piebear

Client Project

2011-11-19T08:05:00.000-08:00

After a discussion with Danny about my client project, I have decided that the D&AD "international peace day" is not the project for me. I hadn't really given much thought to the phrase "international day of recognition". I feel this brings up some problems. First of all, if a non-english speaking person is watching my film, they would be at a total loss, so I'd have to go about making a film that either contains all languages or none. I could of course include people from all over the world and subtitle them, but I feel this project is just too large to take on and still complete to a decent standard.

Here are some ideas I'm exploring:

I saw a few briefs for the YCN competition that looked fairly interesting.

http://awards.ycnonline.com/

http://awards.ycnonline.com/briefs/view/the-feel-good-drinks-company/

This company sounds quite good. From what I've read their drinks are fairly healthy (at least in comparison to the alternatives) and so I think I wouldn't have any problem finding motivation to work on something like this. However, the brief states:

"Do consider all types of new and traditional media, including on-pack and even point of sale if you want to. You may also have noticed that we’re big fans of digital, spending time with our Facebook and Twitter families and spreading our message virally."

I think this would probably be a problem, as producing something that is both appealing to the viral audience and of a length suitable for basing my final project on is very difficult.

Research project

2011-11-16T16:31:00.000-08:00

"How has technology changed the opportunities for a social documentary maker over the last ten years?"

Here is the research question I have finalized. At the moment it feels incredibly daunting, as it seems that there are so many different things I can take into account, I'm hoping that what research I've done and will do will help me to shape a narrative to the project, as at the moment I feel a little direction-less.

However, I do have a great interest in the subject, and have an opaque idea of how to go about shaping the answer to my question. At the moment I think a good place to start would be with "current affairs" style news shows, such as Panorama, 60 minutes, Real Story and others. Though labelled as "current affairs news", the actual shows themselves are very much like documentary film. Working on a production of this sort could be appealing to a documentary film maker; however getting to the stage where you are able to do so takes years of work and, I imagine, a fair bit of luck. I want to luck further into these, and further into other documentary opportunities available to film-makers back in 2001 and try to show how these narrow openings have widened as technology has improved and increased in affordability.

I looked into Ofcom too. The wikipedia article describes ofcom as "the government-aproove regulatory authority for the broadcasting and telecommunications industries in the United Kingdom." and lists their responsibilities as "wide-ranging, covering all types of industries and processes. It has a statutory duty to the interests of citizens and consumers by promoting competition, and protecting consumers from what might be considered harmful or offensive material." This is clearly pertinent to my research, as compliance with Ofcom is necessary to have your work viewed on British television.

The growth of the internet is also going to be another huge factor in improving opportunities for documentary makers, as it provides a platform outside regulatory bodies like Ofcom from censoring or shaping your work, and allows people without the CV to work on something like Panorama to have their work viewed by possibly an even larger audience than you'd get with panorama. I'd like to look into viewing figures back in 2001 too, to see the sort of following these sorts of shows had (and what they have now).

As far as I can see, the releasing of content online has many bonuses for the audience too. For one, if there's something you don't understand in a documentary, you have the ability to rewind and watch over it again, or perhaps pause, do some research on something perhaps they don't understand, and --importantly-- to have an absolutely huge resource for checking the facts being shown. I imagine this must put much more of an onus on the creator to be absolutely critically accurate and honest, as you stand a much bigger chance of having your work criticized if it contains inaccuracies. In 2001, if panorama released a documentary that had inaccuracies in it, it could be investigated internally, apologies exchanged or diciplinary action maybe, but there wouldn't be much worldwide discussion of it (as there is now). It is left in the hands of the government to control and regulate that content. If a documentary is released online that contains inaccuracies, not only are there millions of possible fact checkers to point them out, but people are actually able to discuss and share ideas they have about the documentary with eachother online, in comments sections and blogs. Without the internet you could pretty much talk about it with the people in the room, and that's as far as it can go.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Documentaries

This is a subsection of a website I visit often called reddit.com. Documentaries hosted online can be posted there by anyone, and with each user granted the ability to either vote "up" or "down" once on things they see, which allows the most popular content to be at the top of the page and seen by everyone. If a documentary is known to be inaccurate or misleading, it is downvoted and hardly seen at all. I believe this is an excellent system, and given the community itself is made up of millions of users with a combined knowledge of a vast number of subjects content is scrutinized heavily and honestly. Comments on the content there can be upvoted or downvoted too, so if a user claims a documentary is terrible, or inaccurate, when it's actually good and accurate, that comment will be downvoted, and users can see it is probably a bad comment (and have the ability to go online and check for themselves if what they are saying is true).

Anyway, this is all very vague, and I need to begin looking in depth into these areas and more to see if my preconceptions are accurate or not.

2011-11-15T21:03:00.000-08:00

Here I've collected together some images from works I've specifically created. I am a little concerned, as they show a rather broad spectrum of work, and I don't know weather or not this would make me seem perhaps a little directionless. I'm going to look over more of my work tommorow and see if I can get anything better, and to try to get my five images together. I think a valuable thing to do would be to contact a few potential employers (Through various projects I've a number I could contact) and maybe setup a short meeting to put a few carefully thought out questions as to what they'd like to see. It'd probably be a good idea to transcribe it and put it up on here, I imagine a few other students would appreciate reading it.

Something a few of the pictures here contain that I particularly like is the presence of both movement and static elements to the image. The contrast I feel exaggerates the two, both of which are visually interesting to me. I imagine it'll definitely make an appearance in the final five images I choose.

Client project

2011-11-14T21:59:00.000-08:00

http://www.dandad.org/awards/student/2012/categories/1/open-brief

This is the "open brief" brief of the D&AD student award that I hope to use for my client project.

The brief reads:

Peace Day is an annual call for global amnesty, and together with Peace One Day, we want you to make Peace Day an international day of recognition - and impossible to ignore. Go on, be a creative activist - your idea really can change the world.

Now who wouldn't want to do that?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/jun/22/libya-war-cost-uk-200m

Here is some anti-peace that is being done in the name of every citizen in the UK, and we all have a responsibility and ability to halt it. I believe the citizens of this country are, like nearly all human beings innately peaceful, and do not want war. What I'd like to be able to do is show people how truly powerful they are when working together to achieve political change. A good area to research would be the recent Occupy protests happening around the world and, of course, in relation to Libya, the Arab spring.

Unfortunately I've been extremely busy this week, and hardly had much time to think of ideas about how to actually go about accomplishing my goal, but I'll get a solid idea soon.

Context 3

2011-11-14T20:32:00.000-08:00

Had a go at writing my fifty words for my part in the exhibition booklet.

I am a self facilitating media geyser. I have immersed myself deeply within the creative economy and dedicated my entire life to learning the tools of whatever trade I'm using to express myself. I have a dream and a vision, and I will make all of them come true before your very eyes.

It has an MLK reference in it so if you don't like it you're racist.

Back to reality: this is terrible. But it was an interesting exercise. We read through a lot of the exhibition booklets, and one thing I noticed that didn't appeal to me was the amount of pictures they'd included of themselves either on set or (WORSE) sat at a PC. I seriously don't understand what they think a potential employer would think of it besides "this person wants to look like they are working".

I will not be including any photos like that, I think I'd rather just show any potential employers what I've actually done rather than what I looked like whilst I was doing it.

Two Questions

2011-11-09T11:03:00.001-08:00

Research Project:

I've come up with two possible questions for my research project:

1. How have the development of social media platforms changed social documentaries over the last ten years.

I want to try to make my research project around the area of documentary, and I have a keen interest in social documentaries, and believe that the internet has opened up new pathways for it to be filmed and viewed. I thought there would be a few interesting ideas to explore, like how low-budget documentaries hosted on vimeo can differ in style/content/subject from documentaries produced for somewhere like channel four, and why that is so.

2. How well has 3D cinema coped at integrating itself with mainstream cinema

This is probably very poorly worded, but I basically want to look at how well 3D cinema has made the transition from novelty to legitimacy. I'd question the public's current opinion on it to find out weather or not 3D cinema is actually viewed as a novelty or as legitimate cinema.

After receiving some feedback I'm going to begin exploring the first question, mainly because I think I'll be able to include one of my heroes Noam Chomsky in my research. He has spoken critically of the mainstream media for a long time, and the effect of big money on choice of coverage has been long established, and I believe recently the emergence of Vimeo and Youtube has changed this. It's so much easier to choose the content you watch, so the audience is no longer as much constrained in what they watch by major media outlets. From my own experience I believe this has led to more controversial subjects being covered that would have otherwise gone ignored. There are a plethura of anti-establishment, anarchic, utopian, religious or anti-religious documentaries that, ten years ago, may not have been made were there not such a fantastic way of getting your content out there, cheaply.

http://www.amazon.com/Manufacturing-Consent-Political-Economy-Media/dp/0375714499

Here is one of Chomsky's most famous books that has an absolutely fantastic amount of information about the main stream media and their coverage [or lack there]of various controversial subjects (i.e Indonesia's invasion of East-Timor, Vietname War, COINTEL PRO)

Danny asked for some artefacts I'd do about this question, and how. From what I know, our artefacts are supposed to evolve from one another, so I need to come up with one I'd like to start with, so I basically have to ask myself "what do you want to know". I was thinking perhaps a questionnaire, so I can find out exactly what type of person watches social documentary presently, and how they do it. One fact I need to take into account is that, ten years ago, anyone under the age of 25 is going to have been, at most, 15 years old. So whereas I don't want to discount them, I will take it into account when assessing the data. This is obviously research, and not an experiment, but I think it would still be useful to do.

