Participatory Documentary - A day in the life of a Blow Wave

Today has been all about setting up and organising my project, well my second attempt at my project that should be, now that I am doing a documentary I needed to start from scratch. But it has been a good day. The project is formed in Premiere with scratch disks setup on a a remote portable HDD as there is a lot of raw AVI files that take up heaps of space, and new BINS created and split into three parts, Movie files, graphics files, and soundtracks.

Everything is organised and named, some footage is trimmed but most is just raw imports and I have started to pour through the bits and pieces as the story forms in my head.

The graphics are imported and I have four unreleased to public singles from the new Blow Waves self titled EP as the soundtrack.

I feel good about this one, its going to come together well.

I have also done a new Concept Brief but as it is a word document I dont see how I can attach it to this blog which is a shame. I am working on a storyboard to help get my story sorted out but I have a good idea of it in my head so I am not too panicked bout that but it will help me draw the story out of the observational aspect of the footage. Tonight I am off to see the band play live and hope to get more inspiration from that, and today I actually filled in for the guitar player who was at his day job while they sound checked. I learnt the song this morning and went to the venue at 2pm and played it! What a rush! Pity I couldnt film that and include it in this doco!

I was watching funniest home video this evening and was inspired by a bumper sequence introducing the top 4 funniest home videos and I am going to try and emulate that for my title sequence and bumper.

The text was 3 dimensional and had created these 'wakes' behind them as they bounced onto the screen. I have seen it before and find it difficult to explain but am thinking I could work up an effect to emulate it in AE.

Tomorrow is a big day and hoping to come out with some rough cuts to post up. The clock is certainly ticking to be this far behind!

A weekend of revelations

Well after I busted my gut to get all the stuff together for my final project, including being really late with the development and submission of my storyboard and concept brief to Cathie (sorry!) I have done my usual and come a complete 180 degree turn and am changing my entire project.

This must sound a little ridiculous, but the pressure it puts me under is quite frankly when I do my best work, and although I think my ideas and some of the execution of them are coming together (see my past 4 or so blog entries) I had really hit a bit of a wall in getting the desired affects and composits out of AE and quite frankly I was starting to feel like it was going to be a fizzer. I really needed a good green screen trick to pull off the Machinima stuff I was imagining and the screen capture software I trialled was expiring and bringing up a hideous TRIAL VERSION watermark and most of all I was losing enthusiasm fast.

Not to ditch the idea completely, as a friend suggested, shelve it and also write up some critical analysis of where the project had fell over and then come back to it for the next thing, or it may be something that I can develop further in Software Engineering later on. That makes me feel much better about it.

So, I hear all my fans asking, what are you doing now?

Well, a bit of background first. I have been very actively involved in my best mates band from a punters perspective, and also honing my skills as Guitar Tech and Stage Manager.

His band is called The Blow Waves, and they are a very camp Aussie act that play quite a lot and are really trying to break into mainstream commercial success.

They played on the main stage last year at the Mardi Gras in Sydney and this has landed them local government support to tour the world later on this year. They will be playing at Manchester Pride Festival in London, several gigs in Berlin, Amsterdam and Greece. I think they have what it takes to be the next 'Scissor Sisters.

On the weekend I was asked to come over to rehearsal and help out in a working bee for Bios, Artwork, Tour promo's and any professional CV writing that I could offer cause this is something I have been doing for years and feel like can really help with.

As a side I asked if it would be ok to film the session so that I could maybe compile a mini doco-vlog for YouTube. As you can imagine from there it wasnt far on that I started to turn my thoughts to developing the idea as a full blown Major Assignment.

I have so much background with these guys, I know their music intimately, I have the fully blown mastered EP and full permissions to use it, I have professional photography, hours of video performance footage and the intimate knowledge to know how they would most like to be represented.

To me this is a natural progression to completing my Major Prac with enthusiasm and passion and as I said earlier the pressure it puts me under to perform just makes me more enthusiastic on the whole to do a really good bloody job!

So, I will be posting some screen grabs of my work in progress over the next few nights and getting some early rough cuts together and loading them up for comment on here and my YouTube page and I think the over all synopsis will be to 'show the inner workings of a punk-trashy pop disco band as they make the hard decisions about profile and image as they head overseas.

I will do a stunning fast paced loud but intimate 2-3 minute documentary on the band.

I will do a title sequence.

And I will do some bumper type promo's with the intent of web broadcast.

Stay tuned. As big Kev would have said, 'I'm excited!'

StoryBoard - Work in Progress updates

Finally got storyboard scanned in and submitted to Cathie for final marking of MA3, felt pretty good about it and as always helped me geerate some other ideas for my major prac.

Been watching a few films lately trying to understand how the plot works as compared to the story and find it quite a difficult to discern the two which I can only assume that the director and scriptwriter of the films I have been watching have done very good jobs, as the story and plot have become one.

I watched Monsters vs Aliens in 3D at the cinemas the other day and it was terrific and very inspirational as I think animation is more where I want to head at the end of the day and this lead me to thinking that perhaps my ARG 'Humanoid' should focus on that using AE as the puppet pins look quite powerful.

