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