I am working on artefacts.

I'd like to know first of all

Behind the scenes cut together

2011-04-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

So me and Laura managed to make this little thing happen, DVD of the entire performance (might look for a way to get it online, too) will be available soon.

It was a lot of fun to make, though the sound problems that the mic caused in breaking down are very obvious unfortunately. Oh well, made the best I could of it. Had a good time making it, and made a few friends whilst I was at it too. One of which was THIS PERSON

That's one of the most awesome things I've seen in ages! She wants to do a film about hula hooping--I was like, YES. So keep em peeled, minions.

One great big post

2011-04-20T14:03:00.000-07:00

Well, where to start? How about a run down of everything, this one could be a scorcher.

Got a project on the go at the moment for some of the fashion students who are doing a show in June, for which they first need a promo, which I'll do as well. Went for a few meetings with two of the girls with it to discuss ideas and dates(as in the ones on a calendar), and they've landed on the idea for travelling from one building to the other (bonnington to Waverley, I believe) with light streaks interacting with the environment, so I'm going to get working on a demo of what I think they might like and ship it over to them, we'll see.

Week at ASOS!

www.asos.com

So I went for a week long internship at ASOS fashion house in London, the building was very impressive.

On my first day they I was just set up with a guy called Treve who is the head of AV at ASOS, he had me a mac set up and just started by going through Final Cut Pro with me, helping to transition over from Adobe Premiere, which I found not to be too difficult, and I very quickly started seeing the benefits of using a mac.

It only took one day there to realise that I really am going to have to get a macbook pro at some point, and as soon as possible. First of all, every piece of creative work there was done on a mac and on final cut pro, someone trying to use premiere and to work there would just be completely useless, they had such systematic methods of punching out content very quickly that everyone has to be as efficient as possible. Secondly, Treve was saying how useful mac's are to have on set, as you can import and even edit whilst you wait in between breaks, maximizing the work you get done in the time you work. They are also apparently incredibly durable and very powerful, and so my heart is set on it.

So he had me going through a huge batch of behind-the-scenes footage he'd taken on his Canon 7D for some fashion event (I never asked what it was) for footage that was usable, and he had me grouping them into different bins--a really good idea. It actually allowed you to have an overall direction for the cut you're going to do, so for instance he'd have 'people coming in', then 'people chattting/looking at the clothes' then finally 'people leaving, finishing'. I really liked this non-linear method of editing, the ability to create an overall edit with constantly the same feel (rather than having it change as you go through it, second by second).

The next day we took the tube down to another building where ASOS where having a exhibition of all of their winter line of clothing. It was all being set up (crews building various sets and things) and we went there to check out some cameras Treve had set up for some time lapse footage of everything going up, and they were fine, so we replaced their batteries and left them to carry on. After that he showed me all around the ASOS building, where they do various things (make-up, marketing, modelling, editing etc) really interesting and extremely lively.

When it came to the actual exhibition I made sure to get down especially early, and we set about filming various things around the day on Treve's 7D camera. Treve also had a huge projection looping an edit he'd done on a big white wall of some of the models trying on the winter clothing line, it looked really nice.

Here's some photographs of the event I took on my phone:

It was really awesome, the free food was good too! There was many many people from ASOS there, and also lots of press, even from magazines abroad who'd flown in just to see it. We were interviewing and filming all day (with me on sound) And then near the end Treve left to go back to the ASOS building to get started on an edit and left me in charge of all the equipment, and interviewing people, which was pretty rad. We were filming the interviews on a sony EX1, and the footage just looked gorgeous. After that I sort out all the equipment and took the tube back to ASOS to drop off the memory cards to Treve.

The day after that Treve was super, super busy so he left me in the care of film guys downstairs called Oliver, Tony and unfortunately I can't remember the name of the last guy, but anyway, I talked to them a bit about what it is I do in Nottingham, what it is I want to do and so on, and found that they actually worked freelance for ASOS, which was pretty neat. Anyway, so I got to film models going up and down the catwalk, and with the camera directly hooked up to Tony's mac, he was able to edit it straight away. It was amazing, they had a really systematic way of doing it. Tony would record, then send it to one of the other editors, or keep it on his mac and edit it himself. He had a sequence in place with four different tracks, one of which he'd choose to unmute and use for the model. Everything was really, really neatly organized on his mac, so there was never any confusion, and he was always in contact with the other two editors at all times through iChat (I think it's called that) which they also used to send files. I really learned a lot that day, it was a shame it had to end early as all the ASOS staff had to go down to this huge internal talk given by some guy high up in the company about their strategy for the year ahead, and to look at the clothes. Treve went along to this though, and took some footage.

When he got back, he set me the task of sifting through all the footage he took and using the method I was taught before, of getting all the good shots, then splitting all the footage up into different bins. I did "interviews" "people coming in" "the talk (obviously just a camera on a tripod watching the talk) then "people walking around looking at the clothes. He then knew that internal were going to want an edit of the footage he took, but didn't have the exact brief yet, so he got me to do an edit of the people coming in, then one of the talk (just plonked in a timeline really with two fades) and then an edit of the people looking at things. Here they are:

Edit of people coming in

Edit of people looking at things:

Then finally we got the brief, and it was for a 30 second cut, showing people coming in, then around 8 seconds of the talk (just to show there was a talk) then about 10 seconds of people looking around. So this was actual work! So I did this final cut:

And that was that! It was really sweet to do, knowing that I was actually capable of doing actual work they couldn't just pay anyone £5/hr to do. Anyway, it was one of the best weeks of my life. I want to move to London so badly. I talked so much to Treve (who is a super awesome guy, by the way, one of my heros haha) about work, about getting first jobs, where to look, what to do. He really drove home the importance of macs, but he seemed to mostly think I was on the right track with what I'm doing, just doing everything I can to learn as much as possible. Ha he even gave me an ASOS memory stick as a parting present. After that I went out with my friends from London and got absolutely wrecked, ended up losing my phone, which was so, so embarassing. Mong. Anyway, I am in love with London, and I want to get working as soon as possible.

In other news, I got contact by my friend Andrew, who is an actor who helped me out a lot in various acting roles for my films, and so when he asked me to come film his play I jumped at the chance. I also offered to film behind the scenes stuff, maybe to help promote the drama society for students. Plus, I'm sure everyone involved would enjoy it too, and I really wanted to do everything I could, as Andrew has been a huge help. I spoke to Laura about it, and she was dead excited, so we formed an awesome alliance of thieves, and we went in today to shoot their rehearsals sessions and get some interviews with various people. Laura is extremely smart, and probably has the most creative mind I've encountered from absolutely anyone since coming to Nottingham. We're going in tommorow to film the actual play (two performances, one at the theatre, one outside somewhere, not sure where, and hopefully get more interviews. She's also helping me film a job for a company called Kaplan (teacher tuition videos) on the same day! So it'll be a really busy day, hopefully we can get it all done. Here are some stills from footage we took today:

Onwards

Show Reel 03/11

2011-03-23T13:53:00.001-07:00

Title sequence for Robyn Hood

2011-03-20T13:33:00.001-07:00

Short documentary I filmed today

2011-03-01T14:48:00.000-08:00

Paul Smith spring/summer collection from william on Vimeo.

Started a script

2010-11-18T19:14:00.000-08:00

Someone asked for this, so here it is.

http://rapidshare.com/files/431500767/Work_for_Idle_Hands.pdf

Planned on entering a competition for a 5 page script. 6 pages in introduced two characters and no story. Oh well, enjoy.

2010-11-03T18:49:00.001-07:00

watched some wonderful films lately. Psycho

Wonderful performances, chilling music and at points nauseating fear. Fantastic.

Took it to heart whilst coming up with ideas fo our group project. Absolutely love our group. Uri is extremely talented at directing, but he's excelled at his role as producer. We recently went to a recce on location to check it out, to which he transported everyone, overlooked everything that was going on, keeping in contact with all members of the cast to relay ideas and things amongst one another, and today turned up with everything he could possibly get that we'd need for our presentation tommorow, on a number of sheets, in a clear and precise way. Me and Keiron spent a lot of time together (nothing romantic but he was rock hard the entire time) discussing not only basic concepts and ideas for our film, but also films in general. He is a very smart person, with a lot of good ideas, and he definitely helped to work with me towards making the script actually work 'as a script'. In that, it was a story, instead of just some interesting things happening. Vyte (not sure how to spell her name, apologies) had some great ideas about art direction with me, we talked about the characters, how we wanted to make the shots look and things, and yesterday we spent about 3 hours storyboarding the film, and, as I said to Kieron, I wouldn't ever want to storyboard anything without her again. She is a fantastic artist and very good at understanding what ideas I express in my own barmy way, and of course has her own really great ideas. Looking forward to seeing what the project she's been keeping so secret looks like. I thought it was going to be a huge challenge to produce the film in the vision that I had for it, but with the help of this fantastic group I've put in I really think we can realise it. Hopefully we can express this together in our presentation tommorow.

