CMP1014 Creative Technologies 2007: January 2008

Tuesday, 8 January 2008

Ten Second Film Festival - Evaluation

Whenever I try to do something creative, there are always elements of the project which I could improve and do better on. I like to evaluate my work myself and have others constructively criticise what I have created.

The first and possibly most obvious criticism to note is that a few of the photographs are slightly out of focus. Although this is not easily noticeable on first viewing, after you have seen the film a few times you will see which frames are out of focus or exposed slightly differently.

As mentioned in a previous post, I had problems with reflections on the lego bricks and the opening shots of the animated part of the movie had a butter tub reflecting off the walls. Because the scenes move so quickly, this doesn't cause too much of a problem, although it is still apparant if you look closely enough.

If I had more time (and I still might) to add a few extra touches to the video, I would edit each still photo individually and apply a coloured filter to give the impression of flashing lights. This would give the model more atmosphere and put it in a better environment for the type of film I have made. Having posted this post 3 days before submission, I don't know if I'll have enough time to do this effectively, but I am certainly willing to try!!

If anyone reading this blog notices anything else about the film that could be changed or improved, send me a comment or email because no ideas for improvement will be turned away!

Overall, I have really enjoyed doing this assessment. It is the first time I have ever attempted to create a good animation, and doing this has made me realise just how long an episode of the Simpsons must take to shoot! It really does take a long time. I hope you'll all agree that the results of a hard day shooting photographs are tremendous!

Thanks for reading! Keep checking back for new assessment tasks!!!

Ten Second Film Festival - The Viewing

The video is complete, and now everyone's dying to watch it! So here it is!!!

I hope you like it!!

Ten Second Film Festival - Production (Part 4)

Now the video has been completed in Adobe Premiere Pro CS3, it is time to think about how I will export the video. The assessment brief states that the submission should include a Full PAL version of the movie (which won't play directly from CD), and at least one other version in a format that will play directly from CD to present to an audience.

Fulfilling the first requirement is straightforward. Selecting Export from the File menu allowed me to save the movie in different video formats (rather than the Premiere Pro Project Filetype). I needed to check the settings were all correct before saving the file.

To convert the file to different CD-playable formats, I didn't use Adobe Premiere Pro, because it was limited in the available codecs that I could use. I used a piece of software called Total Video Converter which converts between just about any file formats. Using this program I was able to convert my full PAL video to a number of more user friendly formats that had reduced file sizes.

There are 6 screenshots that demonstrate the process of using this software to convert files to different video formats.

I converted the movie to MPEG, MP4, Flash (SWF) and Quicktime (MOV). This gave me a fighting chance of being able to play at least one of the four on the lecture theatre projection system!! The different formats all had different advantages and disadvantages, although overall, the MP4 conversion seemed to have the best video and audio quality overall. All the converted videos play well from CD, although some of them have interlacing problems and aren't as smooth when it comes to rapid picture changing.

All the formats seemed to reduce the movie size from normal PAL (720 x 576) which made viewing at full screen quite difficult. Again, the MP4 movie seemed to reduce the dimensions of the frames the least, so looks better when played full screen.

Ten Second Film Festival - Production (Part 3)

The model is complete, but I have one major problem. The motherboard in my computer has short circuited which has slowed the project down majority, because I wasn't expecting this!! I ended up with a couple of days downtime when I couldn't access any work, but ended up working on a different system to piece together all the photographs.

The following is an in depth explanation of the photographing session:

Stage 1 - Taking The Photos

Before I started to take the photos, I thought about any problems I might come in contact with, and tried to find solutions to overcome them before they arose. For example, I know that cameras focus differently in changing light conditions, so I needed a constant source of light. To do this, I used a pitch black room (the curtains in my flat are great!!) and a desk lamp. Doing the photographing in this manner prevented any images having varied lightness and all images were equally visible.

Another problem which I had to overcome was the reflections off the Lego bricks. By the time I'd finished I was wishing that Lego had a matt finish rather than a glossy one!! I was constantly having to move objects or the camera to reduce the number of unwanted reflections. On evaluation of the finished movie, I should have been more careful at the beginning of the film when the camera shows the outside walls of the model. If you look carefully you can make out the Utterly Butterly tub that the lamp was stood on!!!

With any possible problems taken care of as much as I could, I got to work shooting the photographs. I had to make sure that each photograph was focused and exposed correctly, as any differences between photos would be noticeable when they were sequenced in post-production. I used a tripod to keep the camera steady and in the same place for each shot, and used the storyboard to try and stick to my original idea as much as possible. You will notice a few extra shots in the finished movie that don't appear on the storyboard. This was because I needed something extra to fill the ten seconds and keep the film fast paced along with the audio track.

Some of the shots required alterations to the model. For example, it was difficult to do over shoulder shots from the DJ booth and the bar, because it meant taking the entire back wall off the structure to enable me to get my camera in a suitable place to take the photos. I had problems focusing some of the shots when using full zoom with macro mode, so some photographs aren't as close-up to the characters as I wanted, but I did the best I could to get good effective stills to use in the video.

12 AA batteries and about 200 photographs later (I only used 150 for 15fps), and the shooting stage was completed.

Stage 2 - Post Production
With the photographs completed, I could started piecing them together in Adobe Premiere Pro. I previously created the titles and the credits, so the stills could just be dropped into the ten second gap that was purposefully left in the middle. Because it was a ten second video and I was using 15fps, each still image needed to be 2 frames long. I told Premiere to automatically import images so that they were two frames long by using the Edit |Preferences menu.

I had to get rid of any unwanted photographs before I imported them into Premiere. I got the image count down to 150, and it was simply a case of dropping the images in order into the timeline. Because I chose to do an animation, I couldn't do any fancy video transitions between scenes because each image is a separate frame. I thought about perhaps doing some split screen or picture in picture work, but decided against it as it would be difficult for the viewer to watch both sides of the screen of such a fast cutting movie. Because there weren't many transitions and effects used in the actually ten second film itself, I tried to include as many techniques as I could in the titles and credits to compensate for this.

Below are some screenshots and explanations of production techniques used in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Importing Images at 2 Frames Long - Use the Edit | Preferences menu to open up the General Settings dialog. Here you can set the default length that images will be added to the timeline with. The program defaults is 150 frames for each image. I set this to 2 frames so that I wouldn't have to edit the length of every single photograph.

Importing Images - Using the File | Import menu opens up a dailog box that allows images, sound, and video to be imported to the project Bin.

Adding Video Effects & Transitions - Using the video effects and transitions menu, it is easy to simply drag and drop effects onto clips in the timeline. The preferences for each individual effect can then be edited individually once it is on the timeline. For example, the speed of a transition can be changed, or the parameters of a filter might need to be different to the default. These changes can all be made once the effects is on the timeline.

Adding Markers - Markers were very useful when it came to synchronising the video with the underlying audio track. Pressing the * key on the numeric keypad in time with the music added markers to the timeline, so I knew where the beats in the music were. This makes synchronisation a lot easier and the project came together much quicker than it would have done without the use of this feature.

Once the stills had been added to the titles and credits made earlier, I could export the movie in various forms. This process is explained in depth in the next post.

Sunday, 6 January 2008

Ten Second Film Festival - Production (Part 2)

Once the Christmas break began, I started work on the build of the set, which of course is a Lego Club, built from my extensive collection of Lego from when I was younger. You can see just how much Lego I have from the pictures below.