Colour Illustrations

Just starting the colour work for the document and the presentation. . .should have started last week, so no pressure.

Hopeing to use hand drawn illustrations, scanned in and painted using Photoshop. . .as I haven't used Photoshop before for painting and as I have only just learnt about this programme on the IT training courses, it should be fun to see what comes out.

Presentation document/bible

Found this quite difficult to write, starting to get there. . .at one point I was putting too much information in and then not feeling like it was enough!

Don't feel I can write as if I am talking either. . .what I have written so far isn't quite corporate but it isn't that loose either.

Also found that I was repeating myself in the different sections. . .trying to write something in brief at the beginning and then in more detail.

I am not a sales person and never will be!

RENDERING - Oh. . joy of joys!

I always get to the point of wanting to export and render and a cold sweat brakes out, and fear grips me to the core.

Spent a day rendering trying to understand the process, kept getting the wrong size output. . .still don't understand it but I have at least cracked it. On the 18th of November 2008, a Tuesday, a most auspicious day, I successfully rendered my BBC Animatic as an avi file, with no compression (as it was made up of bitmaps) at the correct frame size 1024 x 576. . .hurrah!

Somethings which have been understood by most people for so long now, are at least not completely out of my understanding now. . .that is until next time!

Anyway. . . I felt accomplished.

Really annoying though. . .when you 'test movie' in Flash it doesn't pick up the odd mistake, like a frame being out of sync, nor does it show up in the preview window in Premiere. They only show up in the rendered piece. . .so you go through the whole rendering process and only then find all your mistakes and have to go back through correcting and re-rendering until its right, but at least I can now render under my own steam!

In fact I can now render away to my hearts content. . .happy hours spent rendering!!!!!

BBC presentation project-1st entry

I had decided on a story which I wrote a couple of years ago, it was developed into an interactive CD project which used all vector illustrations. At the time I was more concerned with getting the interactive story and audio sorted, wanting to get to grips with vector drawing. I was never very happy with the illustrations so I thought this project would be a chance to develope the project visually and edit the story (which needs a lot of editing!)

I also want to write the script, but I know this will tak a long time as the narrative is currently about 8'500 words.

I started with the animatic as I thought this process would kick start the whole project.

I am quite happy with the result so far on the animatic, found some music, which will probably sound inappropriate when played on the big screen in front of everyone, but I like it! If I have time I will include some sound effects, but I know that this is not my area. . .so I don't want to ruin things.
I used Flash to animate some of the scenes in the animatic, hand drawn images in pencil scanned in and resized where needed. Because these images are bitmaps there are some that become speckled. I tried to resize where I could, but because I wanted to use zooming in and out from shots it was difficult to always have the correct size required. I managed to get the correct size of images in most of the shots by using smaller psd files in the background and when zooming in swapping over to larger psd files by deleting the smaller files on one layer and beginning a new layer with the larger images. So that at least after the motion of zooming has finished the viewer is at least looking at a better image.

I really like working in black and white, and using hand drawn illustrations. This process did start to bring my story to life which was great.

Became more familiar with Flash through this animatic exercise too.

I WILL UPLOAD SOME IMAGES WHEN THE INTERNET ALLOWS ME TO!!!!

Soundscape and Editing

I didn't find these projects difficult as such, I just don't think in terms of sound.

My soundscape wasn't very good I think, I did the editing and recording at home. . .but my computer processor is quite loud, which isn't a problem went dealing with images. And the speakers are just the internal ones on the computer, so I found listening to the finished piece at home was completely different from hearing it on speakers in the studio.
Suddenly all the breaks in the music and joins of the sound effects really stuck out like a sore thumb! Oh well. . .didn't think I had done great anyway!!

But it did point out exactly how important good speakers are, or at least equivalent speakers to where you are going to play the track.

Some of the soundscapes were great, Adam's and Jacob's, imparticularly really brought images to mind which matched their intentions.

Conlusion : don' mind editing sound from already recorded pieces, that can be fun if you have sufficient time to get into it. . .but the whole recording foley effects and dealing with trying to evoke atmosphere (which I agree is so important) is just not a skill I have. I find I just don't really know where to start. . .

2nd Year

My first entry this term. . .its taken quite a while to get to do this!

A very slow start to the year for me and an even slower start to getting back to work.