packs, advertisements, campaign ideas etc etc…

But I think I spent a bit too long with this idea and should have moved on from it sooner, I didn’t quite know where to go next, I always new it would be more of a slide show giving facts and information, I didn’t want to go near live-film, (too much hassle) I didn’t want animation because I wanted to keep it serious, so I thought of having a news programme with hosts and interviews with real life cannibals.

However at the presentation of the boards, the feedback I was getting seemed to be that I needed a mascot, I needed some humor, I was told about some shows such as the “daily news” or whatever it’s called and the Starship Troopers TV spoofs. Although I found these amusing it completely through me off track as it was nothing like what I had in mind so I found myself back at square one, with about 2 weeks left till deadline….

At this point I asked Hoi Kam if she wanted to work with me, it seemed like a good solution, I could help her with the concept and she could help me with characters and animation, or acting or whatever we decided.

So we got together had a brief discussion and then decided to meet the following week to discuss how to put our work together, but of course we had both gotten the date on the brief wrong and thought we had a week longer than we did have,

Then we struggled to meet at certain times etc because of illness and work and so before we knew it we only had a few days left!

I had been working on scripts and Hoi Kam wanted to make some cartoons so I told her to make some flash cartoons, Hoi Kam really liked the resident evil intro and wanted to do something like that, she was having all these crazy funny ideas and I kept thinking, No we need to be serious! But in the end I thought oh what the hell, it can just be a crazy collaboration with my serious stuff and Hoi Kams quirky stuff! So as we only had a few days I began the painful task of making all my scripts into flash animated movies, I had to think about timing and making it look interesting while Hoi Kam made her cartoons.

I had video footage of fire and stuff so I thought it would be “cool” to use as a background, I had wanted to involve the four elements of earth, air, fire and water and felt that using clouds, countryside and fire I could achieve this, however no one “got” it and just couldn’t see the relevance.

Also no-one liked my writing, from the start I noticed people weren’t reading it and by a 3^rd of the way through people had given up trying to read it. (Cavemen! Only joking!) this taught me a valuable lesson! One that I should have learned sooner really! To think about my audience! I felt because I was prepared to read it that everyone would be but thinking about it now that’s only because it’s my own work and ideas, if it were someone else’s maybe I wouldn’t want to read it either!

So we were then left with a week to do something about it! None of us wanted to film, well I tell a lie Hoi Kam seemed happy to do some filming but I just didn’t want to, I felt it would look shabby and rushed, maybe if we had more time to think about it and plan it we could have, but I didn’t want to risk everything going wrong with just a week left, so I proposed that we just animate the whole thing!

So between us we took certain scenes each, (from the writing) and went off and made little cartoons to go with each. At this stage, we have about 10 cartoons between us that we just need to integrate into the video tomorrow and then we have to do voice-overs and work out how to make an interactive DVD! All by 4.30pm tomorrow!

If I could do this brief again I wouldn’t. Well seriously if I could change anything I would have managed my time a lot better, spent less time on the concept and got stuck in a bit sooner! I should have planned to work alone or in a team from the start and then stuck to it.

I think we work well as a team, we just needed to manage our time a bit better and there were times where I felt we were hitting our head against a wall! but then there were times where we really got alot done and bounced off each other well.

We had fun today putting all our clips together and doing the voices, in the end we decided to just make it as a whole new film, it's a shame we can't show it to anyone as it's a BIG improvement on our first effort.

We made the DVD in IDVD which was fairly straightforward, and I am just glad that we have finally finished!

I have not enjoyed this brief really if I am honest, I just want it over with, I feel very stressed, I have missed out on lots of time with my kids because of this, and am very annoyed and upset with the whole thing at this stage, I do not want to do it all again but we have to, I feel a little disheartened cause although we planned out time badly we have still worked our asses off to be fair and other people seem to have done a lot less yet we STILL have to do it again? I wish we could just submit the finished film from last week and all the extra cartoons as clips that we would have added, we don’t even know how to make the DVD, because we missed the session but this was because we were both working at my computer at home because the college computers kept crashing etc, and we also had privacy to do voice-overs.

