WEEK 10: LIVE ACTION FILMING AND ENVIRONMENT MODELLING

25 June 2016

Live action
Our live action film was completed in the span of 2 days, special thanks to Isabel's group and Celine for being our supporting monsters.  I played as Stan, Roxann as Ting Ting, Alvin as Jun and Priyanka is all the side characters.

Unlike other teams we didn't borrow the video camera from upstairs and used our phones instead. Probably because none of us knows how to operate a video camera and to be honest, the last time I've seen a video camera was in 2005. It's really amazing how technology has evolved and the old gadgets are so foreign to me.

Filming was pretty fun, as we filmed, we change some compositions as well. I didn't expect it to be so draining and it was pretty cute that our whole team would unanimously stone when we were tired.

Overall, I have no regrets joining this team and I am blessed to have such good friends. :)

Environment Modelling

This module has been stressing me out this whole entire holiday, and it was very hard distributing work and scheduling so that we can hand up on time. This assignment i felt very alone and had to be very independent.We only had 1 lesson before the break to show Borko our research. He suggested ways to do the environment modelling and off we go on our own. It was hard to consult Borko and I can't complain because this is probably what the working world is like.

Thanks all for this week! Next in 2 days schools starting, hope I don't burn out by then.

WEEK 10 : holidays are over?! Was it even here?

24 June 2016

HOW DID IT TURN OUT LIKE THIS? I've spent most of my holidays having meetings and doing homework. I guess this is the life of a third year student, applying all your knowledge onto your final year project. Sigh pies...

Redoing animatics:
From what we previously discussed last week, Roxann, the Notural Superwoman, did a new animatic for us in just 2 days. I was really amazed with her skills and motivation to do it.

We sent the New story to Karen via email, and had Phil and Jim look at both our animatics. Again all views were different, which was expected. They were all very constructive and I'm glad we asked them instead of just going with it.

Karen
She agreed that the new story follows the storyline and moral of our story. However she finds it seemed more bland and predictable, she gave us suggestions on how to improve if we are using the old story.

Phil
Liked both versions and also says the new version depicts our story clearer. He gave us suggestions on how to improve our compositions and showed us old films to inspire us, because we didn't have a fixed ending. I learned a lot more about John Carpenter , The master of horror, his films are ingenious. I've found appreciation for old films, the stories are more creative and special effects are more memorable then today's computerise effects.

Jim
Prefers the old animatic, says it has more of a story compared to the new one. He proved to us that we were overthinking everything and brought a year 2 student to view our animatic. I nervously watched her watch our creation. She said it was not bad, which was a relieve. Thank god!

Our resolution:
It became clear to us that: Yes, we did overthink. So we decided to make slight adjustments to our old animatic which i think was a great idea as i didn't like the fact that our story changed so much. After that we went on to filming the live action version.

Group dynamics: 

WEEK 9 : The holidays

20 June 2016

ITS FINALLY THE HOLIDAYS!!! not...
The 2 precious week of break is used to catch up on all the CPD work and to finish up my assignments for 3AP, 3EM and 3CR. Wonder why all the modules with a 3 in it is ruining my holidays. :(

I went overseas from Monday - Thursday, but i didn't feel relaxed at all, work was always on my mind, anticipating the huge workload waiting for me at home. I started modelling the environment as well as rendering of the sketches during my trip in Malaysia.

Here are the work that i did:

Group Meetings: 
On Friday, our group met up to discuss about the live action filming that we are suppose to complete over the holidays. But instead we talked about our animatic and story. We had people outside our group to comment on our animatics and most of them were very lost as we seems to have 3 agendas in this film; Love story, discrimination, Self acceptance. It was very confusing.

I showed my group mates the video that i found of Zootopia as i found it very inspirational. The initial story is a complete 360 from the story that they have now. From this our group decided to alter our story a little bit. Its a risky move but i think we might be able to do it.

Group Dynamics

On Saturday we had another meeting, we had a few disagreements, mainly because we didn't want to sway too far giving us too much work. i predict the second week of holidays will be more work intensive. FIGHTING! 