Recent

2010-10-28T18:10:00.000-07:00

The fashion shoot at Hockleys went fairly well, I certainly learned a lot from it about how I'd do it if we could have a do-over. I would have loved to have another camera involved to break up what was perhaps a slightly drag-on of an edit, and I would definitely have been much more precise than I was with each and every model, even though I really made an effort, there were still some clips that were basically trash when we got to edit.

Feedback on the edit has been okay, not great, but I'm still very glad I did it. Emailed a few people about some stuff I'm going to get involved in

http://iseries.multiplay.co.uk/

hoping to cover this

Going to watch Psycho

Hockleys edit

2010-10-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

I love Hockleys! from william on Vimeo.

Did the edit yesterday, fairly pleased with it.

Pictures from work

2010-10-22T18:40:00.000-07:00

Thir-fucking-teen. Thirteen!

2010-10-20T19:39:00.000-07:00

Uni work:

Finished shoot on Monday for our MALAc film. We were able to begin shooting at 2:30, as we had all of the actors required for the shooting schedule I had written out for our group, however we didn't actually begin shooting until about 4:30pm, since not all of the props had been aquired. By this point, our actress had arrived and hence my shooting shedule made less sense, and we also were without a table, so I had to alter shots to acommodate this - I am pretty confident this is going to lead to a few complications and possibly a disaster when it comes to edit. However, everyone was trying to fulfil roles, which was great, and we have definitely emerged a stronger team and are much better prepared for when it comes to shooting our next scene as a group.

Lost my rag at one point, and resigned as director, shortly before returning to the role. A few things needed to be sorted out in our approach to shooting, but we confronted some of them and are better for it. All in all it was a very long day, but enjoyable.

Finished shoot for the Hockley fashion show tonight. It was fantastic fun. The models all looked absolutely fantastic, and were willing to help out with the occasional request I had. Jools' eyebrows surely at the roof of his head as he reads this saucyness. My man get your vile soul dry-cleaned. Uri was extremely professional for the entire evening, and I was very glad to work with him on the project. Got talking to a nice chinese girl whilst I was there who was selling raffle tickets, she asked if I was the boss, I told her I was the boss of Uri lol. At one point we were running low on card space, Uri actually caught a taxi to his and back just to get his card - what a star. For the next fashion shoot I get us to do I am going to bring a number of cards, and, even though I went along to rehearsals and thoroughly talked over the plans for the night with the people running it, the footage could have benefited with being even more maticulously attentive to detail in our preparation.

Got approached by a woman who ownes 'the charity shop' on Hockley st. who proposed a project for me to shoot some pictures for this aparently quite-big-deal designer in London, but I, grimacingly, had to decline, as I'm not a photographer, I would really only be useful for film. I didn't want to accept, do a bad job and get a bad name for myself, but I appreciated her interest.

After finishing I made sure to go around and thank all the people involved for the oppourtunity, I feel like I made some really great friends/contacts from it, CJ and Phil are waiting on my edit, as is the owner of the bar, Andy Dunn (he spent the entire night in the most stylish coat ever, he must have been a thousand degrees) Then we have this games launch on Friday, so I'll see how that goes. I still have no frigging idea where it is, despite going on a little explore on tuesday.

Two things I am currently focused on is obtaining a super 8 camera and taking some real sweet footage, and also taking some high-frame rate stuff of some models in a studio, for this Hockley cut I'm going to do. Asked around and aparently I don't have anything available immediately to me, however apparently there is some good kit in bonnington that will do exactly what I'm after, I imagine I'd have to fight tooth and nail to get my hands on that; luckily that's just what I intend to do.

drawing

Roboplegic wrong cock

2010-10-17T15:47:00.001-07:00

On my way home, saw buried today. After revcovering from the fit of laughter I suffered after hearing my friend ask if it was called barry, I enjoyed an absolutely wonderful film. Fantastic story that managed to address (if only in the mildest sense) america's foriegn affairs whilst managing to not only avoid presenting america as team justice lords of good and democracy, but also seemed to approach it from what I consider to be a more reality based perspective, namely by highlighting that there is an unbelievably vast distinction between what nearly everyone involved in the war thinks they are doing and what reasons they believe lie behind it, and what the tiny minority of elites are getting them to do, and what reasons lie behind that. This is in stark contrast to another film I saw recently called salt, in which you see an almost slapstick comedy presentation of american affairs (and the morality of anyome from the soviet union) that I only see parring woth command and conquer,

This is very far from anything resembling a theme, and was very mild in it's break from the generic rocky 4 remake, but it's certainly an approach that is so rare in western cinema that you wouldn't be too presumptuous to class it as it's own genre, and hopefully a growing one.

Many things about the film sparked for me, which I'd love to talk about if anyone wants to, but I just thought I'd make a post as this is a subject I feel ought to be talked about much more than it is. We live in a system of imposed morality, and I'd like to make it my goal to never compramise on my own ethics so as to fit more kindly within whatever system I end up in, or do whatever the writers of these bullshit justice leauge films do to get their crummy films into the cinema (which is I would guess either regurgitate modern consensus by either internalising the values when writing or to just be victims of the propeganda model we live in)

Anyway, best be off, need to fight the system in bobbersmill
Sent from my BlackBerry smartphone from Virgin Media

Uri

2010-10-16T16:24:00.000-07:00

Picture of uri at the hockley rehearsal. Look at him trying to work out what the hell is going on, also included my favourite photo ever.

Sent from my BlackBerry smartphone from Virgin Media

My way home

2010-10-16T13:30:00.000-07:00

Uploading this on my blackberry, hope it will work. I live in a fairly rough estate, although there is the occasional pretty sight

Sent from my BlackBerry smartphone from Virgin Media

mind shag

2010-10-16T12:54:00.000-07:00

Well that fashion show rehearsal went fairly well. I mingled and mangled quite a bit whilst I was there, talking to a fair few people. One of them was Phillip Campbell, who I had met origonally at Rundance, he was covering it as well, he seemed like a real interesting guy, and he owns a studio called Fibre Camp (http://fibreca.mp/), which he runs along with a woman called CJ, and I've made pretty good friends with them, in fact they were the ones to ask me if I'd like to cover the Hockley fashion show. Anyway, I put together an edit of what little test footage we took at the rehearsal

Hockleys Test Footage Cut from william on Vimeo.

Quite a bit took off since meeting Phil, he's a really cool guy. He also got me the thing covering The Bunker's launch night (website: http://bunker.fibreca.mp/), going down to his studio on monday to have a walk and talk about ideas for shooting it and things, he liked my edit of that test footage and said he'd like something in the same style. Oh, I showed it to the owner of Baa Bar as well, and he said it was awesome, and that he'd like to use the final cut to play on the tv screens at his bar, which is pretty rad. That got me thinking about ideas for it, I thought about perhaps getting a high framte-rate camera into the studio, along with some of the models from the event and get some good footage from that. My friend from ASOS uses that quite a bit for the videos he produces for them

Lisa (5D MKII) from Treve Jackson-Hicks on Vimeo.

for example. Anyway, Spoke for a long time to John Hallem about it, and he gave me the email address of a lecturer who might be able to help with getting hold of a high frame-rate camera, so we'll see what happens.

Phil also added me to Hockley Traders, and I have no idea what it is.

"projectswebmedia
You're invited to join Basecamp, our project management and collaboration system"

I looked on the website, and it just has a lot of dates with times of meetings and things. I'll find out what it is, maybe it's something good.

Been watching Jam a fair bit recently, a Chris Morris creation. Tempting to call him Christ morris, he's just that incredible. He makes everything look amazing, definitely one of my favourite directors.

Just look at this amazing scene. Beautiful use of music (an ending, ascent - classic Eno (Who, strangely, made this for another one of my heros, Carl Sagan (how many brackets are you allowed))) Wonderful framing and lighting, great script, everything about it just looks fantastic, I'd really, really love to meet Chris Morris one day.

update

2010-10-16T12:29:00.000-07:00

I'm in the library, and there was the most hilarious guy in here earlier. Everyone was being very quiet, working away, and then this french guy just comes in and starts talking really loud on his phone, in French. He was just strolling around people's computers, weaving around the room, not a care in the world, just talking away. Then when he finished (about ten minutes later, no joke) he just walked off. Incredible moment for me.

