submission tomorrow!!

i know i haven't blogged in agggggeeeeeeesssssssss!! i've been super busy with juggling between P3 and character design and practicing guitar (i really got to practice at least once in three days...i know i should prioritise and all but if i don't practice i feel like i've deproved!) and still having a life. and my saturdays are pretty much taken up by work (not school work) and i don't have a tablet at home...so i can only do my animation on weekdays! luckily, shermin lent me her spare tablet last week though so i could do some work this weekend. ;] thanks shermin!!

hmm i've been staying till late in the 2D lab the past few days. luckily there is some good company around though so it wasn't as stressful or depressed as i thought i would feel. ;] ohoh and not to forget good music (wootwoot liquid tension experiment!!) and little britain etc. heh. little breaks can really help me to move on and persevere sometimes.

anyway, that's not the point of this entry...tomorrow is our final presentation day!!!! woooooot!! after that, i'll be freeee!!! yayay!! holidays here i come! :D

i'm only fine with my piece though...i know that with more time it'll definitely be better and more complete. i had to cut out the end with the kids walking and another scene because i have no time to animate them! but luckily, those scenes won't take away from the gist of the story. BUT...i could only animate a particular scene (part where the girl loses her footing and falls) and so i'm just going to have a black shot and make use of audio to suggest that she fell off the ladder. hopefully people will get it! :S but i must say that i'm quite proud of myself for having a (somewhat) completed video. i didn't think i could submit a completed piece (though it's not exactly completed in the way i intended!) since i was so far off from my schedule but i still managed to so yay! :]

initially when i first heard that we have a project 3 to do, i was pretty annoyed that we had an extra project to complete unlike the previous batches of students, who only had 2 projects and an FYP. but now, i pretty glad that we had this opportunity to experience P3. now i know that i should set a more realistic schedule and plan more beforehand and not to procrastinate so much (though it can help emotionally and mentally...well at least for me. :X)! if i didn't get an idea on how FYP would be like (with P3), i'll be pretty much screwed i think. i'lll be even more complacent with the knowledge that we have about twice the amount of time for FYP!

hmm i don't really know what else to write...well this is probably the last entry for this blog so TA!! :D can't wait for hoooooollsssssssss!!!! :D:D

Interim 3

today and yesterday, we had interim! i was suppose to present today, but i swapped with one of my classmates so that i could present on the first day since i was done with my updated animatic already. it was a pity that the speakers weren't working though so all the people who presented yesterday had no audio playing for their animatic. by the way, i don't think i've mentioned this yet, i changed my VO. rachael helped me to voice for the main girl this time! thanks rae! ;] but i couldn't get any feedback on the audio though since it cannot be heard. ahh well. but at least i'll be able to see if people understood my piece based on the visuals alone. and i think most people did. :]

some feedback i got from amanda and some of my classmates is that for the scene when the kids walk to the house for treats, the distance seemed a bit long. so i got to do something about that. maybe i might just cut out that part altogether...i'll see if i have enough time to animate that, if not i'll just have to scrap it.

another feedback is that the contrast for certain scenes are not contrasting enough...so i would have to play with levels of something. also, for the scene when the main character moves a pumpkin across the table, amanda suggested that i could use a close-up 3/4 front view of the girl so yea i'm going to do that.

unfortunately, i can't do much work yesterday and today since it's taken up by interim and we got to watch everyones pieces so i'm even more behind of my planned schedule. but at least i got to see my classmates' progress and i must say some of theirs are really looking great!! can't wait to see the finished product. ;]

and today, everyone was really distracted cos our animation year 3 stream had a self-proclaimed "wear-what-you-don't-normally-wear-to-school-day". heh! i wore a dress. it was pretty damn fun though it was a tad uncomfortable for me since i've never worn a dress for like more then a decade! loads of camwhoring and all. but it was a nice little break from our daily routine. so yeaaa. :] i don't know why but i've been feeling rather unmotivated to work lately! ahh i hope that feeling goes away soon. i'm working at a slower pace then when i first started and i'm taking more short breaks then i deserve.

pictures!

Hmm i realised that i haven't updated in a while or posted any pictures of my stuff up yet! so here's a quick look at my character design.



yeaaaaaaaaaa.

i've been busy with character design and P3 and it's eating up alot of my time. i made a gantt chart in hopes that it'll push me to meet the deadline i set for each scene but it isn't going too well. i'm taking a lot more time on a scene than i've expected! i'm going for a sketchy kind of look with lines that move constantly throughout the animation and so i have to practically draw the background (and certain poses) four times to loop it. :S




here's my gantt chart:












but it is quite sastisfying to watch each completed scene though i must admit that i do spot certain mistakes that i know i should correct. but i'm way behind schedule and so i guess i should just move on...and hopefully if i have some extra time, i'll go edit it or something. yeaa.

other then this, i had a consultation with amanda and she gave me suggestions on how i can improve the look of my piece. a few of my classmates also gave me some suggestions but i ended up going with kezia's idea of making it look gray scale instead of my initial black and white idea. but i'm still incorporating my plan of having certain colours show up at certain scenes though.

so yea that's about it! now time to get back to work!