WEEK 8: Exams, to perservere

10 June 2016

ASSIGNMENT 1s HAVE FINALLY ENDED! *confetti*

A summary of what happen this week, we had common test for DCG and 3AP , while completing the other modules assignment 1. I prioritise my exams more than my CPD work. It was make it or break it.

Exams: 

i found the exams to be quite a challenge as in the course we hardly did examinations and i was afraid because of the lack of experience. The 2 papers were very different, the DCG paper was more theory based while 3AP was more application.

For DCG i studied for it so it wasn't that hard , though there were some tricky questions. Whereas 3AP, if you have a rough knowledge of the syllables and a lot of common sense you can ace it, sadly i didn't have that. I didn't even notice there was an error in that paper until my classmates told me about it after the exam, so my answer may be irrelevant.

Other subjects: 

During our modelling class, we are beginning to model our FYP environments and we must complete it by the end of our holidays. I really had to wreck my brain and go through all my old notes, we really went back to basics.

In CPD class, I've edited all the environments line art as we had to make all the environments more monster incooperated. I had lots of fun creating posters for our film, i left get to sneakily add stuff into our film; "make monster great again". We showed Karen our 2nd animatic before we move on to our live action filming and she said it was ok and we should suggested that we change several parts but overall the comments were helpful and good.

Here are some sketches that I did:

Research for new building design inspiration

WEEK 7 : Calm waters , Redemptions

3 June 2016

Feeling of the week :

credit Priyanka for this funny idea

This week compared to previous weeks was more calming compared to previous weeks. We probably have gotten use to CPD. From the previous week we discussed on Karen's comments and decide to edit our storyboard, the edit were quite major as we will be adding scenes and changing a few things.
She also commented on the environment so we decided to change those as well.

Teachers comments: 

Phil and Jim
On Tuesday, Jim and Phil met our group and commented on our animatic and concept designs.
He thought our animatic was really clear and suggested that we research more on racism and black history to enhance our establishing shot of our monster world.
Jim commented on how the environment didn't look like its inhabited by monsters and suggested we look at how Zootopia designed their environment.

Karen
On Wednesday, She gave us roughly the same comments, she questioned the world they lived in and said that the characters should have more features so that the environment would have more elements to play with.

Action taken this week: 

 Phil showed us a video on how the black were treated in the past, it was really inhumane. From there we finalised the world that they lived in. I also think that our group dynamics have improved as we no longer work separately. We don't only do the work assigned to but we help each other out. I am weak at choosing appropriate colours for the environment so alvin did some rough sketches with colours for me to follow. That was sweet of him. Karen told the whole class that we must hand in an animatic next week, though it's Roxann's job we decided to spilt the load because it's too much for her to handle.

Sketch:

Team Dynamic:
I'm really happy that we are getting use to each other and are being more helpful and honest. Let's keep up the good work!

week 7 : What to do with your film after making it

2 June 2016

On Thursday, we had a talk by Tan Fong Cheng ,  She's Zhao Wei Films film producer, on film marketing and after production activities. I was very interested in this as I take business diploma plus to learn about these stuff.

She told us the cold hard truth that short films rarely gets turned into films. Advising us to not invest too much money and the purpose of a short film is to enhance my portfolio. There are exceptions of course (district 9 etc).

She suggest that we enter as many short film competitions as possible. There we can gain recognition and mingle with film directors to promote ourselves and the film. She also reminded us about pitching skills that its really important to seem confident as they won't buy if you are uncertain about your project.

She also talked about Singapore's market and told us to dream big.
Aim for your film to be viewed as far as Europe.

This talk is basically about business and how invested you want to be in your project after creating the film. The talk was very informative and also quite helpful. At first I didn't know of ways to promote our films and how films are sold to theatres.
However during the Q and A I was unsure of what to ask as I'm not very well versed in the business and marketing sector and when she talked about distributors and all those technical terms i was quite lost. I would like to take up classes in Arts business management as it could also be a future career prospect.