I've been in the Library for about five hours, the storyboard took quite a long time, but, despite a fair bit of rework I had to do on the script, I got it done, and wrote out a pretty efficient shot-list for us to work with. Went for a recce down to Jack's basement yesterday, seems like a pretty decent location, got Jack to get us a blue lightbulb to plug into the ceiling, should make the scene look pretty rad. Tried contacting a few others from the group today but not managed to get hold of any of them, hoping I've not put in this work for nothing. Andrew had better bring back my blackberry cable as well.

The idea I have for it is pretty basic. You get no explicit description of any sort of back-story, or what any of these events could be about, but we can imply some sort of story-line; the one I had in mind was perhaps a mole in a company being discovered and tortured. I wanted to see a huge amount of contrast between the SHE and the rest of her surroundings, and I went about this by suggesting that she be dressed all in a black suit, very clean, with the other two characters being dressed in lighter clothing, covered in muck and blood, and the surroundings also being extremely dingey. We imply that she is someone high up in the company with this, and that she has been forced to come down to this awful, grotty suburb to deal with something. It's quite an unusual situation, one would assume, and fairly interesting. Obviously used lots of different things to show dominance, weakness, fear, focus and whatnot, but I won't list that here.

Uri's group is doing a sex horror, I rang Uri to find out if he had storyboarded it yet, because I knew he was directing it, and he said he was doing it tommorow. I literally cannot fucking wait to see what that little guy comes up with.

This post is too long amigos, adios

Back

2010-10-11T06:49:00.000-07:00

I've been very busy this week. I've been spending quite a bit of time watching through episodes of Nathan Barley, trying to watch it with a different approach to just sitting back and enjoying the comedy of the show, I've been looking at every single shot used and actually tried to think about why they used it, what effect it had, what about the shot contributed to the effect it had (lighting, positioning, focus, costume, characters, dialogue etc..) and I've found it to be an unbelievably useful experience, and I kind of feel like a switch has been turned on almost. When lectures always told us to watch as many films and things as we could, I couldn't so much see how that would be as useful as just getting out there with a camera and doing it, but I've never approached watching anything like this. I'm really enjoying it anyway, and I already feel bettered as a film maker for it.

I've also recently purchased a blackberry (well, got a contract) after talking to a few people about it, it seemed like a really good deal. It's so, so useful. I am not a brilliantly organized person, but with this I find it so easy. I can just pen ideas down, appointments, things I have to do, and it reminds me in time for everything. I've not been late for anything once this week, which is pretty much unheard of for me. Anyway, it's great.

On Sunday I took part in the documentation of the rundance festival in Nottingham.

http://www.rundance.org/

Rundance is an anual event I believe was created a few years back by 'Usha M' and 'Penny A', two artists based in Nottingham who desired to inject a little spontineity into Nottingham, to 'tickle its streets'. They get together and, with the help of two technitians providing sound for the day (through the use of a pedal generated sound system. They built it themselves, they were very smart guys, I managed to talk to them for a bit over a pizza) just dance however they like, for ten minutes, in ten different locations. They did a little promotion prior to the event, however most of the public participation came from just people seeing what was going on and wanting to get involved.

It was a lot of fun, but a long day. We started filming at 10am and I finished at 10 at night. I feel I managed to get quite a bit of decent footage (beforehand we met up with the team to discuss what sort of footage they want, as they have a film maker who will be putting together the edit) and some interesting, quite creative stuff as well.

Near the end of the day I got talking with two people who are from pcm creative who were documenting the event, and they told me about a fashion show they will be doing called We Love Hockleys, and asked if I would like to come along and provide coverage of the event, which I obviously said 'what are you kidding me of course'.

Some other projects I'm getting involved in include The Bunker which is a gaming event with some americans coming over I think to see who is the best at playing lame console games (although I think they might play some real games at some point)

an update from jag about bunker launch from Philip Campbell on Vimeo.

and game city

http://www.gamecity.org/

I've put myself down to be a steward of the event, but I'm really hoping to provide some coverage. If you can't already tell, I am a big fan of models and computer games.

Recently back

2010-10-08T08:58:00.000-07:00

I feel that I have returned to Nottingham after a long (and unfortunately un-eventful) summer with a fresh attitude towards my development as a film maker, with a different perspective on how I'm going to spend my time here at university.

I've only time for a short post, as I have to go shortly, but I've recently been in contact with a film-maker who heads the AV department of ASOS fashion. He and I have been friends for quite a few years, and so I've always thought he would help me out as well as he could. He's offered me a lot of fantastic advice, and also an internship at his company whenever I need it, which I am hoping to take him up on at some point this year.

I have invested in a macbook pro recently, and began learning Final Cut Pro, as it is the industry standard (although I hear perhaps taking a look at AVID at some point.)

I am fervently watching and thinking about film. A show I have been watching a lot recently is called Nathan Barley. It is a comedy television series origonally aired a few years ago, written by Chris Morris (probably my favourite writer) and I absolutely love the way it looks, and I find it very, very useful to watch it from the point of view of a film maker. I find I am learning so much more from just thinking like a filmmaker as I watch it, and even though I have watched it hundreds upon hundreds of times prior to recently, I find after only a few episodes already I have been bettered creatively. I hope this trend will continue.

Anyway, I'll write more in depth on this when I have time

Will

Assignment plan

2010-02-11T08:15:00.000-08:00

Jules' lecture this week I found to be extremely useful. We were, each of us, split into three separate groups and given the assignment to produce a plan for the beggining, the middle, and the end of the visual essay we are all expected to hand in at the end of the year.

Afforded the ability to use whatever visual medium we think would be best, we have been set the task to essentially make a case for our choice of study (our pathway) next year. When I first heard this my mind was instantly sparked with creative energy, and still is. I am extremely excited about the project, and I feel it is a great chance for me to demonstrate everything about what I aspire to do, what I have studied, who inspires me in what way, how I think about certain things, things like that.

My group was set the task of planning out a plan for the beggining of the essay. We were given the following four bulletpoints:

What and why is my Pathway choice?

How might you get to know the challenges and opportunities in some detail? Where are the sources I might go to?

How do I discuss my work? Specifically, how I have used research?

I more or less felt I did take charge a bit here, which I was happy to do and the group seemed happy to have happen. I began by finding out what each person in the group was leaning towards, and, unfortunately, no one was really sure. So, since I am more or less sure I shall be doing moving image, I went foreward using myself as an example, how I would plan it, and then with other people offering their opinions on my process, modifying it and adding their own thoughts on how they would like to approach it. Here is what we came up with:

What and why is my Pathway choice?

Here I will begin by laying out exactly what it is I plan to do, and then go on to, in a very linear way, begin to describe what exactly has led me to come to this decision (excluding my three practitioners). I would begin with my experience of the subject before comming on to the course, about films I had got involved in, things I'd studied at school/college that inspired me to look further in to the subject, films I'd seen that made me want to study how to make them. From there I could move on to my course, listing specific elements from the course that had inspired me to choose what I have done, say a specific day of filming that went really well, or a really interesting lecture, or a talk/email with a relevant lecturer, some really interesting work I'd seen from third or second year work. From there I can line out perhaps a vague plan for the future, where I see myself in a few years time and how will choosing what I have done assist that. What sort of films do I want to be making? What sort of team do I want to work with? Films? Movies? Director? Behind camera? Edit?

How might you get to know the challenges and opportunities in some detail? Where are the sources I might go to?

Here we came together to agree that lecturers would be an absolutely great place to begin finding sources. They are trained and extremely talented at critiquing student work, seeing what will and will not work. So I can ask them what sort of problems they've seen students in the past face and how they were overcame. Another great source would be students on the second and third years. Perhaps going and speaking to them about questions/concerns, asking them about problems that they may have encountered and overcame without the help of a lecturer. All of their blogs are also available on the reflective journal's page, and from there it is very easy to find out exactly what sort of work they did, with a running commentry alongside it showing you exactly what they were set, with problems they discovered along the way, and how those problems were addressed. Another few people I can think to go to would be some people I know who have left university studying a similar course a few years ago, what difficulties they faced when just leaving, how did their course help them to overcome them?

How do I discuss my work? Specifically, how I have used research?

Here I feel is an excellent time to make use of the online journals that we have been keeping since the start of term. We can begin to discuss (again trying to keep things very linear) how, through iterative development, we have developed as students in our chosen pathway. For me, how have my films improved throughout the year? What mistakes would I go over to correct were I to do the projects again? Comments and feedback would be a good thing to use as well, especially if I can demonstrate how I have implemented solid, useful critique into the following project. It would also be excellent to encorporate the first term reviews we have recently recieved. The feedback in those is obviously invaluable, and I definitely need to be able to show how I have improved through use of this. How did I impliment it? Did it show an improvement? How do I plan to use this to further improve?

So that is the beggining of the essay planned out. I have had a few thoughts about how to present it, and I am pretty positive I would like to do it using a film. Like an extended show-reel sort of thing. I want to make it something someone would enjoy

Pissed off.

2009-12-18T19:40:00.000-08:00

Was only given 10 minutes for my entire presentation, and the whole time I was being hurried along being told "you're running out of time". This caused me to feel very flustered.

