week 1 - it's only beginning

So we have officially began our studio 3 unit and the stress has begun to build up. We had class on Wednesday and that was the day where we divided the teams, I ended up with two students I never worked with, but I have seen their work, it is pretty impressive, so I wasn’t worried about the quality, what I was worried about however was that one of the students was an over achiever, she aims too high, which lead to her demise a couple of times in the past. After the teams were divided, we sat together and got to know about each student’s weaknesses and strengths, which helped with determining the kind of project we wanted to go with. My team ended up wanting to make a comedy, which is a pretty difficult genre to get right, especially with a CG production, but no worries, it shouldn.t be that difficult. The next day came and we began to re-explore Aftereffects, our lecturer showed us some great ways to make titles for our productions, which involved transforming the intro sequence into 3D. the technique here was to place a camera (which I didn’t even know was possible) in Aftereffects and to “film” an intro sequence, we used gizmo tools to transform the text and animate it. And the camera was to help add some effects, one of them being a blur effect using the aperture of the camera. Along side the title sequences that our lecturer helped us create, he also showed us a way to “fake” an establishing shot, it was a very easy yet effective way to create a visually appealing establishing shot, the example we had was of a football stadium with the camera crossing in between the grass, which were layers of grass PNGs. We then added the aperture effect to it and gave it a cinematic feel. With the information we learned this week, we have a head-start on creating a cinematic intro and outro sequence for our film, especially with the faking, it will give our movie a nice artistic touch. I could draw some PNGs we can use in the sequences as well, that will help create a link between the sequences and the short film. Now the challenge was coming up with a story that is fairly new but has been done before so we could have some references to look for. We were shown some videos by a group called Corridor on YouTube, and although most their productions relied on CG effects and not models, we got a good idea of how we want our comedy to be, their skits were witty and over dramatic, which gave it the perfect comedic feel I was looking for.