TV Project Week 2

On the second week we where placed in to 2 groups of around ten and got to rewriting the script, blocking a very rough version of our show and looking for actors.

My group worked very well with each other and we where able to do a number of things on our first day. We decided to come in a day early, so on monday we started by planning out on what we should get out of the way first. Two people in my group went to work on the script and the rest of us focused on the adverts we needed to do. Creating the adverts was not as hard as i thought it would be as we only needed to come up with futuristic themed adds so we had one where smoking is good for you and another where adds spring up in everyday life unwanted.

As well as coming up with adverts we also spent half a day in the studio blocking out where our presenters where going to be at what point in the script. this took a while as we where still working on the script and where using a rough draft just to get a feel for things. We also spent a good amount of time researching what our presenters where going to talk to our guests about, we looked at what point in time we should be talking to them about and what works of andy warhol to show them.

When it came to the friday we had finished our script, filmed our adverts and where getting ready for the next week. We where making sure that actors could be there on the days they where needed and just getting content ready for the show like for example having a power point playing on one of the screens showing off andy warhols works.

Overall it was a very productive week and we got a lot done in preparation for filming which will be on wednesday and thursday so we have two days to see how it goes with the other group first.

The TV project

In the first week of the TV Project we where told we where to create two shows with the theme of a time travel arts show. The show had to be done live and had to have a dramatised problem happen at the end with the time machine breaking down.

Once we where told the outline of what we where going to do within the next three weeks we where split off in to random groups and started to generate ideas. In my group we had ideas ranging from a never ending loop to meeting famous dead people and and as we where coming up with these ideas we wrote the good ones down in preparation for a pitch at the end of the day.

The two ideas which where chosen at the pitch where the ones about jack the ripper going though time and having a andy warhol/time zombie themed show.

The last 8 weeks have been really fun i didn't expect to like so many different things i had never tried before, although there where a few things which where not as good as i hoped they would be overall the course has been great.

Starting with photography, it was something i didn't expect to like so much. Taking photos never really sparked my interest, i knew some basics but my heart was never really there so when i found out we would be doing photography for the first two weeks i was a little underwhelmed. The first day was alright i found out some interesting stuff on past photographers and what sort of work they did but when i started to learn how to use a camera and begin taking pictures i became really interested. The first week when we had to have a picture for our first crit was very enjoyable i liked being able to take photos of things i would not normally do.

The way i got to my final piece was i looked at every different picture i had took narrowed it down to six final test shots and from those i took one and used it as my final piece. I tried to focus mostly on memory and future memory and when i was setting up some of the shoots i used a lot of things that had i or people i knew had memories associated with them.

Animation was great, I knew from the start that it was going to be something I enjoyed. We where put in to random groups at the start of the two weeks which was good as everyone got on in ours and we all had lots of ideas for our final animation. On the second day we where told to each draw a storyboard as a pitch for our short animation, i drew a comical cat with makes things worse when trying to help. We didn't go with my idea which was a good thing was our idea we went with was really good. It was about a man looking into a photo album at past memories. We kept expanding on this idea and as iv mentioned in previous posts we went from a eating book to the chain of evolution until we settled on a fly just trying to find his paradise.

Creating the animation was really fun we used a program named I stop motion where we took two pictures for every shot we wanted. we only took one some some shots as we wanted them to go really fast for example the fan starting to spin. Overall i think we worked really well as a team as we all knew what we wanted the animation to be and everyone was really open to new ideas expanding on our project. The final crit went quite well for us and we got some really good feedback in terms off the the way we shot it and also some feedback on how to improve it for the future.

Sound was interesting i learned a lot of things about it i didn't know before. On the first day we learnt what how to use some of the equipment and software which was alright but not particularly interesting until we got to use some of it. It was fun going around looking for objects that might make interesting sounds. When we got to week two we where already in groups of our own choose this time. My group and i worked very well together as we all where contributing ideas. I came up with one idea about having a scenario where we have nature turning in to a city. We where told at our first crit it was cliche so we went about changing it and reversing the idea and adding some more to it.

When we came to the final crit of our sound journey it went really well we didn't get much negative feedback aside from one person not understanding what was going on. We where praised for using all of our own sounds to create the journey and i think that me and my group did a really good job together as we got on and had the same goal in sight for what we wanted to do.