Simon seemed genuinely interested in what I was saying, and was trying to get involved in my thought process and how I felt about the course, but then Danny Kaye couldn't stop talking about the time, just going "yeah, next, come on. OK yeah I get it, come on just click past all this". Really, really lame. And, yes, I know they were running late, but why is that my problem?

My presentation wasn't that strong, but I felt like I had no chance. I've read other blogs where people have had 20 minutes--this is also what I was told I would have. Maybe next time the lecturers could be a little more accurate with the brief of the presentation.

Edit - I've just gone through a few old messages where we were given advice of preparing a presentation of "10-12 minutes". This *was* sent out in time for my presentation, but this is not what I was told when I first heard about the presentation. Like I say, I've checked a few other blogs of people who think they had that amount of time as well.

Pixelation - short post!

2009-12-14T23:45:00.000-08:00

Just rushing to get all my work up onto the blog. With this part of the module I neglected the blog quite a lot, and did most of the work on paper. I did so for the last part as well, but managed to update my blog a little better. Oh well.

Anyway, the idea initially started out with an idea for my housemate to be drinking a can of diet coke and to retrieve another one once his was empty. After shooting this, I wasn't very happy with the result. I had, for some reason, decided to do a patter of my housemate moving a little bit, taking two shots, moving a little bit more, taking two more etc.. Once I got this onto my PC I found it was very choppy, and not very convincing at all. Another problem I had was that he was getting very tired, and so would accidentally move, or move a little further into a shot than I would have liked. He did a good job, it's just it was very difficult to get perfect. I decided two things from this: One, I would take single shots and move whatever I was wanting to animate slower; and Two, that I would use inanimate objects, as they hold still a lot better :P

I also wanted to be a little more thoughtful about what I was animating. I have done two quite up-beat pieces of work so far, I thought about maybe doing a sad one. One thing that sprang to mind immediately going into this was a show I used to watch as a kid called 'Sesame Street'. I remember it had a LOT of stop motion 'sketches' in it, often trying to give a motivational message to the kids. Often things like 'believe in yourself', or 'try to sleep more' (what a wicked piece of advice that was) , and, more specifically, "The Teeny Little Super Guy". He was rad as hell. He would cruise around in his cup, dancing and giving advice, then at the end of it just climb back in the cupboard. They used stop motion animation to create him, and I wanted to do something like this.

However, this would obviously be an upbeat short, something I didn't want to do. So I thought about maybe it just having a sad ending, like the hero doesn't get what he wants somehow. I started playing around with things I had around me, trying to get some interesting shots of things, and I fell in love with my housemate's lamp. It's a gorgeous lamp. Quiet and strong. I loved the way the top of it looked like a sad head. Pixart did it first, but they used 3DSMax or w/e to create that, this will surely be a first, I thought.

Anyway, drew up a few ideas for storylines, and fell upon the idea of the lamp comming to life. I mainly liked this because the bulb would look really good on camera, especially when it lit up.

Here it is, anyway

I am very pleased with this, even if it may seem a little cheesy. I think you have to realise that's kind of the point with it. The old Sesame Street sketches were cheesy, but they had a fine message. If I could have done this again I would have got a different lamp (Sorry, lamp) as this one was a little harder to manoever than I would have liked, and in some shots it looked a little un-natural . Also, despite how hard I tried not to, I did knock the camera near the end, and it caused a little jump. This was annoying.

Interactive narrative - Done

2009-12-14T01:25:00.001-08:00

Well, I finally came to the conclusion that the best idea would be to do the graphic designer/fairy story idea, as it would be the easiest to do whilst at the same time also being the one I could be the most creative in.

I started looking at some other works, such as 'Mallet Girl'. Unfortunately I am unable to aquire a link to the flash animation, but it was available on NOW. What I was thinking of doing was a very simple fairy story, something that allowed me to demonstrate all the elements of narrative that we learnt about in the lectures. What I encorporated from 'Mallet Girl' was the comic book design that I really liked. It had a really nice way of moving the narrative along, with the ability to have numerous shots in one image, therefor being able to tell more of a story with less images. What I also liked about the comic book idea was that it would further exaggerate the absurdity of someone living in a very normal reality that all students can pretty much relate to, suddenly being thrust into a fairy story.

I decided to look at other comics to get some ideas. One I used to read as a child were the old 'Rupert the Bear' annuals that my mother gave to me (they were her's when she was little, as well) and what I loved about them was the little rhymes that would go with each picture. There would be a long, detailed story you could read at the bottom, and then, just below each picture, a little rhyme to describe what went on. I really wanted to encorporate that into my work, even if my poetic skills aren't as brilliant as the authors of those great books.

In relation to Freitag's pyramid, I feel I demonstrated my knowledge of it quite well. I have the exposition of setting in place that the protagonist is a graphic designer working towards getting work done before a deadline. I did this by getting as many graphic design bits and bobs I had in my room and wacking them on the table. Books, pens, rulers etc.. I feel this could have been done a little better, maybe made a little more obvious, but I feel the lighting was nice. You then have some internal conflict as he decides weather or not to go out with his friends. This was very cliched, and I could definitely have come up with something better. Then the inciting incident of Rupert getting high from all the ink he is using. Again, this could have been described a little better, but I was trying to use rhymes as well as tell a story, so it was pretty difficult. Then you have the rising action of Remi describing how their lives have been ruined, and that something must be done. Then the climax of Uri taking on Enkrin, and the subsequent falling action / denoumont of his two helpers being cured of their brainwashing.

One thing I'd do differently were I to do all of this again would be to make my blasted font a little easier to read! I really hope people are able to read it. Anyway, here it is

Scribbles in Doodleshire by ~piebearrr on deviant ART

Interactive Narrative, ready to shoooooot

2009-12-09T07:29:00.000-08:00

I've made a lot of progress since my last post. I have decided to go with the idea of a sketch pad comming to life. I came to this idea simply by sitting around with an A3 sheet of paper, trying to come up with ideas, and basically imagined myself, at that moment, to be in the narrative. What could happen, that sort of thing. Obviously this will appeal to the target audience I previously determined since, first of all, my whole course will have been in that position at some point, so will be easy to relate to.

Developing on from that, I began to look at other works, such as one from previous years entitled "mallet girl", by a girl called Hayley Jennings, that can be found here

https://now.ntu.ac.uk/d2l/lms/content/viewer/view.d2l?tId=214428&d2l_body_type=1&ou=63206

I really liked how she managed to create a very simple narrative and obviously demonstrated her understanding of plot, characters and narrative with quite a basic piece of work. Obviously she is talented at drawing and things, but, even though I am definitely not as good an artist, I would like to do this comic book style. I tried to develop that further by thinking about what sort of comics I used to read as a child, and what came to me were the stories of Rupert, the bear. I used to read all these annuals my mother used to read when she was a child, and I thought they were great. What I really loved about them were that they were like a comic, but whereas a comic will have some sort of narrator speaking to move the narrative forward, Rupert's narrator would rhyme in each picture. This is something I would love to include in my work.

So as to not completely rip off other people, I tried to take my idea further, and came up with the idea of the story starting in real life, with the only character at first being the student sitting down to work, and trying to come up with ideas, maybe the audience could be given decisions about what to do, like to work or to go out with friends. By also pointing out the character has a deadline for the next day, this will produce an internal conflict that the user must overcome to continue in the story. But then I was trying to think about ways of transitioning this quite normal scene that's easy for the audience to relate to on a day-to-day basis, to this surreal world where I could tell some sort of 'fairy-story'. I was thinking maybe he could get high, or start drinking, but I felt that would clash too much with the childish nature of my story, and would just be weird. Eventually I decided for the character to have all the ink he is using to go to his head. This would be known as the 'inciting incident' in Freitag's pyramid.

So I set out to write this big story, with lots of different pathways and things the user could take. It's quite a simple story, and very childish. I am also not a brilliant artist, so the quality of the drawings isn't that good, but I just tried my best to focus on the narrative. In lectures we were often told that fairy-stories are one of the best examples of narrative, and, not surprisingly, the easiest to understand. So I just set out to produce all the things I've learnt about leading up to it: plot, characters, structure, conflict (external and internal) protagonist/antagonist etc..

Anyway, I'll get shooting it as soon as I can and get it into flash.

Interactive Narrative - generating ideas

2009-12-07T12:55:00.001-08:00

Well, I've started this section of the module with a different method. I began by thinking about what type of person would make up the majority of my audience. I myself used to regularly browse a website called newsgrounds, on which I would watch various short, sometimes interactive, flash films. They were quite basic, as they were created simply by the users, the most popular then being featured on the front page (as I remember it) So, from my experience of this and other websites, I concluded my audience would generally be bored internet users/students aged between 16 and 25, typically male.

