NEW BRIEF. Thoughts and feelings

So, I tried starting a new blog for this final year. However, on publishing my second blog about research Tumblr crashed whilst uploading and I lost my post. Very, very, unbelievably annoying. I started that day just wanting to catch up on blogging, since moving house we have been without the net for 2 months, hence why there hasn't been any posts. But, after Tumblr failed it demotivated me and I couldn't get myself back in the mood to write.

Back to Blogger, my trusty friend. There are aspect of blogger that really annoy me, images don't upload where you left the cursor, they load at the top of the post and if you have a long post its not the easiest to drag it where it should go. And, if your wanting more than one image, your fucked.

Back to the College project (sort of), they idea in a nutshell, the usual three (Graeme, Mark and I) are planning on making three short sequences to develop our filmmaking techniques. On the 2nd year FMP we did really well with casting, locations, script, using the camera and equipment available. We far exceeded our expectations, and I think maybe our peers and tutors too. It was a massive project for 2nd year students, But thats who I am, If it comes easy its not worth doing, I aim big, but I don't mind failing big. That frame of mind might change once I'm in the industry and nobody wants to fund my big ambitions.

This is a big nutshell by the way.

The final outcome of the three sequences should be film quality, thats the aim. Getting that is a bonus, the real project is in the preparation. We did so many good things on the 2nd year FMP, but we also did many things wrong. The art direction was next to none, we mostly tried to find locations to fit the scene, and as we grew closer to the shoot we had to use what came available (office scene), I don't think we purposely brought anything to the shoot to improve the shot. We did a little bit of rehearsing, but without storyboards or a shot list it made matters difficult on set. We had a few crew members helping us with sound, but between the three of us we had 40 crew members jobs, which personally made directing a nightmare, on reflection I didn't think I even directed the cast very well, just told them there markers. It was lucky we did a day of rehearsing were we got the actors into character and they did the rest themselves.

From that paragraph you can see we didn't really prepare for the shoot technically, some of the camera work and compositions are terrible. Thats not to blame one person, its the fact we didn't have time to set lights up correctly, reset the white balance, find the best composition. Due to all this it made the shoot feel long and stressful. I should add I enjoyed it thoroughly and it was vital experience.

So yeah, in a nutshell, where just practicing.

This will be essential to the FMP, there are a few other techniques and sequences I want to tryout before the FMP. I haven't told the other two yet, it will be a nice surprise, I have however put them in the calendar.

I have a lot of back paddling with blogging. We are already into the fifth week and we have done so much, it'll be hard documenting it all correctly but i'll do my best. I really wanted to video blog it all, I tried it on the 2nd year FMP but it got too much to edit and export it whilst working on the project. Video blogging is something I want to get in the habit of, I think it is a great why to document and can make for interesting viewing. I had the idea of recording 20 seconds a day and then collating the footage at the end of the week, like a diary, or a miniature making of. 20 seconds isn't a lot, it shouldn't take up much of my time or effort. But starting it seems really hard, Am I just being lazy? I can't decide whether to use my isight cam for connivence or my DV cam, but then you have to capture the footage and buy a new tape. This could be a great opportunity to use OnLocation, this is a piece of software that came with the adobe production suite. I've never opened it, but what I've read about it sounds good, basically you can use it as a hard drive, but you can also manage the sound, colour and other various key components when shooting. The down side is that you can only use it with other adobe software. I have premiere, but prefer Final Cut. Might be worth looking into though.

So that the brief and a little more...