At the end of the day I am glad it’s over, I enjoyed some aspects of the brief, like coming up with an idea, I liked making some of the animations, I enjoyed editing the first video actually, but it was more stress than it was worth in the end, I just hope that we pass and can just move onto the next thing!

Evaluation for video part 2

Video Part Two, “In a minute” Evaluation by Kelly Bruce.

 

I was excited about doing the 2^nd part of the video module as I wanted to get a better understanding of filming and using the camera, as for the first part of video early on in the year I felt my video could have been a lot stronger.

This time I would get to work in a group as last time I had been limited to working alone, as I had started the course later than the rest of the class.

I chose to work with Hoi Kam and Katharine as I was working with them on the second life brief and we all felt we worked well together and it would be worthwhile to continue as such, we had even given ourselves a group identity of 3K, and were going to have this in the credits of our film, but for some reason I think that part was forgotten! But nevermind!

At first I secretly wanted to work on my own as I had an idea and wanted it all to myself, for the fact that I just didn’t want anyone else to try and change it so maybe I was being a little selfish but as it happens I told Katharine and Hoi Kam and they both really liked it and along the way we did change things but as a team, my initial worries of having my idea completely altered were all for nothing! And I am very pleased with the result of the video and felt that we all again worked very well as a team.

To keep things organised I wrote a script, which we all read, but to be honest we had talked about the story so much that we all had a clear understanding of how it was going to work out in our heads! And because of this communication everything went to plan on the day of filming and we got everything done pretty quickly!

We did change things along the way slightly, for example the first scene was meant to be filmed twice so that we could use special effects and have the ghost on screen with the student at the same time and for her to replace her reflection in the mirror, however due to time and technical limitations we decided to not use special effects, but to just opt out of showing certain aspects of the film in the camera to give the effect we wanted in a different way.

In the 2^nd scene we were going to use special effects to have the ghost’s reflection follow the student through the reflective surfaces of pictures, glass etc. but instead we found a small square indoor window and decided that the student would stop here so that the ghost could make an appearance behind her though the window instead!

I had intended on playing a part in the movie having felt that if I wasn’t in it then it wouldn’t feel like my work, as my past videos have always had me in them, but playing the director was a good decision as I got to direct the actors who were very professional and much easier to work with than my mum! (Last video) and I also got to oversee what was going on and decide how I wanted the camera’s to operate etc.

But I made sure to take on board any ideas that Hoi Kam and Katharine had changing things here and there so that we were all happy.

I think the key to our project being successful was the cooperation and communication between us, which proved to be very effective, and helped us with time management.

We edited the video together, and Katherine did a great job on the title and credits, (she also helped me with the camera as I was unsure how to set up the tri-pod and silly things like that!)

I am a little disappointed that we were not shown any advanced video techniques in order to improve on the first attempt, besides a ten minute introduction or demonstration on how to set up the correct lighting for ‘green-screen’ use we didn’t get any further tutorage, something that I feel would have been useful, however I am sure if I had spoken to my tutors I would have gotten some extra help but as I was in a team did not need to worry so much as we all pulled together and helped each other so It’s not like there was no support, and we were assisted as much as possible with getting the footage off the tape although this was a tad frustrating as the AV suite was always too busy for us to get into, it’s a shame we didn’t have any dedicated time allocated to us as a year, but we managed without it ok once we got a tape player into the studio.

With regards to the sound, we used a soundtrack from an "Anime" however this was a mistake as we cannot enter the video into the one minute film festival because we would need copyright permission so I changed the sound by getting some "royalty free" sound effects from "sound-dogs.com".

The effects we used were “add noise” and “blink” to get the flickering, which I am not 100% happy with, it’s not the look we were after, we wanted a more static-like TV interference effect but were limited with time and unfortunately had no training in after effects which I have heard that we could have done all that and more in such as making the ghost scenes play backwards to give a creepy effect, I only wish we had had a full 2 weeks training induction for that but I’m sure we will next year so that is something to look forward to!