So I began thinking about what subjects I could cover. On my mind map I have the following:

- Love interest with girl in class/job
- Waiting to escape boring job/class
- Attempting to manage a wild and crazy house party
- Making ends meet at the shops
- Something very exciting happening during homework/coursework
- Pest endangering your tenancy at your flat

After reading through these ideas, I began to feel like all of these were a bad idea. I thought them to all be extremely dull and over-done; unoriginal. Sure, my audience could relate to these ideas, but they aren't innovative in themselves. After all, I really want this to be an interesting narrative, where I demonstrate everything I have learnt about structure and characters.

So I began simply trying to play with these ideas, to make them a bit crazy and innovative, and the ones I liked the most was 'something exciting happening during homework/coursework' and 'pest endangering your tenancy at your flat'.

My Ideas

Jerry and Tom

This is simply a working title that very much sums up my idea. I have taken the structure of Tom and Jerry (a very simple Protagonist/Antagonist setup) and reversed the roles, making the cat the prot. and the antag. Tom and Jerry was an extremely successful cartoon despite how simple the structure was. The creators of the show were able to make interesting and funny story lines and very interesting characters, and I would try to emulate that and perhaps contrast the times in which the two stories would be set to achieve humor.

It's an interesting concept I feel, although not brilliantly innovative. Also, getting hold of both a mouse and a cat and not allowing ~~the mouse~~ either creature to die would be a burden. I would like to be a little bit more adventurous with structure so as to include all different types of characters.

Graphic storyline

This is another working title and quite a bad pun upon 'graphic design'. In this I imagine a graphic design student sitting down with a blank pad attempting to come up with ideas, and he perhaps spills some sort of supernatural ink, or a strange potion, and the characters on the page begin to come to life. This is one I am extremely interested in, as I already feel the idea falling into place with all the ideas I've learnt about story and narrative (the exposition obviously being showing he is a graphic design student working on ideas, the inciting incident being the magic ink etc..) I also feel I could create quite interesting characters and story with it, perhaps using red ink for the antagonist and blue for the protagonist, and other simple things like this.

I think I will go with the graphic storyline, to be honest. But I'll try a few sketches and things and see how I feel about it. I am not a massively brilliant drawer, but I can do my best.

Interactive Narrative

2009-11-08T19:15:00.001-08:00

Just going to write up the notes I took from this lecture.

Plot vs Narrative

We started by talking about the difference between plot and narrative. I am left a little confused, as I took a bunch of notes on what Shaun was telling us, but after reading up about it, the definition I have found elsewhere is quite different. Shaun was saying how narrative encompasses everything inside a film; that they contain characters, conflict and plot. And a plot was, well, the only note I have is "a film can have several plots". Anyway, after reading up about it, I found that this quote was once said by someone:

"He [E.M Forster] observed that if we write “The king died, and the queen died,” we have a narrative, but if we write, instead, “The king died, and the queen died of grief,” then we have a plot. The second assertion has established a link of cause between the two events. And this, the making of connections, or designs, is the essence of storytelling. Narrative is simply a record of what happened. For narrative to become a plot must reveal its meaning in human terms. Events only become interesting, which is to say relevant to our understanding of life"

This seems very different, and, to be honest, easier for me to understand. I'll ask Shaun about it.

We talked about the different things that go into a story. A story should also have a protagonist - the good guy that the film revolves around, who faces conflict; and also an antagonist. This character is the bad guy that causes problems for the protagonist, and creates conflict; A film should contain conflict, both internal and external. I'll go into this later in the post. Finally, a film should contain plot. Freitag's pyramid sums this up.

Plot

(this picture here unfortunately leaves out the 'inciting incident' point)

Exposition

This sets the scene and the circumstances of the film, the time and the place, giving the audience back ground information that you need to understand the film. Characters are introduced, telling you what their goals and motivations are. It sets the tone - comedic, satire, tragedy etc.. And introduces theme - the point of view of the film. For example, it could be about the injustice in society, or the nature of truth.

Inciting incident

This is the point in the film where something happens to incite action and begin creating conflict.

Conflict

This is plot complications, obstacles to the attainment of the goals. There is two types of conflict: internal conflict, firstly. This is person verses self. For instance, a boy debating in his head weather or not to cheat on an exam. Then there is external conflict, which is itself separated into three sections: person vs person (David and Goliath) person vs nature (man stuck on an island) person verses culture (racism).

Rising Action

This occurs simultaneously with conflict. For example, a girl wishes to have a later curfew, but her parents are reluctant to allow it. Her grades begin to slip, she gets into a fight etc.. This is rising conflict.

Climax

This is the highest point of tension in a story, a characters decision/action makes the outcome of a film inevitable.

Falling Action

In comedy, this is known as 'resolution'. You find out what happens to the characters with their goals. In tragedy it is known as a catastrophe, and is usually something awful, like someone dying.

Denoument

This ties loose ends in the film up, and is a fancy word for 'conclusion'.

I found a lot of useful information on the subject here

http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CAcQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.jerichoschools.org%2FHS%2Fteachers%2Flfischer%2Felementsofplot.ppt&rct=j&q=elements+of+a+story+exposition+internal+conflict&ei=CpD3Sub9OM624QbQoMXXAw&usg=AFQjCNGiszffijjR07mo93isBbxx_mTc-A

Narrative

Wilkens et al (2004) argues that narrative is:

“A chain of events related by cause and effect occurring
in space and time and involving some agency or
intentionality”

An agency is usually the characters or narrator, they move the narrative along.

I'm going to try to watch Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' tommorow, as it is aparently a very good example of linear narrative. An example of non-linear narrative would be pulp fiction, however I have watched that into the ground.

Brief

• Produce an interactive narrative using still images positioned onto the Timeline in
Flash CS3
• This interactive narrative should utilise a branching structure that forces the user to
make a number of decisions as they progress through the narrative piece
• Narrative should be the primary concern
The Rules:
• You will need to have at least ten still images to complete your interactive narrative
• It is important that image, text, and audio are seriously examined in an attempt to
truly consider audience engagement and interaction
• You should use ActionScript 3.0 to build interactivity and the navigation structure
into your movie. (A simple ActionScript template will be provided)
• You MUST publish your final movie as an SWF.
• This is an individual assignment

Deal breaker

Inspiration

2009-11-08T18:43:00.001-08:00

Well, during that tutorial, I found the group was asked to research into someone who inspires you, or who you admire. At the moment, I'm just trying to improve my own graphic design abilities, with regards to drawing and that. One thing I did was to go out and buy a load of nice paper and a bowl of sharpies, leaving them beside my desk just so I'd have a draw whenever I could. Create ideas and things on there. It's pretty good. Feels like I'm improving a little. I'll try to scan some of them in at some point.

Anyway, one person who I think is pretty good is a friend of mine called Chris Chilvers.

He's a professional graphic designer and has a website with plenty of things he's created on it, and, though he doesn't work in film (as far as I know) I still like his stuff and reckon I working things he draws into film would be pretty good. Here's some stuff he's done.

pretty cool

Ten on ten.

I'm gonna' do laps, basically, after that.

I like the patterns and shapes, and colours. I guess being good at that is part and parcel with being a proffessional graphic designer, but it's something I'd really like to be able to do. He definitely has his own style, and it's pretty wicked. It seems like a really random clutter of ideas, but they all work with one another. No idea how he achieves that, I'll have to ask him. I will do. I'll see if he has anyone he reckons I should look at as well.

check out his website here

It is well fucking futile.

Feedback

2009-11-08T18:23:00.001-08:00

Today I attended what is, ashamedly, my first tutorial with Deborah Tuck. I was surprised and pleased to find that the tutorials are made up of only a handful of students, put in place to give us a much more personal guidance on our journey through the course. I found that students from the previous week were set the task to look into artists who inspire them in their own work, and to look into works they've done. This week I shall do this, as I know I have a number of artists in my head that I feel I should research a little, and this is a good excuse to do so.

During the tutorial, Deborah, much to my embarrassment, asked (in that sort of way in which it sounds like a request, but really it's a demand) if she could play my film. Red-faced, I obliged, and glad of it I am, too. She pointed out, quite rightly, that my entire course is going to be filled with moments such as this, moments where I must present work I have created to an audience. It's quite a personal thing, showing someone something you've put as much creativity into as possible. But I recieved an applause (Pretty sure it was an appreciative clap. Could have been a pity clap. Tough call) and quite a few nice comments, and a lot of helpful criticism.

Pros

Simplicity of the plot - I think that, as a compliment, this would at first seem maybe a little odd. But they are right, and it's what I felt as well. It's a very simple design brief, and to stretch too far in terms of plot and things would only serve to highlight our obvious inability to create marvelously complicated narratives. It was also noted that, given that it is a story about a student in a lift facing a situation every student has at some point, the plot would sit quite well with the audience - students. This isn't something I had considered. Good, though.

Acting - This one surprised me, I have been complimented quite frequently on my acting. I mean, that's great. At least it means that the ideas that work in my head also work on screen, and I'll feel a little more willing to express ideas in the future.

Shot angle was interesting and awesome - This is something I can take no credit for whatsoever, as I was against the idea of shooting it at that angle. However, I am glad we did. It does look interesting and awesome.