Interim 2

hmm i haven't blogged in quite a while!! been occupied with my group's animation 2 video which is due today. but i didn't completely neglect P3 of course. i got some feedback from alan regarding my storyboard and he gave a couple of suggestions and comments. one of which is about the rope...he felt like it was a little too predictable when the main character hangs a noose on the tree. so i decided to use his suggestion of having the girl hang on fairy lights instead. and when she's swinging in the wires, she can accidently hit the switch for the fairy lights and it'll light or something. ;]

yea so i revised my storyboards and also did some voice recordings as well! andrea lek helped voice for the girl and one of the passersby, jarrold helped voice the other passerby and andrea and i did the children's voices. thanks alot guys! ;] i had several versions for the girl's voice and i ended up going for the texasan-ish kind of accent cos i thought it was the most expressive and it sounded pretty funny. but alan said i shoudn't after he saw my animatic today. :X heh sounds too weird and uncommercial i guess! so i probably got to re-record or use one of the other versions.

for today's interim session, about 8 people (including myself) presented our animatic. mine isn't complete or finalised yet. it still lacks some sound effects and i feel that there is still some problems with the pacing and timing of certain shots. some feedback i got is that i should make the switch on the ground smaller. and i could let the girl use a step ladder instead of a rope ladder to climb up the tree so that when she loses her footing, the step ladder would fall and hit the switch instead. now the size of the switch is a little too...unrealistically huge. ;b

another feedback is that audiences are unable to distinguish between day from night in my animatic. so i got to do something about that. another one is my pacing and as i've mentioned before, the audio (voice overs) as well. yea so that's pretty much it! hopefully i'll get to spend more time on P3 now that anim2 is pretty much over! we still got another module next block though...which is character designing. hopefully it won't be as time consuming and production heavy!

Group Consultion

today groups 1 and 2 came today for a "consultation" with alan. we were asked to think about the importance and purpose of a gantt chart as well as the task we should include in our chart. alan also suggested a sequence of the type of scenes we could tackle first and what we should tackle last. Also, to reduce workload, we could work smart by using props to cover a characters mouth when talking to avoid having to do lip sync etc. we saw an example of that when we watched wallace and gromit yesterday and its freaking awesome! ;] stop-motion is freaking cool. yea so that's about it!

been rather busy with animation2 and so i haven't really found the time to work on my P3...but i will soon! ;]

changes

We had a class presentation today regarding our chosen stories and storyboards etc.! got some feedback from alan. but before that, we had consultations with alan regarding our learning contracts earlier in the week. Since my story is kinda ironic, he wanted me to up the "irony" factor of the story, and to do that, i should place more emphasis on decorations. so he suggested that i could start off the animation with the girl talking on the phone and telling her friends that her halloween decorations would be the best this year. then after her accidental death, i could end off with her friend's remark on how good her decoration is. :b i like that idea so i'll most probably incorporate it into the story if i can't think of another way to bring out the irony of the story.

For today's presentation, one of the feedback i got was that i can cut down on a couple of frames, especially at the start. this can help me cut down on a lot of animating and save me alot of time. it can also get a bit draggy if the beginning is too long. also, i will need to find more references to get a better idea on how my character would look when she falls into the rope. or maybe instead of a rope she can get tangled and hung in "christmas lights"? hmmmm.

hand up by wednesday! :[

heard in today's class that we gotta hand up our:

-individual storyboards
-learning contract
-character designs
-references
-research plan

all by wednesday!! :X booooo. ahh well...i will be really busy the next couple of days...and my weekend is already taken up by other things! dang. and my group is going to build a set for our other module which will be really time consuming...but we will work it out! i better get started on my learning contract!

i have some ideas for my animation piece. i will probably use messy lines that changes on every different frame...is there a term for that kind of animation? that could be really tedious as i'll have to draw every frame even though a shot might stay for an amount of time. but i think it'll suit the whole halloween theme thing and since my target audience are for 18-21 year olds, i suppose it would work because they would be more open to such a style? hmmm. and i was thinking of using dull colours for the background to bring out the "halloween" dark feel. but i'll some more research and see what other styles i can use. :] i might also limit myself to use only a few colours. yea.

questions

we were told to ANSWER THE FOLLOWING questions on our blog regarding our project:

1. Who are you telling the story for (primary audience)?
—Ages 18-21

2. What reaction do you want?
—Shocked
—Disturbed
- Laughter

3. Is the narrative omniscient (all seeing) or restrictive (viewed from a single perspective)?
(If the narrative is restrictive, whose viewpoint are you using?)
—Omniscent

4. List the important events of the story.
—Establish that it is Halloween (calendar shot)
—Girl puts up decorations around her house
—Wanted to hang a puppet on a tree outside her house
—Lost her footing
—Ended up being the one hung instead
—While gasping for help, passersby thought it was just some prank and laughed it off
—She died.