Overall I am very happy with the outcome and look forward to advancing my video skills in the next year working both alone and in a team.

 

Finished! word summery/ evaluation

well I've made a design for the outside instructing people on what we are and what we do and how they can get the most out the service, I felt a sign would be easier and more eye-catching than a basket or a box with instructions in it.

Katherine has managed to find some mannequin dummies and scatter them around which is brilliant! I wish we had found about this earlier because I had ideas of having all the characters really funky and bizarre but plain and simple is better than nothing I guess!

I'm not sure if we have to write a word summery or not so I will write one anyway, (I hope we do have to write one after me now wasting valuable morning time to do one!) 

Evaluation/first thoughts:

At first I didn't really care much for second life, seeing it as a "glamorized" chat room for people who didn't get out much! (I'd been on it once or twice a couple years ago and it was full of strippers and Chav's- from the impression I got from the way they were speaking and the strippers said they were strippers in real life and second life!) and from that I just couldn't be bothered with it, I never really knew about all the building and stuff you could do.

Anyway at the start of this project we were shown how to build basic items and script, but unfortunately I was catching up on another brief for the first or second session, (because due to my old hard-drive crashing I lost half of my previous project) so having missed that session I was clearly behind and that kinda through me off track and it took a while for me to get on board again.

I didn't really get into modeling until we got into our groups properly and started making it, before that I had just been throwing ideas about and doing research- petrified of actually going into second life and probably delaying the process for as long as possible!

Objective:

Perhaps I should outline what our objective was, we had the choice of healthy living or health and well being from the direct gov website and we then had to use second life to build a 3D environment based around the chosen area. My group chose health initially focussing on general health and our plan was to make a virtual doctors surgery with different rooms for different problems but after a talk with Anna we realized that it would be better to chose one specific area, and I had been toying with the idea of sexual health anyway, so we all agreed that to make it a sexual health clinic, and that it would have the most use for second life users. 

It is often an embarrassing  topic for some and obviously can be quite sensitive, so we felt users would benefit from having a confidential place where they could go for advice and information if they needed it without the awkwardness of being face to face.

We started by developing leaflets and undergoing market research- by asking people to fill in our questionnaires, from this we found that people were thinking along the same lines as us anyway so that was easy! of course a few mentioned the elderly, but I can't really see them using second life or needing sexual advice...

 

Building: 

At first Hoi Kam had built some sort of romanesque looking thing, which I found quite daunting, if she could build that in 5 minutes what could I do?  that kinda put me off for a while, as it was already in place, I didn't know what to do, but then we got our heads together and decided exactly what we were going to do and the next time I visited 2nd life there was a nice big empty space for me to work with, the building had already been made, minus the ceiling and floor! so that inspired me to start something, and then I spent the whole day making a floor and a tunnel into the outside near the sea! (It sounds simple but for a novice it wasn't and I had to mess around with the terrain, textures etc for a while) the next day I started making simple things like block benches, inner walls, I had ideas to hae a gazebo and chairs about the place but couldn't make them for the life of me so I improvised and went and found some freebies! including a water fountain!

Outcome:

Our finished product is fantastic! we are awesome! that's all I have to say. sorry that was a joke, you will have to endure more of my writing yet! The outcome looks great visually and we have the posters with the info and the links, we have freebies and blog links which is great, we have dummies everywhere, (thank you Katherine) which look great too, but of course there are things missing which prevent it from being what it was supposed to be, BUT these things are not possible to achieve as a college project, however if this really were a government funded operation then the following could have been in place: 

A) Interactive nurse, that can respond to simple Q&A interactions

B) Private rooms for consultations, (we have these but they are not "protected" so that conversations therein cannot be picked up)

C) Actual human health officials to control avatars so that advice given is from an authority, (however this would NEVER happen! but it's a thought! and it would never work because no-body would take it seriously and thus the "officials" would be wasting their time)

D) Appointment system, I have written this on the welcome board just for the purpose of this brief, but of course this isn't going to happen without the "staff" and a drop in would be nice too. (this is getting rather silly now so that's enough of my alphabet bullets, I think I am taking myself too seriously!)

