Day Four

Greetings fellow human!

Day four marks the end of week one of project one. Well, technically, that's a lie because we still have tons to discuss so we decided to meet tomorrow morning to continue our adventure.

In class, we were shown 'Capturing the Friedmans ' and another dvd that I might have gotten mixed up with the one I watched during Design History and Culture. I distinctively remember 'Capturing the Friedmans' because of the music and the introduction. There were a lot of homemade videos and photos incorporated into the documentary, capturing the viewer's attention almost immediately.

The way they portrayed themselves to be a happy family made me want to know more about what had happened. Was the youngest son abused by his father? Why didn't anybody know? Were they innocent? The documentary intrigued me.

Adding archive footages and selecting the right music, I realised, will help present that element of surprise, mystery and make it thought provoking. Also, the interviewing techniques used were helpful in a sense as they didn't cut out the parts where the interviewee had obviously messed up. Instead, what was presented was raw emotion. Something that will also captivate the audience.

After the video session, we settled into our groups to discuss more. We allocated roles for each of us.
Group leader: yours truly
Scribe: Joel and I, but all of us are taking down notes as we go along.
Equipment: Joel
Software Application: Natalya and Kezia.
This way, we don't always have to stall to achieve a simple task.

Next, we thought of a group name. It was going to appear as '[insert group name here] productions' on our introduction. We all agreed on 'Press to Exit' as the name for our group. An idea that was inspired by the switch beside our wonderful auto-lock doors.

We moved on to how we were going to do our opening sequence in the video. Realising that we all had different visuals in our heads, we decided to clear any doubts up and agreed that our video is going to be a movie style type of documentary. Something like Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Kezia, having wonderful, talented hands, sketched out the storyboard for our introduction. We took three ideas and decided to merge them together. The first idea was a camera tracking the ways we get to school, the second was the 'survivor style' introduction where we flash a myriad of our works and the third was the Mr. and Mrs. Smith concept.






Our storyboard for introduction.

And because we're not done discussing details, we've decided to meet tomorrow morning to get things settled.

Signing out.


*sketching by the wonderful Kezzzzzzzzzia.

Day Three

The reason my previous post is of the same day, date and approximately the same time as this entry is because my home internet connection was undergoing maintenance last night. Starhub broadband was very kind to have sent a notification letter a week ago. One week is enough time to have forgotten about a lifeless little piece of paper. Due to my lapse of otherwise faultless memory, I proceeded to play with the power switch of the innocent router and only stopped an hour later when my very kind brother came home and reminded me of the scheduled maintenance.
Despite being physically tired, i whipped out my laptop and wrote my entry in microsoft word to publish it the next day, which is today. Kudos to brains.

After fumbling with the internet settings in my laptop, i managed to connect to TP's server. Yay.

We assembled in the LT today. Was it LT25? I think it was. But knowing what LT number it is is really quite redundant. Anyway, we were shown different kinds of documentaries to broaden our knowledge and to inspire and give us ideas. Personally, i was more interested in the subject and content of the documentaries than the concept behind it. So it was a bit anti-climatic to only watch a few minutes of each video.

But being interested in the content makes for a good learning point as well. I realised the different types of documentaries and what makes it good and what makes it not. Lighting also plays an important role, something, i'm sure, we'd have taken for granted. The framing, the backdrop, the set design, the sound; they all play a part in creating a lovely documentary. I personally loved the credits for 'Shoot em up'.

Famished, we spilled out of the LT and straight to the canteen for a late lunch. Chicken chop has never tasted so good before.

We didn't really discuss much today, only confirming and clarifying bits and pieces of what we discussed yesterday. We vaguely know what kind of documentary we are going to shoot.
A team mate is currently taking down notes and pointers on what we should discuss tomorrow so that we're on the right track.

Personally, I think we're doing quite well so far.

Day 2

Upon attending today’s class and observing my fellow classmates blog entry, I’ve realized how vague and general I’ve been with my first entry. On hindsight, I should have added the kind of ideas that we’ve come up with on the first day, the general timeline of what we’ve planned to accomplish and make a list on who is presenting what modules.

It’s never too late to list them down along with what we’ve accomplished today; here I go.

Yesterday, other than discussing how our video should look like, we’ve also collated the modules we’ve taken throughout our year. We managed to come up with 2D art fundamentals, 3D art fundamentals, drawing essentials, ideation, creative storytelling, communicating design ideas, animation fundamentals, digital photography, video fundamentals and also included, our cross disciplinary subjects and electives, visual presentation, public speaking and Italian (although the reason behind including Italian is still quite sketchy).

We also decided who should present the modules and that we should get all our modules back by Wednesday.

We also discussed the theme of our video, if it’s going to have a plot or if it’s going to solely be a documentary. We then decided that the idea of having a plot was fascinating but we didn’t want to tie ourselves down with a theme until we figure out how we are going to present the modules in the video.

That led to today’s discussion. We had to work out on how we’re going to present our modules without making it seem dull and boring. We listed down the modules again and visualized on how we’re going to showcase them in our video. We decided to add animated characters to showcase our skills at animation. We came across a problem when we broached on how we were going to present our video fundamentals module. We then decided that our whole video could speak for the module itself. So far, we’ve made more progress.

In class, we were also told to think of a message or two that we want to put across in our video. My group and I came up with the same message, the first being that we want our target audience (the freshmen, parents and people in open house) to be informed on what they should expect during the first year of school. Through our experiences, we hope to successfully achieve in that area. Also, our underlying message is that through our experiences in school, we hope to portray that we also had fun. Fun, meaning the satisfaction of completing a certain module and that we enjoy doing our work as well.

Even though we only had a few minutes to spare because of other commitments, we’ve managed to progress this far.
Onward to the third day.

day one

Project one has finally started and after much anticipation and guesswork on what we are going to do, we assembled in the LT for a briefing.
We took down notes, or rather some people did, and separated into our respective classes. Our group was the last one to get formed, not because either of us are fussy but everyone else was willing to get into groups of five which left us at three. Everything worked out well in the end when a kind soul transferred over to our three-man team.
I admit, my mind was absolutely blank and I had no ideas to churn out but a group-mate already had a vague idea of what she wanted our video to look like. We didn't agree unanimously on the whole concept of her idea but we worked on what little we had. We made progress, and I dare say that we're getting along quite well for now. I find the need to put emphasis on 'for now'.
Anyway, we've already agreed on how our intro is going to vaguely look like, what works we are going to present to emphasize our many, many, many talents in life and a brief outline on what we're going to include in our video.
We're going into more in-depth discussion tomorrow, or later today, considering the time.