5. Which aspects of the setting of the story are important (time of day… location… period of history…) and how do you intend to establish these important elements?
—During Halloween
—Night-time
—Location:
+ Start of film - inside the house
+ Climax and end of film - outdoors

6. What traits of the characters in your story are important and how do you intend to establish these traits?
—Girl
+ clumsy (when decorating indoors, she accidentally trips over things and drop or break items)

7. In what order are the important events (step 4 above) covered? Is it a strictly linear sequence of events in time, or does the story contain any flashbacks or other interruptions to the sequence of events?
—Linear

8. How does the story flow, does the pace change? Does it contain a surprise? Consider your answers to 1 and 2 above when making your response.
—Normal pacing
—Surprise:
+ when she accidentally lost her footing and got herself hung

9. How will you use sound to help all your responses to 5-8 above?
—Cheerful music at the start with occasional notes in the minor key? hmmm
—As the story progresses, the music becomes more and more sinister
—No music as she was gasping for help

10. Does your story need dialog?
(write out the dialog)
—Little dialogue
—More of gasping
—Dialogue:
+ "nooooo...please heeeelp me..."
+ *chokes* “Hee…..lp meeee……hel…hel….help….lp.” *dies*

yea so that's it!

Project 3

This blog is to document the processes and experiences that i'll go through during the pre-production, production and post-production of my project 3 in temasek polytechnic's moving images course. so it's basically a production diary. it is individual work and so it's sort of like a mini "FYP" (final year project) to be done in the span of 2 months. and since i'm in the animation major in moving images, we've got to come up with an animated piece for project 3.

before we were given more details on project 3, our class of 26 people was broken up into 5 groups. each group is given a weird scenario and a set of 10 qns for us to answer. my group includes chuinny, jarrold, naf and hanis! We created a PowerPoint slide presentation and presented it to the class. some feedback we got was that we are not descriptive enough and don't give enough details when it comes to establishing a certain setting or a personality trait of a character, such as the way they act, the words they use etc. Establishing the habits and personalities of a character early in the production can help influence the way a story is told, as well as the target audience and reactions we hope they would have.

after this session, we were told to each look for 3-4 weird stories so that we can use the gist of one of the story and create a story and animation based on it. it was pretty interesting searching for weird stories as some of them were really funny and entertaining! and some were pretty morbid and shocking too.

the first one that i found was about a girl who poisoned her boyfriend with a plastic pellet filled with rat poison when she thought that he was cheating on her. by using a kiss, she nudged the pellet into his mouth and he accidentally swallowed it, dying shortly after wards.

here's the link to the article:
http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/strangedeaths/912/kiss_of_death.html



the second story is about a singaporean old man who put his *ehem* private part into a 1.5 litre bottle mouth and couldn't get it out. too embarrassed he waited till it was pretty bad before he seek for help. by then he couldn't urinate as it started to get inflamed and due to other medical complications sparked of from this, he died. :O

here's the link:
http://www.straitstimes.com/Breaking%2BNews/Singapore/Story/STIStory_354806.html



the third one is about a woman who commited suicide by hanging herself near halloween. however people thought it was just a halloween decoration and regarded it as a prank.

link:
http://www.forteantimes.com/strangedays/strangedeaths/328/trick_nor_treat.html



there are a few others but i decided to take these three. i realised that all of them ended in death. heh. :X


anyway, we shared the stories with our group the next day and picked one out of the three to do. then we each presented another member's stories to our class. some of the stories are pretty funny! and some were really strange. but it was entertaining. i decided to do the third story. but i'm changing to look like it was a accident and that it wasn't intentional suicide. i'm also going to change the date to be on the actual day of halloween and it would be set at the victim's house. i have some idea on how the style should be like but i'll tackle the story telling bit first!

yea so that's basically it for the first two days! i have a huge feeling that these two blocks are going to be killer. physically, mentally...two production modules in one block! and for the other module (animation2 - we got to create an animation based on a given story within a month), my group is going to attempt stop-motion, which is something we've never done before! but i;m excited to try. so yea it will be a very busy two months. hopefully everything would turn out great. *crosses fingers*