Conclusion: 

I'm really pleased with what we have accomplished, I'm happy that I did some scripting and designed the posters and welcome sign, I love what the 3 of us have done, and am really glad we all got to work together! the only thing I would have liked to be different is my confidence in modeling, I would like to have been able to make more in terms of furniture etc. but I don't feel that I didn't contribute, I still feel like I did as much as possible for the capability and limited skills that I have! (for example I made blog links and gave out alot of ideas) Katherine and Hoi Kam were fantastic to work with, and I doubt this project would be what it is now if we hadn't all worked "together". I certainly enjoy 2nd life alot more now from this experience and can see how useful it can be from many different angles, I will definitely consider using 2nd life alot more from now on, (not professionally!) mainly to practice building and perhaps to make my own projects around?

FIRST CONTACT FINISHED VIDEO AND EVALUATION

Finished "first contact" video, now with sound!

I decided to come into college today to do a bit more to the video in terms of editing as I wasn't really happy with it just as it was. I also wanted to change some of the camera angles in maya but it wasn't having it, by not allowing me to see the key frames for the perspective, so I decided to leave it alone.

EVALUATION:

When I read through the brief and discovered we were making an animation about "first contact" between two characters, I was genuinely looking forward to it as I like to create my own characters and enjoy story-writing.

I was still working on my interactive story which I was really getting into and having fun with, (although now I am wondering why I bothered? it has not been shown to the group and I can't figure out how to have it on my blog) anyway, as soon as i'd finished that I decided to get on with my maya, yes I had been dabbling in it and drawing up storyboards, but was not ready to give it my full attention until my other projects were finished.

Moving on, my first impression of maya was "oh my god! what the hell is this?" I never thought I'd be able to use it and didn't even have the heart to try to be honest, I found it visually- a total eyesore, chaotic and far too "techy" I didn't even like looking at it! never mind touching it!

It took me weeks to get to grips with modeling, I found this frustrating and feel alot of time was wasted, (looking back I don't know why I found it so hard, I think I was trying to use too many tools that I didn't need to) 

I asked for help but it wasn't getting me anywhere, I just didn't get it! but after maybe the 6th week something twigged and I started getting to grips with it and a small surge of confidence came about, maybe if the interface wasn't so hideous I would have "twigged" sooner, but nevermind!

I was happy with my finished sperm model, I did attempt to make quite a few, never happy with them so I kept trying till I got a pleasing result, in the end using a picture imported into the software to model against, (wish I'd known that sooner!)

The next stage was to use deformers and handles to make the sperms "wiggly" and to also keep their tales in a swimming motion, this wasn't so bad, it was explained to me step by step and once I had done it once I found I was able to repeat this for all of my sperm models.

I disliked the rotation tool, every time i used a deformer it would appear in the wrong position and I would spend several minutes sometimes faffing about with rotation to get it in the right place, (as when you think you have it, you turn the camera and oh you don't have it!) I realize there were other view that could be used and a graph view, but I didn't like looking at any of them, it just looked like advanced physics to me! (all those lines and dots-yuk) I much preferred working in the standard view with shaded models, not see-through liney confusing wireframe!

anyway enough of that, on to animating, again this took a couple of sessions to get used to, but i found i picked up each new obstacle quicker each time, having got that bit more used to the shiteness that is maya! (sorry i just really hate it!)

I found that the delivery of this module was a bit too fast for my liking, by the time I was coming to grips with say A, we had already moved on passed B, C and D! so most of what I have learnt has been from pestering the teacher for one on one time as I just couldn't follow the group classes, If during the classes the steps had been broken down a bit so that we had to follow them step by step I feel I would have learnt more as it would have been beneficial to have done the steps whilst they were still fresh in my mind, rather than us all forgetting as there was too much information in one gulp.

besides that I really appreciated the one on one time I got otherwise I doubt I would have been able to progress at all. 