Criticisms

Copywright - Unfortunately I failed to credit the film correctly. For instance, I didn't credit the artist who originally recorded 'The Girl From Ipanema'. What I think I shall do next week is contact the Copywright Protection Society and find out how I would go about requesting permission. Deborah was saying how my film would be judged on the length of the song that I use, and the film's prominence. Considering it is just a student's short for a first year project, I imagine they won't charge me, but it would be good to start as I mean to go on with the career: a by-the-book maverick. Another way we could have averted this would be to simply create my own music for the film, which wouldn't be that hard, given all that is required is cheesy lift music.

Mix levels need to be worked on - This is definately true, and I am going in tommorow to sort it out. I feel a little bad about doing so, since the film is already up on youtube and vimeo. Basically, the voice over is a little too loud, and the lift opening is a little too quiet. Another thing I could add in whilst I'm there is to hire out an Edirol and record some light gusts of air to simulate the sound of air rushing over my ears as I listen to the thoughts inside my head. This was Deborah's idea. Pretty good.

All in all, good times. Very happy with the end result of the film, and I am going to find out weather or not we actually have to produce a dvd copy of the film with a box and such. I hope so, since then we could work on an awesome cover, and a sweet DVD menu and that.

Awkward Turtle

2009-11-04T10:36:00.001-08:00

Here is our film

Awkward Turtle from william on Vimeo.

The design process for our film

2009-11-04T09:39:00.000-08:00

The design process can be better described as 'the four D's'; the four essential elements required to properly design a film, a photograph, a story, or anything else you'd like to create. They are:

Discovering

This is where ideas and solutions to problems imposed by those ideas originate. Research into past ideas and solutions, along with analyzing what you found can be very useful, along with a proper understanding of users.

The discovery stage of the design process our group experienced began with us organizing to go away and see what ideas we could come up with for our one shot film. I enjoyed this greatly, as I find myself at my most creative when on my own. My initial idea for a short mockumentary style short about an absurd 'hot-head marketing guru' was put under great scrutiny, after which we thought attempting to do a mockumentary style film would be extremely difficult on a tripod. A few other ideas bounced around before we finally settled on Uri's idea of doing a film about the goings on in a lift. I loved this idea, as did everyone else. It was easy to film so much as we didn't run the risk of looking too amateurish by out-reaching too far, yet was versatile enough an idea that we could be very creative with regards to plot, lighting, shot etc. We found it hard to be critical of eachother's ideas at first, since we had only recently met one another, and didn't wish to sound arrogant or hurtful; and in fact this is a problem I still suffer from. But we did our best, and I feel our criticism filtered through the best idea.

Developing

At this point you have your idea, and it is time to let that idea flower; to clip and prune it. You should draw up a plan for your project, and better define and develop initial concepts and prototypes. Running an acceptance test is also very useful, and analyzing feedback and acting on it.

Once we had the idea, we agreed the next best step would be to each go away and think of a few different small plots. We felt this would better facilitate the creation of this sort-of montage of interweaving storyline and characters that we had discussed would be possible and great to do at the initial meeting at the coffee house. I found it quite difficult to simply come up with small characters and plots, thinking how my ideas for characters would harmonize or conflict with other people's ideas. I decided what I would do would be to write a script for the whole thing, and then the group could either use perhaps a small part of it, all of it, or, maybe, they'd do away with the whole thing. Either way, I didn't want to come to our next meeting empty handed, so I did my best. Over the years me and a few friends from back home would enjoy writing scripts for short, humorous films; sending them to one another. We shared a love of comedy, and so writing the film was quite easy for me. Not necessarily easy to make the students of my class laugh, but I knew I found it funny, as did my friends from back home, so, in that sense, I had done my best. I was surprised and relieved to find the others in the group thought my script was a good idea, and then very pleased to find they wished to use all of it. We then set about trimming and developing certain areas of the script to make the whole film run smoother and become funnier. Certain phrases were cut, and others added to improve the script, and finally we felt confident with the script as a base, and to head on into shoot.

Defining

This stage could be compared to the development stage and often could be found to be not all that much different. However, as I see it, this is the 'hands on' development of the plan for your film. Problems within your film that you encounter you had created, and had to overcome with further development, and rigorous analysis of feedback on the production in progress.

This was, for me, the 'polishing off' of our film. Final refinement of everything we had planned, during the actual physical creation of the film. Certain mannerisms, phrases, storyline routes were curved and altered. For instance, once on set, I was talking through the script with the actress playing the girl in the lift, and she noted that the ending was a little odd. The ending I had originally written was that when she returned to retrieve her forgotten bag, she notices me on the floor, and I decide simply to ask her to go out for a drink with me, to which she agreed. However, she pointed out this was odd, and the we, the cast, all decided a better ending would be for her to simply walk in, see me, then walk off; a much funnier ending that makes a lot more sense. The editing stage of the film was the most exciting, and we were still developing the script. For instance, at the end of the film, I had originally written for it to cut to black, and to roll credits. However, I thought of an idea where I could add an extra sigh after it cuts to credits, by pasting one I did earlier in the film, just to extend the silence and awkwardness of the situation. Me and Ben, on the final day of editing, also added in the sound of the lift closing after it cuts to credits, which had the same effect but strengthened the cringe worthy silence.

Delivery

Here is where you must evaluate the response from your film. This is absolutely essential for anyone wishing to improve at anything that I can think of. You must look at the effectiveness of every area of your film. The techniques you used to create humor, sadness, fear - any effect that you wished to have on your audience, must be scrutinized without fear or embarassment. You must then, through an almost evolutionary process, allow the natural selection of your audience create you and your ideas into a better film maker, photographer, painter or musician. I feel this is the hardest part of the design process. I often find myself dead-set in an almost childish reluctance to change ideas I am convinced are among the best in the world. As a great man once said, "We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers".

I have not received very much feedback on the film so far, but what I have has been largely positive. Those who watched it found the film to be enjoyable, funny and easy to follow. The ability for the audience to follow exactly what was happening in the film was something that concerned me throughout the production. Would they just sit there looking baffled as I desperately try to explain how the film plays out in my head? Fortunately, this didn't happen. I have shown the film to a few lecturers in passing, all of which have liked it and even laughed - one of the greatest rewards. I love that they like the plot and things, and feel extremely proud of the film and our group. I am looking forward to more in depth feedback when the lecturers have time.

A movie I made before

2009-10-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

Here is a short intro to a frag-movie I made for a few friends a while back. I created it using a number of programs, mainly adobe after-effects.

Update

2009-10-30T06:01:00.000-07:00

The film has been captured, and our collective genius surely now realized. Going in to the shoot I was extremely nervous, since I was not a proper actor and that. However, once we got to the lift and started talking about shots and things, I began to feel a little more comfortable. Uri managed to get us an actress who was more or less perfect for the role, so I can now retract my accusation of him being a socially inept hermit.

One of the main complications for the shoot was that people on other floors kept attempting to steal our set away from us. We also had to keep blocking the door from crushing our crew and equipment, whilst fobbing off complaining staff members. We alleviated this by only doing the final shoot in the lift, and rehearsing the entire thing outside in the hallway. We could have gone a step further in preparation for the shoot by filming at an absurd hour, at which no one would need the lift. Plus, our group is full of socially inept night-owls so that would not have been a problem.

When it came to actually acting in the film, I feel I did a pretty alright job. The film is a short comedy, and, since I had written most of it, it was my sense of humor, so I didn't really feel I was trying to make anyone else laugh except myself. Another complication we ran in to was lighting. Looking in to the camera we knew what we were capturing was going to be quite dark. Uri tackled this by getting a lamp from his room. However, we found the light was much too sharp against the reflective walls ofthe lift, and made it far too obvious we had used a lamp. We thought for a while (I tried shining the lamp backwards against a white piece of card and aiming that towards the lift, but the lamp was not powerful enough) before Uri attached a white piece of paper to lamp (bending it and using clips, to prevent a fire hazard) which softened the light up quite a lot. I thought that was pretty smart.

In my head, I had imagined the film being shot simply head on, a simple medium-shot. This caused a problem, since the entrance to the lift was quite narrow, and with the camera directly in the middle of the door the actress would have a tough time exiting naturally. Ben created a really interesting shot by making use of the mirrors on the walls of the lift, and fixed the maneuverability issue.

We recently went into edit of the film and Uri did a fantastic job in my opinion. In things I've filmed for the benefit of me and my friends before (short comedies and what-not) I've always, always used fade in. I suggested we use that, and Uri was against it from the start. I'm definitely glad he was, he has made the film look great. The film now uses what appears to be a very basic style, however I think it looks fantastic, the quick cuts and things, and the basic font. It looks like not much effort has been put into it, but it maintains the style and format throughout, so I think it really works well. Also, everyone knows it's just a group of first-years' first attempt at creating a short, zero-budget one-shot film, so the fact that we aren't pretending we are anything we're not makes it pretty classy stuff I think. For instance, there were ideas flying around like adding 'alpha-group productions' at the beginning, and something like 'fin' at the end, which Uri and I were definitely against, and I'm glad they didn't go in. We aren't a production company. Like I say, we don't need to pretend we are anything we aren't. What we've created is good enough without it, in my opinion. I'm really proud of it. All that's left to do is add the voice-overs and sound effects, which will more or less explain the film's plot.