Film was undoubtedly the best part of this course so far. On the first week we got started by looking at some chase sequences which where all very different from each other. There where only three people in my group but we all knew each other and got along really well. We spent the last half of the first day planning what we wanted to do and that was when we came up with the idea of having a surreal chase. we kept changing our story with all the feedback we got so we could make a better one.

On the second week we started filming, unfortunately on monday due to the weather we could not do anything so we carried on planning and doing some test shots. all of the test shots we did really help us out in terms of planning for the day of shooting, since we where using actors from another group who had to do there own film as well all the planning we did made it very easy to film what we needed fast as we had a shot list which we followed to some degree so we could set up our shots fast and get them done.

Overall i think that the last eight weeks have been really good and surprising as i was only really ever interested in film and animation, i didn't expect to like sound and photography so much which was a good thing as they where both really good. Things which  thought worked well where all of my groups as we all got along really well and contributed lots of ideas towards the projects. Another thing that i think world well was the way in most of the projects the use of trial and error, seeing if one shot worked and if it did we would use it and if it didn't we would not. Something that i think i didn't work so well on was the blog i have written a lot to it but i have not enjoyed much of it.

Final Film Crit

On the final day of the film unit we had our last crit, all of out footage was edited down to one minuet and we started to watch everyone else's final films. It was interesting watching other peoples films and to see how they had done there chase sequences. Some where very direct with someone being literally chased where others where more subtle but all where really good with lots of different interesting shots and stories.

Listening to the feedback that was given to people about there work was helpful to us as well. Although not directed at us the feedback could of easily been applied to ours, an example of this is when people where told they needed a more clear story or that some shots where odd and listening to this i could see how our work could be improved from it.

We where the second to last group to show ours so it was nice to see everyone else's before ours. once we had shown it we got a mixed reaction as to where some people had understood the film others had not. We got some fair feedback saying that the story was to weak and not very satisfying with the main character ending back in the exam room at the end, so we where told we needed to work on it for the future and that some of the shots where not amazing which was also true. The more positive feedback was directed towards the fact we didn't base out chase sequence in reality and tried to be creative with the setting which was one of our goals from the start.

The things that worked well on the film unit was definitely my group we all got on and where able to cordinate to work together as a team. Thought out the planning stages we all worked together to come up with an idea which we all liked and agreed on and once we got feedback from it we could change it again until we where all happy with the idea. Another thing which worked well was the filming stage we all worked really well as a group in sharing the roles of filming with us all each getting our fair share to do. Editing worked well as just like before with the filming we shared the role and got on with it each doing different scenes.

Things which did not work so well was the amount we filmed, we thought we had quite a lot but when we came to editing we realised that we did not have all the shots we needed but we had to make do with it. Another thing that did not work so well was our story. the final story we all thought was good but it turns out that it was not as good as we believed which was a shame.

For the future i think getting more options from people outside of the group to look at the story and see what they think and showing the rough edits of the film to see if they understand it will be a good thing to do.

Although not perfect i am happy with the end result of our final film and here it is. 

Tate Modern Reveiw

Going around the Tate Modern was an experience, having never been i was not sure what to expect. Walking around floor called Transformed Vision there was one room which caught my eye. In one of the rooms there was 10 photos of empty streets and squares in a city, looking at them i was trying work work out what it was about until i overheard one of the tour guides who walked in the room talk about it. She said that the pictures where taken in Syria and that the person who took these photos (Hrair Sarkissian) used to walk past these places where public executions took place. I didn't expect to hear this and was shocked to see that these pictures i looked at where about executions.

I looking at the work for some time longer i found it a bit ironic that Syria where it is believed civilisation began is so oppressed. Because of the surprise i got from learning more about it i found it more interesting as it stood out to me more than other pieces of work i had looked at before.

These are some of the pictures i took of the work.

 I was deffiently impressed with the tate as i was not quite sure what to expect and some of the diffrent exebitions i found really intresting including the one named Word. Sound. Power which i went to first

Today we started filming our short film. We started by doing the beginning and end first in a class room and shot from a variety of angles so we will have a lot to work with when we begin editing. The second location we filmed at was a park, unfortunately the camera was low on power so we had to be fast when filming we got all our shots and went back to charge our camera before going to our next location.

I think we could of gotten more footage in the park but we where limited with the power but overall today went very well as we got all the shots we needed with a variety of shots done on the tripod and without so we had a good mix.