Up front I must say that my characters are a bit of a rip off from Cyanide & Happiness but only because I find them easy to draw and my drawing skills are crap! So what I plan to do at the moment as I mess around with filming Second Life and Exit Reality web pages is do some illustrations stick figure style and see if I can import them as composits into AE and mess around with Puppet Pins animating them.

What I think I am lacking a little bit of so far is being able to tell a story, maybe its the plot thats missing, am I plotless? Oh dear...

Anyway here are some images of my storyboard which hopefully explain a bit about my project thus far.

Crazy ideas!

I've been having some crazy ideas for my ARG and as I am at work I have nowhere to jot them down so I am putting them here.

Create some 2D flat zombie looking freaks in Illustrator
These zombies could be the people that have been online too long in the 'unreality' world and could be the things you need to help escape by unplugging them
Could have become so digital that they are 2d instead of 3d like my avatar

More to come...

Machinima & Compositing in After Effects

I have been getting so excited with the prospects of what is possible with After Effects this weekend has been great.

I know my last post was pretty boring, simple lightning effects with some exploding effects but this is really the first time I have built my own compositions with artistic license usually bound by the boring corporate monkey life that I am forced to live to pay the mortgage - &*%*&$?!!!

Anyway, got that off my chest, got The Kooks on in the background, a puppy dog on my lap who is watching every movement of the mouse cursor on screen quite curiously, I am sure she can read, and a successful (albeit only mostly) composite Machinima creation of my very own - my very first! Secretly quite chuffed with myself.

And on top of that I have successfully combined multiple effects, and I wont say mastered, but now I do understand each of them better by virtue of practice I am sure things will only get better. The key effect I needed was green screening (Keylight 1.2 in AE) to get rid of most of the look of second life and plunge my avatar (note UoN t-shirt I am wearing - kitsch!) into a bleak and dreary yet kinda shiny world of digitisation. I didnt want to remove everything from SL but rather I wanted to more B&W look with the ocean glow effect beneath and although I am not convinced I entirely understand how I did it, I did it. :P

I have also done some colour correcting and then composited two compositions together to create this (see movie below). I also needed to mask out the ID of my avatar which I just couldn't turn off in SecondLife. Another downfall to overcome. I also had to download some trial software to capture my Machinima action which was clunky and I am not the best at camera control in SecondLife so the footage actually is not that desirable either but in concept it is coming together. Masking out the ID title has left a nasty black hole which I am not sure how to get rid of as I had to change its layer propertie to Subtract to remove it but that has gone through the composited footage as well so it looks pretty tacky people, but I am getting there.



I just published and previewed the movie and it looked terrible! All gone to crud because of the smaller quality I exported out of QuickTime Pro so I have had another go on different compression rate setting but I cant promise you it will look much better! If I had much more time I would fix this right up and export it at a much higher frame rate and post it to my YouTube page but right now other things are calling me away from the darkness of my studio/office/room/computer...

Playing with lightning

I've always been obsessive about lightning in all its forms, so to be able to play around with special effects lightning on screen well its like a dream come true.

This probably seems a bit weak putting this quick title sequence together cause it is very basic and I need to master the advanced lightning effect parameters a lot better but I got so excited when I first saw my creation I just had to post it.

More to come.

Work in Progress - Major Assignment

Well it certainly has been an interesting course thus far!

While I tortured myself thinking 'too big' about my final assignment and harboured badly over the written essay, a really good phone catch up with Cathie on Monday night has pulled me into line.

While I havent got any screen grabs to show examples of my Major Prac just yet I have plenty of stuff in my head so here is a bit of a written run down on where I am at.

I am pitching for financial backing for the creation of an ARG. My ARG is called HUMANOID. In Humanoid the typical Web 2.0 user is gradually overcome by too much time spent online in chat rooms and social networks and turned into Avatar and becomes completely digital!

In the digital world the Avatar will roam through 3D web simulated pages (software created by Exit Reality) where all the social network sites are represented by buidldings of the pages which look really cool.

I am going to use Machinima to simulate some footage for the digital segments I need to create (it gets a little washy here but will concrete as I get film on tape) and I will simulate this using the Second Life platform and an Avatar I created last year in Second Life for the lectures that took place at the UoN island created by Roger Quinn on 3D animation & rendering. I can use this simulation for some of the 'gone digital' time.

I also intend to film either a) myself at my computer or b)a friend using a computer in the 'real world' and then hope to use After Effects and a morphing simulation where the two worldsd 'tween' together and become one.

I have been working on some drama treatments, synopsis developments and general writing of ideas to help me cement these ideas down, and this is where I started to bog down and thinking way too big for this trimester.

I am now committing to creating 3 pieces of footage to meet the specifics of the brief, although I worry about my ideas still being too large!

The 3 ideas I am developing are:

1) 3D title sequence "Humanoid - how will YOU get escape WHICH reality"
2) Bumper - something exciting and fast paced
3) Video segments - some eye catching action from real worl to digital realm

All of these ideas are still a bit loose and will tighten up over time, but Cathie in discussion over the phone agreed that this is a good approach.

Still very excited about getting 'pen to paper' with this project, just very time poor at the moment.

As soon as I have some draft ideas exported out of After Effects I will post more regular updates here and on my YouTube page.

PS - After Effects is amazing! I love morphing using the paint brush and using 3D space to change block text stuff, I wish I knew all of this when I did my first video!

DM