Digital Media Production (Year 1)
When I initially started this course it seemed very much like the course I had previously completed at my college. My college course was a Btec in Moving Image and was primarily based on units requiring a folder of production work and a finished moving image piece. The main difference between this course and my current course is that all pre-production documentation I am doing currently is stored on an internet blog as opposed to hard copies in a folder. That aside the structure of the course was very familiar, as relief to me as I believe a subject such as this can only be taught properly using practical methods.
Our first brief was to represent what a night out means to us personally using Adobe After Effects to convey our message. Over the period of brainstorming my initial ideas, I heard a lot of other people in my class exploring ideas of personifying alcohol as a beast or monster; showing the altering effects it can have on drinkers. I decided to try and push this idea further with the personification of a wider array of drugs, not just alcohol.
My initial idea was to show a character on a night out with everything shot from their point of view. This character acts as an outsider to drugs, therefore, the drugs he encounters are shown to have stereotypical appearances. The drugs would be people in the club named after the drug’s ‘street slang’ using names such as ‘Mandy’ for MDMA, ‘Billy’ for Amphetamines and ‘Lucy’ for LSD. They would each be personified in their own unique way, such as increasing the brightness and vibrancy of the scene for Mandy or adding hallucinogenic animations around Lucy.
However I decided not to follow this idea, instead making a piece that encompasses my current view on how the nightclub scene is an overhyped farce, designed and inflated to draw people’s hard earned money. My idea was to show a group of ‘normal’ young people finishing a shift and going straight from there to a nightclub. From the moment they enter the club money begins to drop from everyones pocket like coins in a video game. The characters order a drink and as this happens the scene transforms to show everyone acting drunk and inappropriate. The characters would then be shown leaving the club as bums; completely penniless!
I intended this piece to be created using photographs of my classmates, which I then extracted using Adobe Photoshop. I designed the backdrops as a series of faces in Photoshop which I then rotated across various axis to form a three dimensional effect.
Although I had planned for this I didn’t allow myself enough time to complete this piece therefore leaving it unfinished. This was unfortunate as I believe it was a decent concept and in future I would allow more time for development.
Another unit we began at the start of the course was the 3D animation unit. This was the most difficult for me as I had no prior experience with both the style of animation and the software we used. We were required to use Autodesk Maya to create our piece, a program I found to be tedious and confusing from the start due to its hierarchal structure. Due to this I decided to create something relatively simple so that I could gain a basic understanding of the procedures within Maya, without it seeming overwhelming. After a classmate demonstrated how to create a gravity field I decided to utilize this effect, using it to make a beer can fall and ricocheting off of various surfaces. For the can I created a cylinder and two ring shapes that I placed at the top and the bottom of the cylinder to create a can shape. I then used a series of extruded cubes to create the ring pull. With my shape ready I created a skin for my object using the ‘Stella Artois’ logo I found on the internet. The rest of the skin I had to draw myself based on pictures of stella cans. I then created and rotated a series of cylinders to act as abstract platforms for the can to bounce off and added gravity.
I was rather proud of the project even though the finished piece doesn’t look to impressive at all. I managed to make something with a program I knew nothing about and to the most part feared although on reflection 3D animation is not a path I wish to pursue.
Our third project for the first term was called ‘Principles of Sound and Video’ where we were asked to plan and shoot a viral video; a video designed primarily to be viewed on host sites such as Youtube. This was our first group project of the year. Our idea was to show a series of people playing instruments from their living rooms, in the same style that many people use on the internet when making a recording of their instruments. The people in the videos play different instrument but they all play riffs from the same song and the clips were recorded note for note. We then overlayed the recorded riffs to form the song in its entirety and cut the video in a way that it changed the person performing from note to note. This gave it an overall choppy style making the video seem more lively.
I was most impressed with how this project turned out especially considering the difficulties we had within the group and my own doubts as to weather the final piece would present itself correctly.
In the second term we were assigned another two projects. The first was Short Form Video, which is a film with a relatively short duration in comparison to feature length, lasting between 5 and 15 minutes. This was another project we undertook as a group. We were given a basic plot outline from our lecturer which was divided into 6 perspectives to be shot from. Each of our groups was assigned a perspective from this story, our perspective being the terrorists.
Initially hen we were told we were going to be terrorists we thought about being either muslim or irish terrorists as they are the stereotypes commonly known throughout our media today. However were decided not to conform to such a strong stereotype for various reasons from causing offense to unoriginality. In accordance to this we decided to base our characters on cyber terrorists and linked our story in the the recent efforts to extradite hacker Gary McKinnon to the united states.
We had planned to set our film in a basement and shoot it from the base room of the enterprise building but then we discovered that another group within our class required us to use Sopley Airbase as one of our shooting locations. So to adjust to this we shot our final scene there along with a blank scene of the base which we later green-screened into our other shots that we filmed in the base room, making it seem like it all takes place at Sopley (more or less).
One of the reasons I enjoyed this project the most is because I was able to write a script for it. It’s made me feel that script writing may be a path that I could pursue as I find it less stressful and an easier outlet for my creativity. As well as this the strict shooting schedule and array of equipment made this project feel more like a professional shoot, even if it did cause stress.
On the whole I feel like I am most proud of this project even if it is rather sketchy still, it shows the potential of what we could be creating.
Our last project which is still under development is the Post Production unit. For this unit we’ve been asked to use Adobe After Effects to composite images or effects over footage or animations. For this project I decided to continue with the idea I had for the ‘Lucy’ character from my night out project. I want to show a character who eats some mushrooms then watches the world distort around him. I plan to create an effect similar to a Kaleidoscope with bright light being accentuated as well as a faint soundtrack to further encompass the mood.
In conclusion I have learn many different techniques this year and many different methods of achieving things. I have learnt how to make primitive models within Maya but also learnt that Maya is not a program I wish to be using for the rest of my life. I have also learnt a lot about directing and controlling the team when on set. My mind has also ben opened to the possibilities that lie with Adobe After Effects including the creation of eye catching titles and fonts as well as constructing mock 3d sets. The final project has also made me more aware of how to string clips within a scene together seamlessly, from how poor and jumpy some of the scenes in our Short Form appeared.
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