Tuesday 29 September 2009

Comparing the two..













In this shot we focused on the camera and the
mise en scène-
in particular, where each element was placed in the scene.
As we can see, Juno is on the right side of the screen, with
her body facing forwards and looking left. She is also in the
middle of a house in the background and there is a road in
front of her. The titles are centered, and to the left of the screen.
The action of the scene is her taking a swig of sunny delight.
These are the parts of the shot I feel that we have managed to
replicate to the best of our ability. We also got as close as we could
to getting that lamp post in the background by using a tree instead.
Also, in the setting we were in, this was the only place we could get
a clear camera shot of the road without going out of bounds.



Monday 28 September 2009

Feedback

there is still work missing! Even when you are away it should be possible to do most of the tasks- it all counts towards the marks! Please catch up the work

Juno Opening scene- Recreated




At the beginning of this project we were shown the original
Juno opening scene and started
noting down all the camera shots we could see
and talked about the effects. In our group (me,
Alison, Alex and Tom B) we started to construct a
timeline to show the length of each clip showing
screen grabs of each one.


When we went to Coleridge we began shooting our
opening scenes. I was taught to use the
cameras and had the role of using it for each shot.
Originally I has a few ambitious ideas for how
to achieve the camera angles which weren't possible
due to the expensive equiptment- Such as
climbing a tree for the helicopter shots. However, despite
this we managed to recreate the scene as
well as possible. The props were also a challenge, such as
finding a guitar and putting guitars in a window. I asked the
music teacher to borrow these and we found reasonable
substitutes for some props such as the sunny delight bottle-
we simply used a water bottle.


Unfortunately I was ill the day we were supposed
to edit the film, but the other's in my group managed to do the job
well, and it was not my role to edit anyway.
However, one thing that should have been in our opening
scene was the little animation clip which I created
in Blender 3d (which is shown and explained below).
I also made a shadowplay logo in photoshop
which would have gone well with the beginning to match the
real version.

Once we did have an issue with the props. At one point,
Instead of carrying the sunny delight (in our case
it was a water bottle), Juno appears to be carrying
pieces of paper. Unfortunately we did not realise this until it
got to the editing stage and our project was coming to a close,
otherwise we would have reshot the scene.



Monday 21 September 2009

Juno Walking



After watching the opening sequence of Juno and being told we will start to recreate the opening sequence to the film, I decided at home to practice my animation in Blender 3d, I made the head shape first by creating a sphere and using the sculpt tool. I also sculpted the neck into this and added a face with the vertex paint tool- Though in this video the face is not visible.

I made the shirt by adding a cube and forming the torso shape then subdividing, extruding then sculpting the shape. I made the shirt red to distinguish Juno's character, then did the same for legs and made then blue like the jeans.

For the hair I selected the area around the back of the head, seperated the vertices and then duplicated them and joined them to the head again. to the new object I sized it up and made it merge into the head, then I inflated the back for the ponytail.

Feedback

Really good neatly organised clear posts which explain things well. A very good start for your blog as evidence of your work.

Pete

Friday 18 September 2009

Our task was to create a pie chart for an aspect of our lives, based on Craig Robinson's 'Personal Pies'. I first wondered why we couldn't just talk about our lives rather than showing them visually. Now I realise that this is a record for later reflection. The first pie chart represents periods in my life I have chosen different favorite animals. I made this in Keynote.

In conclusion I realised that mostly my favorite animal has been a Lemur, and at points it has changed to owl, dragons or llamas, but has always returned.

Thursday 17 September 2009

What I thought about Kiwi

The opening scene for Kiwi (after the yellow title), shows a flightless animated bird I'm particularly interested in the camera shots in this scene, starting with a camera shot as if the camera was on the ground, sowing the bird's legs and partly its beak. The music starts out with a very bouncy feel, and the bird is designed to look very cute and loveable, through the big eyes, the way he moves and struggles with what he's doing tumbling over himself. This also represents the bird as helpless, as if the fact he has no wings makes the bird disabled. Dispite this, the bird is determined with his task. At one point a tree is shown at the centre of the screen, with sky in the background as always (daytime, contrasts with yellow bird, shows height). The bird runs in from the left and runs some rope or wire around the tree and leaps through it to tie a knot and lands on the floor. This shows us how clever this bird really is and doesn't mind hurting himself (landing on the floor) to fulfill is dream of flying.

Kiwi- A student film

Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Film Openings

I went to look at various film openings on YouTube and found three which interested me. First I looked at the Lord of the Rings opening scene, which I had seen before and which mainly narrates the story as if it was read from a book, and supports it using the visual film. Then I watched the opening scene for Soul Calibur IV which of course is animated as it's a game. This allows for it to use a lot of unrealistic actions and effects to emphasise the power of the weapons it revolves around.

The main one that caught my attention was the opening scene for the Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The first thing we see here is a centered title with a date in a font that suits that time period. Then we see a very misty scene where we vaguely see a castle and a hill, and along with the music we can hear what sounds like a horse. This disorientates the audience for a while before the scene comes into focus, the director probably decided to do this for suspense and to help us believe that the man is on a horse. Soon we find out that this is a man with coconuts making the sound with a companion. The rest of the scene is a conversation between this man and a guard about them. I like how the simple idea has been focused on throughout the starting scene, and there is not a lot to distract the audience so they can't miss the joke. They also mention that this is Arthur, from the legend, and uses humor along with this to show that it'll be a parody of the character.

Final Cut

At the beginning of this session we were given an audio soundtrack and a number of video clips to work with in Final Cut, and shown how to do the basic tools required to construct a video in the program.

Me and Louis first dragged the clips and audio we liked into the timeline and made the film clips fade into each other by editing the points and overlapping them in different layers. Then we shortened the clips as some were too long to run smoothly and stay interesting. We also asked how to change the speed of the clip and made some 150% of their normal speeds. I added some titles and added an animation to them so they seemed to zoom around the screen.

We then experimented some more with the audio and, whilst playing around with the rewind tools, decided that it went more with the video when it was reversed. So we reversed the sound.

Postcard design













This is the final result from me experimenting in photoshop to create a postcard for a client.

I started by getting the two images from flickr and opening them into photoshop. I dragged them into the same file after setting the dimentions for postcard size. Then I erased the background of the camera image using the magic wand tool, and flipped horizontally to make it face the spring.

I used the dodge tool to lighten the colour on the camera and then used a transparent brush on it, changing the colours to createe a gradient rainbow effect. I added the 'Chalk and Charcoal' filter to the spring image in the background because it caught my eye and seemed like a photograph that would be taken by the camera.

I then added text, rasterized it and then added blending options to it by clicking the layer twice. I made them glow in yellow, similar to a light bulb to advertise the course and how 'enlightening' it will be.

Wednesday 16 September 2009

Tuesday 15 September 2009

Mood board! :)


this mood board was made for the film shifty.
Taken from various magazines and newspapers.
The mood board has many connotations to represent different aspects of the film.

The birds represent the freedom theme in the scene, or lack of it. The person in the car still in particular (shown in the centre of the mood board) has no choice but to follow along and risk being in trouble for no reason.

The tattoo and the word 'culture' go together as this is a culture of underground society. There are various faces around which are showing emotions such as anger (the black and white photo) and fear (in the black and white cartoon).

Saturday 5 September 2009