Steven’s Mediaworks Production Blog

Last week was a production week. I ripped a few more DVDs and did some editing. I think it looks pretty good so far. It still needs some work in terms of the green screen but I downloaded the trial of After Effects and I’ll experiment some more with it and I have a lot more movies coming from summit this week. Yesterday was critique. I thought it went pretty well, I think that I am going to try to have multiple TV’s in my installation or multiple reels running. We will see, I need to experiment so far. It was nice to hear feedback that kind of lets me know I am on the right path, it seemed like everyone liked it. I also need to work on planning how I want my installation to be. (No affinity group meeting this week, although we are trying to meet and finish watching Amadeus)

Which one should I buy?? It’s for my intallation piece. Read the previous posts if you don’t know what my project is…

#1. This one is 50 bucks but it is AWESOME and has the right connectors…      #2. Or this one? Its still pretty cool, its only 25 bucks but it has weird connectors…

This week I spent mostly doing internship work but I found some time to jump into the MML and go on after affects to key out the green screen. I didn’t really have any idea what I was doing because I have never worked with After Affects before but I think I figured out the right thing. It wasn’t too hard, especially since I use Premiere on a regular basis and they are slightly similar in the layout. I figured out how to add a color key to my clip but I couldn’t figure out how to splice it…seems like there should be a way. Anyway, it looks SO MUCH better now. I might go back to do a few small touch-ups but it looks great. I am fo sho excited. I also met with Margaritte and Guy to talk about our installation room and I think we have it mostly figured out. I am going to play my piece on a loop on a TV in the center of the room. It should be cool. I went to Goodwill today to do some TV shopping and found a cool one but it didn’t have the right hook ups (or at least any that I knew would work, I’ll check my DVD player today and see if I can make it work). I also found a really cool one that has the right hook ups and is in this really cool wooden case but it’s 50 bucks…I dunno. We will see.

At our affinity group meeting we got to see some of Otis’s work which was WAY good and we heard the revised version of Ben’s narration which was a lot better than we heard on Tuesday.

Wow, week 6 is over. I have a lot of work to do. I am still working on getting the television green screened out properly. I think I am going to hop over to the MML one of these days and use After Effects and just get it done instead of trying to mess around with Premiere’s not as good chroma keying. Because of these problems, I am learning a lot about Premiere and how keying works so that’s good.

Ann (my internship supervisor) let me borrow a bunch of her Disney movies including Mulan (1 and 2), Cinderella, and some Barbie princess movies. Nice. Now I should have a decent amount of material for the background. I’ll try to grab a few more movies in the next few days.

The affinity group meeting was really good, we watched American Movie this week which made me feel oh so good about going into independent film. Yay being poor!

Also, what the @#*%&(!#$ am I going to do next year????

Here is a clip from an installation piece called Populi. This piece was very inspirational to me, my style is directly influenced by it and yeah, I think it’s awesome.

http://www.kachew.com/work.php?showmovie=242

Ok, time for a REAL blog.

Last week was all internship stuff and very minimal this project stuff. I worked a little bit with the green screening and keying. I have been having a bit of trouble making it look good so I might find another program that works with it. When I am keying, I have been getting blotches outside of the area that I want to key that are getting pulled out which is no good so I have been trying to find a way to use a matte or something so that I can key JUST the television. I’ll update on how this works. Too bad I didn’t have better light, I wish the toxic fumes wouldn’t have impaired my decision making process. The next step is getting footage for the television, but I’ll talk about that later.

I missed the affinity group meeting which I was kind of bummed about because I didn’t get to see Rowan’s stuff. The meeting got moved to Friday morning because Rowan was filming on Thursday but I could not attend because of my neon sign class. Next week I will hopefully be able to see some of the stuff.

I haven’t really been addressing the things I’ve learned so far in my blogs so, to appease Marilyn, I’ll try to get to everything now (which may end up being a little repetitive in my internship blog but whatevs). The main thing I have been learning is how to balance time. It’s been extremely crazy trying to juggle working on my own project versus the internship. I feel more of a connection with the internship and want to work on that as much as possible and thus end up either doing one or the other instead of both. This has led me to end up being behind on both because I get a little stressed whenever I think about how much I have to do and then I end up not doing either. Bad plan. I’m working on that though.

Another thing that I have learned, especially in the melting episode, is that pre-production and planning and thinking of every single tiny thing is imperative to staying on schedule. If I had a group of people that I was working with, they would all hate me right now. I hadn’t tested my torch before melting and ended up having to run and get one. I also didn’t think about the amount of smoke that would result in the melting or even about how the melting would actually work which was very different than what I had imagined in my head.

Now that I’m done shooting, the next task is to get footage to put on the television. This has been a bit of a problem with the lack of pre-production and the lack of time management skills. I didn’t really plan out what I wanted to put on the television and so here I am in week 6 scrambling to find material and time to go through the material to find clips of stuff I want in the background.

I have found that I am learning more from the experience of doing this kind of project and internship than I am from the material I am working with. My failures in this project have put a permanent imprint on me that will hopefully never go away because this is not a process I wish to repeat.

Oh yeah, I started a different blog for anything about my internship. Here is the link: Internship Blog

And there is a link in my links.

Ok, I can’t figure out this weird media uploader thing on this site so I posted them to my photobucket. Here is a link. I think they are self explanitory (except for maybe the picture of my thumb after I smashed it.

Quite the process…

Time to melt. Sam is here helpin me out. He is going to be operating the compuer while I operate the torch and the scissors for Barbie’s hair. I hope I have enough fuel…

Soo. The torch isn’t staying lit. Hiatus time.

Ok, I’, back and with a new torch head. Time to melt.

Wow, way more smoke than i imagined. My room is gonna friggen nasty. I should have done this outside.

Ok, I’m done… I don’t want to breath this nastyness anymore. It’s WAAAAY shorter than I was hoping but too bad. It’ll be like Rowan’s 1 min thing.