One of our lecturers, Simon, took a peep at our film and said I'd done a good performance. Perfect times.

Despite being really proud of the film we've done, I would definitely, if it's possible, like to work with the guys again to produce another film, or maybe two other films. I just want to make as much use of the time we have on my favourite area as possible. I have had a few other ideas, such as a time lapse film. Well, that idea just popped in my head when I was writing the last paragraph, and I text Ben about it. All I said was "Ben, idea:time lapse" Not sure he will follow. I've no idea for a plot just yet, but I'd love to do it. In fact, I'll go away now and have a good think, then I'll make another post with ideas. For now, I'll leave this video. This is one of my favorite bands and possibly my favourite music video ever. It is a little like the video I posted before for 'how soon is now', with the short shots of the band on stage mixed in with other footage, and interesting colours/lights.

check THIS out

2009-10-21T12:07:00.001-07:00

Was just watching the video to 'How Soon is Now?' by The Smiths. I just thought I'd write about it in here since I think the video is fantastic

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_U5HpeA_WSo&feature=fvw

Unfortunately I can't embed it here, since the user has disallowed it. But check it out.

I would absolutely love to film a music video. I think I may look into it, and I am definately going to look into how this video was made.

Our film PLUS chris cooke lecture - could it get more wild

2009-10-20T11:11:00.000-07:00

I thought I would post a copy of the outline script I created for our film. I made it under the presumption the group would use a little from it, or maybe not at all, who knows. But I found it hard to come up with lots of little plots like we agreed, so I made this. What's ended up happening is that we are going to use it in its entirety for our film, which I am pretty chuffed about. Here's how it is now, we've organized a meeting on thursday to change the plot how we like.

The film begins with a man standing alone in a lift, apparently waiting to arrive at his floor. Shortly before the lift arrives at the next level, he begins to suddenly pick up a conversation on his mobile to portray himself as a popular fun-loving student.
"Yeah, all the boys there: Higgins, Boz, Daz..." His conversation begins to trail off as the doors open and no-one enters the lift.
(Internal dialogue, added in post-production) "You know, if she knew that you've been in this lift for a little over half an hour waiting for her to get on just in the very slight hope you may get the courage to talk to her, she might think you were cute in an odd way." He begins another conversation on his phone.
"Put it this way right, bozzer and gaz were both out, and you know what those..." Once again his conversation trails off as he finds the girl is not at the floor.
(ID) "Yeah, either that or a psychopath. It's a hit or miss thing I guess. For now, though, I'll keep it quiet. We'll talk about it in a few years time when we're comfortable in our relationship. Hopefully then she can explain why she hasn't accepted my facebook request for the last four weeks."
"Get this, right, Boz, Gaz, Bombhead, all the..." His conversation trails once again as he sees no-one arrive, however at the last moment the girl leaps inside the lift, placing a heavy bag on the floor, during which Will tries to regain his composure and continue the conversation he was pretending to have.
"Yeah all the gang, going mad as always." During the conversation he tuts and points at his phone, whilst casting the girl a knowing look. "So wild it was, was pretty much the ladies night for us." "(ID) That COULD have sounded gay." "So, ah, yeah, I'd better go...Daz...Yeah got-" Suddenly the phone blasts out his ringtone, completely destroying the facade of a conversation,the girl looks lazily over in non-surprise.

The next part of the dialogue is pretty hard to write down, as it's a very awkward few moments, and how I visual it playing out is hard to describe. Perhaps this is something I need to work on. Well, definitely.

"ahhh........text message....just need to-"
"Isn't that a ringtone-"
(cutting in) "Ah?"
"Isn't that a ringtone."
"(nervously, stuttering and shaking his head whilst looking down at phone) ...nah...Just.....ah....what was I...sheesh....uh"
Pause.
"Still on the phone then?"
".....(starts nodding)....y-yep...yeah....just *brings phone to ear* Hello? Ah....gone."

There is an extremely awkward silence for the rest of the journey, after which the girl exits. There follows a long pause, and Will slowly turns to the wall, and sinks down all the way to the floor, falling out of shot. This remains for a while, until the next stop, at which the girl re-enters the lift to reclaim the bag she had left there before. She stops as she realizes Will is on the floor.
"Sarah, would you like to go for a drink?"
"Sure. Tuesday?"
"Tuesday is good."
The girl exits for the final time. "What the F-" Will's sentence is here cut off as the titles cut in.

Throughout the film, we decided it would be really great to have lift music playing to make it easier for the audience to instantly recognise this as a lift, and not a guy maybe just standing around in a big cupboard. Uri has some ideas for tracks already which I know are great, and I have a few as well. Napoleon dynamite is a film I greatly admire, and the soundtrack to that is absolutely wonderful; I think it will work great.

This is the piece I like. It's also a great video, I found it whilst looking for the music. Great stuff. With regards to editing, I would like to think we keep it very simple, as it is a very simple story, really. A fade in; a cut to credits; that's about all I figure we need, but I'm open to any other ideas from the group. I would really like to make this film as interesting as we can.

Casting wise we have landed that I will play the role of the guy. I don't really know how we came to that decision, but I'm pretty comfortable with it. We are yet to find a girl, since all the guys in our group are socially inept hermits, but we will find one soon.

Very interesting lecture with Chris, (actually typed 'christ' there.) we learned about the camera we will be using: A sony Z1, on which we will be shooting in DV mode. I'm just going to make a list here of the notes I took for the lesson so I can throw this mangled paper away.

Outdoor light > 5000 kelvin, known as 'daylight'
Indoor light > 3000 kelvin, known as 'tungsten'

To book cameras, contact John Hallem (I hope I spelled that correctly) artniastore@NTU.ac.uk
To book decks for editing, contact Owen Baxter. Didn't get an email there.

On the camera mini-display, the top-left is the battery, below that should be "DVCAM" to indicate what we are shooting in. Bottom left indicates if steady-cam is on, the number in the middle of the screen was the iris setting (we had ours at F1.6) and right of that is the gain (Which Chris - I just typed christ again - insists we keep at 0db)
To check white balance, stand upon the area you wish to film, and hold something white. Have the camera zoom right in on it and make it blurred, then hold the white balance button in, situated on the bottom left hand side of the left hand side of the camera.
Before replacing the camera, check the battery is out, the charger is away and that the lense is clear by opening it, and closing it once finished. With regards to the tripod, simply make sure it is properly sealed and then secured away putting the legs in the closed end.

Here is what I hope we have sorted for friday, or the day we choose to film:

- Story
- Kit list
- Location
- When can I have kit
- When are we all free
- What costume & props we need
- Cast list
- Tape
- Audio: Music & FX

Anyway, that's that.

Recent tasks

2009-10-19T17:02:00.000-07:00

WI have been placed in group one, who's first area to study is moving image, which is the pathway I feel most draw to going in to the year, and the one I expect to follow going out of it.

We have been asked to produce a 'one-shot film'; a short film that has no cuts whatsoever; a single camera on a tripod pointing at what is happening. Once split into groups, we organized to meet at a coffee shop to discuss ideas a few days later. We have decided to follow Uri's idea of a short film set inside a lift. After the meeting, we all organized to go away to come up with ideas for various different story lines that we could have. Trying to come up with ideas for that sucked, since we only had a few minutes, so what I eventually did was to write the entire film myself, and they can use whatever they like from my outline depending on what they like from it. Who know: maybe they won't like any of it. Maybe they'll like all of it. I'm not sure group work is really where I am going to do best, I find it hard to work with other people that I am literally forced together with. In fact, I hate it. It's not that I don't like my group, it's just when I create something like a film, there are people I already have in mind I want to work with, because they are like me. They find the same things funny that I do, and I already know them to be creative and great.

However, obviously that's not possible in a group of strangers, so I'm just hoping what we produce is decent. No idea why I created this post.

A little more about me

2009-10-07T05:15:00.000-07:00

My name is William Peter Sanger North and I study currently at nottingham trent university. I've started this blog to display various things I'm interested in, things I find that I think perhaps I'd like to emulate in work that I create on in future. I'll add things I make to this blog that I have made just so you guys can see how well I've taken on board what I've found.

We started yesterday with a cheeky little meet and greet in which we were split into groups and set the task of creating a ten-second stop-motion animation using a digital camera, a white board, pens and paper. What we ended up creating was pretty interesting, but I feel the whole work would have looked much better if it was only one person doing the whole piece, since the constant rotation of illustrators caused absolute mayhem with different sized objects being drawn in different ways. Regardless of the quality of work we produced (which was still decent) it was a good excercise for getting to know people in the group, despite the whole affair becomming a little tedious after a while.

Ultimate post

2009-10-07T05:12:00.001-07:00

unbelievable start