#jayphoenix

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Keep on Walking

So... last day. Blimey, this thing has gone quick. Even though it technically hasn’t, but lets not dwell on that. Anyways, I’ve come a long way since I started on this course, from the nervous wreck that wouldn’t talk to anyone to a less nervous wreck who could at least make jokes. Huzzah. 

Anyways, we sorta just worked on finishing off a couple of things today, including the small issue about what to actually title the friggin’ thing. Hopefully by the time you actually get to read this we’ll have decided this, but at the moment it’s a tie between “One Word”, “Labels”, and “Steve goes on a nice long Walk”. I’m still rooting for the last one.

We also did some other stuff today such as filling out forms, hastily whipping together a couple of scenes and putting together the dvd box art/blurb. I primarily worked on making the blurb sound less like a press release and more like something that had at least an ounce of personality in it. I think I sorta succeeded in that, even though the thing I wrote about Children in Need at the end of the credits had to be cut for something more generic (it was a good think I wrote about CID, promise...). I also added Steve to the special thanks section. Keep on walking Steve.

So yeah, that’s nearly it. There’s probably gonna be a huge rise in the amount of stuff posted near the premiere at Warner Bros (yes, really) and I may have something else I’m working on shoved on here (steve will be proud), but chances are that there won’t be much else on here for a while. I suppose this is goodbye in a way. All the tens of people who have been reading through this blog, I’ll see ya in a couple of months or so. If you want more of me, you can follow me over on Twitter at @ayliffemakit I suppose, but I ain’t gonna force you to (I may also get a Tumblr at some point too, but I dunno about that yet).

And yeah, that’s it from me. I’m off to take my driving theory test. Welp.

- Jay

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Arts Award Inspiration: Douglas Adams

My arts inspiration:

I’ve had many arts inspirations in my life, but overall I’d say that Douglas Adams is one of my favorite comedy writers, and deserves to be presented here as my arts inspiration. He has worked on countless works throughout his life (well okay, I counted them: over 34 different projects), and has spread out through multiple different types of media, from TV and films to computer games and radio dramas. He’s also famous for coming up with “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”, which started out as a radio series and then was translated to nearly every art form imaginable, including 5 books (described as “A trilogy in five parts”), a long-running radio series, a short-lived TV show, a full Hollywood movie, and a lot more.

Why they inspire me:

I’m pretty inspired by all of his working achievements, but the fact that he managed to spread out into multiple forms of media and arts is pretty inspiring. Trying to break into the TV business may be hard, but managing to break into that and several other forms of media AT THE SAME TIME is pretty outstanding. At one point in his life he was trying to juggle writing several different forms of the same story, and managed to still maintain his trademark humor throughout. As I’d also like to do some comedy scriptwriting for various art forms in the future, he seems to be a perfect inspiration. And, simply put, he is the perfect inspiration (well, for me anyways).

What they make or do and how:

As I’ve probably mentioned multiple times already in the text above, he was a writer. So naturally, it’s safe to assume that he regularly wrote things. Mainly humorous things. Instead of planning all his work out before he wrote it, he just came up with his ideas on the fly and often missed deadlines, and was even quoted saying “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”.

What do other people think of their work?:

Many people consider the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to be one of the finest Sci-Fi comedies ever made, and has a significant following around the world. There is an official fan club entitled “ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha”, who have a large online forum and organize meetings regularly. There is also an international celebration of his life on the 25th May called  ‘Towel Day’, in which fans carry a towel around with them all day to show their appreciation for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

What I like about their work:

It’s pretty hard picking out one thing about his work that I like (so much choice, so little time...), but I think I’m gonna have to go with his attention to detail. Even though technically he’s written the same story in several different forms, he always tweaks the story a little in each one to give it something unique and different from the numerous other versions. It’s a rather nice touch that keeps his writing from becoming too dull and same-y.

What I have found out about their career/technique:

Well, after looking intensively at his wikipedia page I managed to find out that his career mainly consisted of writing various forms of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and some other sci-fi/comedy novels. He also ended up writing several episodes of Doctor Who and another novel, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. 

Bibliography:

Wikipedia

Official site

IMDb

-Jay

[hcafilm]

Visit Original Link

So, on day 4 we did a bunch of audio interviews (you know, interviews without the camera), and I was super-nervous and everything. Remember that? Well, here are some of the better bits of the interviews slapped together into one audio file. It was kinda hard trying to get the actual good bits out due to background noise and some slightly repetitive answers (sorry lads, we can’t put literally everything from all the interviews in the film), but thankfully there were some super-useful parts in there about the difference between identity and personality, how identity can’t really be fully summed up in just a single word, and various other interesting points. 

