Psycho Killer live on stop making sense vidéo.
What is the best beer on planet Earth?
Submitted by Remmy Van Hornie.
Blue Moon Ale
What kind of camera(s) do you own?
Er... I should be expected to answer this one.
Hasselblad 500c/m - 6x6 Medium format
Nikon D2h - DSLR "work cam"
Nikon D70 - DSLR "party cam"
Nikon FM2 - 35mm SLR "art school cam"
Nikon Coolpix 5000 - Prosume digicam "the backup"
Panasonic LX2 - Digital P&S "Drunk cam"
Ricoh GR10 - 35mm P&S "artsy drunk cam"
Sanyo C5 - Digital P&S "Photos and video time!"
Ricoh Auto half - half frame 35mm P&S "it's 40 years old!"
Holga 120N - long exposure modded "toy cam but not quite"
Holga 120SF - "toy cam with flash!"
There are a few more I'm forgetting, but these are the ones I use most.
So with four days away until due date, I'm going to start doing a run down of the elements in this film. Mostly to show what they are, but also a bit of discussion as to how these pieces fits (or doesn't) within the project.
First off the motion graphic pieces that shows up on the TVs and jumbotron in the film. These were definitely the hardest elements to lock down. I originally planned to create up to six versions to be mapped on to the CG screens, but with production time for the CG elements taking up more time than I had hoped, I decided to cut down the number of screens to three.
The most difficult thing about the production of these screens comes from the fact that everything was all based on the same "brand" 'The number one product', I wanted to keep typography consistent thought out all three spots, but that created a quit difficult situation in terms of designing them, since to have each screen holds it's own in the scene, they have to be stylistically very different spot.
The three themes I went with were, a pop culture based spot, a product/infomercial spot and a personality/celebrity spot. The idea behind these spots and actually the whole film are based on a lot of Asian advertising styles, where advertising literally only feature the brand and an A-list celebrity spokesperson and most of the time, the celebrity really have nothing what so ever to do with the product. I've always found this concept to be very interesting where a brand is purely driven by celebrity tie-ins. Especially compared to western advertising where the focus is associating an emotional attachment to a brand and less about having some celebrity vouch for a product.
Of all the elements I created for this film, I really hoped to have more time to develop the design of these spots. Personally I really want the designs to be a bit more thought out and more elegantly put together, but not having these spots built were really holding up the CG rendering, plus given it only shows up for about 1 and a half second or so in the whole piece, this was a compromise I am happy to deal with.
At the same time, I really do like the somewhat over the top boldness of the moves and treatment. In a way, it fits the very Asian corporate design sense. They want it loud, they want to show that they spend a crap load of money on the spots, I was definitely thinking of my art director when I was working in web design in Hong Kong, I remember the very line I got was "Keith, your designs are too American, you have got to add more to it, the clients are not going to be happy to see they paid all that money for a few lines and blocks. Needs to be louder."
The past few days have been a lesson in learning when to call it quits. For all intents and purposes, I've been done with this project for two weeks. The good thing about this is that I have ample time to tweak and get feedback on the piece, of course the ample time also led to an overly obsessive attention to minor details.
For example, should anyone really need to spend 3 days tweaking a 15 frame transition? It is my hope that the attention to details at that level will show, but at the end of the day, people will most likely not notice, or pick up on something very obvious that I've managed to miss. As a friend of mine commented after showing him the piece, he said, "When you stress out over a detail, I can't tell if you are just being neurotic or that you are just really good at this." I didn't say at the time cuz I'd like the think I'm really that good, but yeah I was just being neurotic.
One of the things I was glad I got feedback on was on was for the titles and credits. During production of the motion graphics elements, I was obsessing over a type treatment that I really wanted to try out, but it didn't fit with the overall styles of the motion graphic pieces I was making for the screens. So I decided to save that for the titles and credits as it felt like something that would work well with my piece. So I spend quite a bit of time making that work and convinced myself that it fits the overall style. But stylisticlly it was such a huge deperture from the actual piece that I decided that it actually took away from the actual content of the film. This was definitely one aspect that I was very glad that I got very constructive feedback on, as if no one had pointed it out, I'd have convinced myself that the very elegant, fine and curvy type treatment actually fits with a CG piece that features a lot of really bold type and hard angles.
I think I found a middle ground with the type treatment, I really like the outline to fill transition for me to completely give up on it, ending up going all caps and a bolder serif font (Breughel Black). It's a good thing to have a departure from my love for San serifs.
I've gone back to reading my thesis research paper and reread my goals as to what I am trying to achieve with this project, I was really hoping what I wrote a few months back will help me make this decision. But they both work within the style I'm looking for, I think the warmer look fits better with the overall theme of what I'm trying to say with this piece. But the cooler tone I think looks better... eh, decisions...
With 10 days to go before thesis due date, I find myself at an odd situation. I'm done, and have been for a few days now. This is new to me, very very new to me. I've been known to be the type of person who's always stressing out, working down to the wire, to the 11th hour, sleepless for weeks, making deadlines minutes before it goes on air kind of deal.
But here I'm done, ok done not in that "this is a masterpiece, you can't improve on perfection" sort of done, more in the likes of, I'm content with what I've created and will be fine with handing it in, if I am told that this is actually due tomorrow.
I mean as with any creative work, is it ever really done? You either run out of time or you've given up on trying to improve it. The only reason I've stopped is because I have solid final renders for all my scenes and decided I needed to get started with compositing and check if all the scenes are working.
This is a rather scary time, the next 10 days, for I'll watch the film over and over again, looking for the tiniest flaws and attempt to fix it. And I'll show it to a friend, who will watch it and make a very innocent comment about a color choice, a lighting angle or a pacing issue and have that comment throw me into a frantic emergency mode as I attempt to redo complete scenes because that never occurred to me during production.
Right now I'm busying myself with color grading. I have two color styles I'm toying with, one sticking to the cold stark sci-fi blue, green thing. Another one where I'm pushing a warmer color set over a what should be a stark cold environment. Both looks I've played with in the past year photographically, both styles I love equally.
This is the toss up now. I'm leaning more toward the warmer tones, since it's something I've started playing with recently and also a style that I want to develop further.
While the colder looking blue green style is much more indicative of a stark urban distpoian night scene. As a color and a style, it's easier for the viewer to identify with the mood I'm trying to convey, as they can relate to prior usage of such color combination.
I have both version rendered for a screen color test tomorrow, as much as a creative decision this is going to be, it may very well end up being a technical one where one of the styles works better with the projector we are using during thesis defense.
Also a good thing to have noticed this early is that, I'm already seeing presentation issues right now, my D1 footage looked a lot brighter after going through a mpeg 2 compression to go on DVD. This may just be the difference of how Quicktime plays back on a computer VS how the apple DVD player plays back footage, the issue right now is the Apple DVD player pushes the gamma up way too high, it would be really bad for this to ruin my presentation. The color test later will help answer a lot of these questions.