Film test shots

When coming up with our ideas for what our film should be on we made a few test shots to see if our ideas could actually work on screen. One of our ideas was going though doors and ending up in different locations so we did test shots so we could see if it was clear that the actor was going though the door without showibg what was in the other side.

One of our test shots for the door idea. 

We also created multiple storyboards so we could have an idea of what shots we would use and to get an idea of the flow of the film. we kept changing and creating new storyboards for when  we would change some of the details of the story. Here is one of the different storyboards we created.

With all of the feedback we got we kept changing our storyboards creating new ones and taking elements and ideas from the old ones. We carryed on doing test shots to see if our idea could acctually work on screen and most of the results where good. We also started to look at locations for where we would film the one we have so far is a park area in Greenwich and thinking about using somewhere iconic in london and a corridor for another. 

Here is the location shot we took once we looked around we decided on using this in our final one so most of our storyboards incorporated a forest of some description to make it feel surreal.

Photography

The first week of photography was interesting i didn't expect to like it so much but i was wrong it was fun shooting different shots from different angles and learning about aperture and other technical things about my camera. Because of the first week i am able now to do things with my camera that i didn't even know it could.

Here are some photos on the say we looked at lightning we used eggs and where told try and make a picture of them with emotion. We went with love as we had a red filter which came out pink which was great for us. The other picture is off one of my object we had to take in, although we didn't do anything with them i wanted to take this picture as i thought it looked good.

When it came to the second week and we had to get over 40 diffrent pictures i was a bit worried but i looked for all diffrent types of objects with intresting shapes and got all of these.

These where the pictures i took and the ones that have circles around them where the ones i used for my final 6 test shots. I used different lightning, filters, angels for the same objects and the results where really good. Some of the object which looked boring look really good in different set ups.

Sound Design Week One

The first week of sound design we not as intresting as i was hoping the first few days of testing out some of the equipment and software was very unintresting to me. while i can appreciate sound design for what it does and how it is used im not very passionate about it. Saying this my intrest did spark up when we started moving on from just testing out the stuff to coming up with an idea. I had a few in mind and after looking at the handbook and seeing what types of sounds would be needed (atmospheric sounds and some others) i came up with an idea to have a natuer atmosperic sounds turning in to a city.

When me and my group started to come up with ideas for sound design we sat and talked about our ideas which came in to our heads which included driving, sport, food and some other things once we had all these ideas we voted on our top three and the one with the most votes was the one we would chose.

The top three ideas we came up with where food, cars and my one which was the nature to industrial. We ended up going with nature to industrial but when we went for our crit we got some good feedback which made us go back and rethink our idea. We where told that the nature to industrial was too cliche and that we should change it to be different. We reversed the idea by having industrial turning into nature and then connie in my group came up with the idea to have a natural disaster so the transition would be more obvious so people would get what was happening

Some of the other ideas which we came up with where sports, musical instruments drinking, driving, transport, food, technology and weather. we didn't end up using these as the main idea but we did incorporate some of the sounds to fit with our main idea like weather for example we needed that for the natural disaster so we set back trying to record some good effects.

I think we all really worked well as a group and we managed to come up with some good ideas. similar to the animation once we had a main idea we all started to add different ideas to it to make it better and improve it and i think that worked really well and helped us to come up with a good idea for our sound journey.

The new idea we have now is alot better now with having a city atmosphere which then leads in to an earthquake and then finally a nature atmosphere.

Week 2 Final Crit 

In the final crit for the sound design unit i got feedback regarding my final piece, the feedback was mostly good as we used only sounds we had recorded our selfs the only negatives where that some people did not get that it was an earthquake happening.

The sounds we used ranged from a recording of the birds early in the morning to cars and throwing chairs down. We tried lots of different ways to make earthquake sounds and combined them all in soundtrack pro.

After hearing feedback on the previous friday about how our idea sounded cliche, there was no mention after we changed it around and added a natural disaster. One way i think we could of improved our work was if we used a different variety of sounds as we mostly used items in a kitchen and some chairs and lockets banging.

Group 6 stop motion animation

On the first day when we started animation we each drew and storyboard of our own and pitched it to our group. Mine was about a cartoon cat who tries to fix things but ends up failing most of the time. I was influence mostly by animations i like to sometimes watch like Futurama and Adventure Time. Once everyone in my group had pitched there idea we went with one where it was a person looking into a picture book and everyone in the group started putting ideas forward on where to go with this. The idea changed a lot of the course of the day and every time we would have crit about our ideas we would get rid of the stuff which didn't work and try to add and expand on the stuff that did.