I am surprisingly pleased with the outcome actually, I had begun to design some backgrounds in photoshop but felt they looked "tacky" and rubbish, I chose to stick to the black background in maya, and I actually quite like it, the shadowed edges of my models blend in with it, although I had to add some additional lights to add balance, and it gives it a dark undertone which I like to have in my work anyway, I am pleased with the sound effects- I chose to have the jaws theme as I did in my animatic, and some bouncing sound effects along with screams of terror as the "Egg" kills off the sperms one by one.

In the end the story-telling, idea and editing have made it shine through as always, not my technical ability!

but to say it was complete utter rubbish to begin with I am more pleased than I thought I would be considering and am happy with the end result.

It's a shame we will probably have to use maya again at some point, I have no interest in 3D animation whatsoever, but at least next time we have to do this I will have some prior experience- if I don't forget! 

500 word individual evaluation

I started this project by generating some visual idea's in my sketchbook for a possible how to video. I wanted to go with something interesting, maybe even a bit bizare, I had some idea's along the lines of how to catch an alien,  how to annoy a cat, how to be a samurai etc. I decided to go with how to loose weight, thinking of those silly weight loss adverts on the shopping channels as my inspiration. However as i went along the darkness crept in as usual and i ended up making the whole thing a little dark, and during the animatics it got a little abstract toward the end so i aimed to try and keep it simple for the live-version.

I started by creating storyboards, scanning them into photoshop and then piecing them together as an animatic using Final cut pro.

This gave me more confidence in using final cut and proved to be crucial to my overall work during this brief.

The first half of the brief was to create the animatic which realisticley can be done in a day, I think i did get the first one done in that time but then instead of moving onto the live-video i wanted to do the animatic again not happy with it's visual style after seeing some of my colleagues work.

For me i'm glad i did this, because i'm much happier with the second animatic, although the key element in it was the sound which is the same in both, the visuals are more pleasing and have a more professional look as a pose to the scruffy and random images used in the first animatic.

For the second half of the brief, making the live-video i feel i could have done alot better but am still happy with the outcome due to the sound and editing involved. This was alot harder than it needed to be due to the amount of footage i had recorded, for example, I had hoped to film each scene individually from different angles, and then they would be edited together to form the full film. however my partner in this case was not the most patient of people and being the actress in the video also i found difficult to direct them, finding that they would go straight into the next scene without pausing, therfore some scenes did roll on when i would have preferred them to be individual.

I had forgotten most of the settings on the camera by the time it came to filming, but to be fair i was only talked through this once before and did not get the opportunity to take notes.

This resulted in some very poor quality shots in some cases- especially with lighting as i did not know which setting to put the camera on and because i had limited time with actors i just had to film whilst they were available.

for example the scene where the postman is delivering a package, that was a random person i saw outside and asked them to do the part, i didn't have time to get the lighting right or anything as they literally had to stop what they were doing and play a part in my film for 2 minutes, i could not ask them to do it again and again so i had to use the first and only shot, i also missed them knocking on the door as i should have hit record some seconds before the knock! 

I enjoyed the editing process, i found it very redeeming as i felt the footage could have been better i tried to make up for this by putting as much time and effort as i could into editing the clips to go with the sound, and trying to make them flow a bit better.

One scene worth mention was the eating scene at the start, when filming i had a fit of the giggles, and could not stop laughing, we tried this scene 5 times then the actress lost patience and refused to do it again, as a result of my laughing of course the camera was shaking and kept getting put down as i just couldn't film at one point for laughing. during editing i had to pick out all the bits that seemed "sturdy" and put them together, i like the overall effect this has given, as it starts with her eating on the beat of the music and each eating clip comes in and out with the sound.

I am happy with it as a piece of experimental student work definitely, as i feel i did the best i could with what i had and my time-limitations plus the fact i started the course late and didn't have a partner, as a professional piece of work- no, it would need to be alot better, but i feel i could easily achieve higher standards if i were to do this type of work again which no doubt we will be!

If and when i do this kind of work again i will plan a work-flow and make sure i get the shots/footage i want as this is vital for later editing!