We finally came up with the idea about a fly trying to find his "paradise" but before we reached that idea we went though numerous including having a book coming alive and eating the fly like a flytrap and the book sucking the fly in to a strange world showing the chain of evolution. Seeing those ideas it was quite obvious what we thought worked and what didn't as some of it was either to boring or to ambitious for a 30 second animation. 

Once we had the main idea set we went around changing and adding things to it including the fly being hit outside, removing some scenes in the storyboard so we could expand on others and changing what we would use for the stop motion to make it easier. 

The next day we started drawing the assets we would use in our film, i think we worked really well in doing this as we all had the same idea on what the end goal would be which defiantly helped us to work better as a team. We got the best drawers to draw the actual characters like the fly and the cat and the rest of us took to drawing extra things which would be in the the background like windows, drinks, fans, tables and many other things. 

On the First day of filming we ran in to a huge problem which set us back a day when our save file for our project came corrupt because of this we had to come in the next day and reshot everything we had already done which was annoying. The day after when we all came in again it felt a lot easier as we all knew what to do right from the start and we did things better than what we had in the original so it actually turned out to be a good thing losing our work. 

Things i thought worked well in the group was definitely our team work as we all got along and did things that needed to be done, we also managed to get everything drawn and ready for the next day all in one day so when it came to filming we did not have to waste anytime getting things ready. Some other things which worked well was everyone bringing a different perspective to the group so we would know if something was not as good as we thought and also the sounds and effects added by jack made the animation come to life even more which was great.

Some of the things that did not work so well was probably just the fact we lost our original save file as the rest of the project went really smoothly and losing our original save file went from a negative to a positive as we made a really good short animation in the end.

Overall animation was something i did not expect to enjoy but really did in the end, theres something great about seeing something you have worked on for days come to life when you start to play back what you have got. So lastly here is the final animation we which did.

The final animation.

People in my group:
Jack
Nima
Eliz
David
Ina
Me

V&A Memory Palace

V&A Gallery

Going to the V&A was  great,  i had been there a few times before but i had been a few years since i was last there. The day started with everyone meeting at the Serpentine Gallery which was a very impressive piece of architecture which gave me an idea to start of my sketchbook. 

                                        The Serpentine                       First page of my sketchbook 

After a good half an hour at the Serpentine i went down to the V&A Gallery. Quite a lot of the pieces on show had not changed since the last time but the recommended rooms in the handbook gave me the opportunity to see what i had not the last time i was there. I started with "making it up: photographic  fictions" In this exhibition it is a showcase of photographers creating stories though the medium of photography. Some of the pieces dating back to the 19th century created by people such as Julia Margret Camron and Oscar Gustav Reilander and more recently pieces by Hannah Starkey.

                                                        The Couch (Hannah Starkey 1997)

The Memory Palace 

the memory palace was a really unexpected surprise, i had never been to an exhibition where it tells a story as you go though it. A quick summary of the memory palace its about a man living in the aftermath of a black out, he is imprisoned for trying to keep knowledge alive as he believes its the only way to move forward and rebuild, but other people who are leaders of the new society have created a ban on any information as they believe it was information that caused the blackout in the first place. The protagonist is imprisoned for knowing all of this information and creates a memory palace in his cell where he stores all the different pieces of information. Thought out the exhibition you are introduced to lots of new terms which are used to describe events  like "the withering" and "the wilding"  the withering is used to describe the event which caused the blackout and the wilding is used to describe how some people believe that humanity will become extinct and the world will return to being wild. 

Some of the best moments in the Memory Palace was seeing how people interpreted worlds like internet, hospitals and recycling. You are shown that the people of this world believe the the word internet means source of information so the protagonist is frequently called a internet throughout the story. Other examples are when the protagonist is trying to put together pieces and find out more information on the old world but does not quite get it, hospitals he believes are carts pulled by four foxs that go around looking to help people and that recycling was a religious practice. 

 Here are two pictures of the protagonists interpretation of a hospital 

A museum 

There where more things in the exhibit that i could not get pictures of and one of them was probably my favourite of them all, a picture of a periodic table where in the middle all the chemicals where falling out of place and being lost which i guess was to represent the information being lost over time.