So yeah, I cut out the not-as-good (and occasionally irrelevant) stuff, chopped away as much of the background sound as I could, squeezed out all the interview-y goodness and exported it here for all you lucky people to enjoy. I also exported it in another format (forgot what it was exactly, I think it was ADTS or something) for future use in editing, so chances are it’ll turn up somewhere in the final cut. Not gonna tell you where though, I’m gonna leave that as a surprise for the final film... 

Also we haven’t planned that out yet, and we don’t know where it’s actually going yet. And we only have two days left, both of which I’ll be partially not there for (not for the whole sessions though, I’ll be there for the majority of the time) due to me having to do some rather important things on those days (tomorrow I’m collecting my recent exam results, and on Friday I’m taking a theory test for my driving license). So yeah, slight chaos. 

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

- Jay

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EDIT4: Let’s get down to business (to complete the film)

Well, this is day 4 of the edit. You know, the point where we get super-serious about editing and start doing proper edit-y things, as that’s kinda the whole point of being here. At the end of the day we’re supposed to be making a film, and that’s what we’re gonna do.

So, let’s get down to business (and defeeeeeat the huuuuun).

My main job for today was to edit together a super-short transition with the clock timelapse footage we’d recorded way back on the first day of filming, which I was expecting to be quite easy. Was is easy? Well, moderately. Was is quick? Heck no. It took the whole day to put together, due to the software being slightly fussy. I’ve been told that I should guide you through what I actually did to achieve what I did today (yep, it took a whole friggin’ day for 30 seconds of footage), so I naturally will sorta try and do this while trying to not sound like an automated message being played through a meat grinder.

First up was importing the footage of the clocks on separate layers, and then making the top layer mostly transparent by using the videomerge tool (which apparently has a different name in other programs, by the by). The different clock layers were being generally fussy when I tried to overlay them. Even though we tried our best to line up all the clocks on the shoot, we obviously hadn’t tried very well as they were all completely out. Oops. In the end I had to spend quite a bit of time trying to line up all of the clock faces, one of which I didn’t even use in the end. 

Next I had to simulate the pace of the clocks speeding up by applying the time remapping tool and speeding up the clips by over 800% (no, I am not making an “over 9000″ joke here) to achieve an appropriate result. For some reason it wouldn’t increase over this amount, which was kinda weird but wasn’t too much of a problem since I didn’t really need ‘em to be any faster than that. After this was adding some silly visual effects to the video, which wasn’t too hard. It was basically just a case of dragging the desired effect over to the correct clip, which would have been easy if it wasn’t for the endless render times. Oh boy, those render times were super-annoying. They took up nearly all of my editing time, and were simply a pain. I could spend another couple of hours ranting about how annoying render times are, but I have better things to do than that. Such as anything else.

Up next was adding sound, which was both irritating and simple. Adding the clock sounds was a breeze, and consisted of literally just dropping the track onto the timeline (just like me old mate, Windows Movie Maker). Choosing which foundling voice to use was a bit more of a challenge, but in the end I found an appropriate clip and shoved it over the clock noises. This leads me to the irritating part, which was trying to find out how to adjust the audio levels and make the clock noises a little less loud so we could actually HEAR the foundling. In the end I sorta figured it out, but it still wasn’t really that great. Ah well, it was worth a shot.

Anyways, that was how I did the clocks bit. Apparently someone’s gonna magically add a very short teaser of what I did to this post, which should help make what I’m describing seem a bit less like the ramblings of someone who’s been spending a bit too long on a 30 second segment of film. But first, someone’s gotta go render that clip. Good luck to ‘em, they’re gonna be there a while...

- Jay

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EDIT3: *insert PC Master Race joke here*

So, third day of the edit. Blimey, we only have about 4 days of editing left before the end of the project. Dunno how we’re gonna get all of this done in that time, but we’ll have a go anyways. It’s always worth trying at least.

Anyways, where was I? Ah yes, day 3. The day we actually started to fiddle with the actual footage, and sort out the rough order of the film. Well, sorta. If you count ‘sticking pieces of paper with the different sections of the film on them in a certain order on the wall of the editing room’ as ‘sorting out the order of the film’, then you’re in luck. Because that’s what we did. Why else would I bring that up if we didn’t do it? 

After this, we were sent off to work on different parts of the film on the Macs. Remember when I said on my last post that the PCs were slow and crashed a lot? Well I wasn’t expecting to say this, but the Macs were somehow worse. I dunno why, but they were stupidly slow (lag after you click on anything) and kept on giving me the spinning wheel of death every couple of seconds. 

So I scrapped that idea and went back to the PCs, which at least had signs of working-ness. And I got stuff done. Somehow. 

So yeah, I did editing things. And possibly proved that PCs are sometimes better than Macs. Oops?

- Jay

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EDIT1: Selfie-ified?

If you read my post yesterday, you would know that we’d finished the shoot and we had to move onto the edit. So naturally today we started focusing on the edit. Obviously. 

Before we could really do anything, we had to remind ourselves about what we’d actually shot over the course of the last 6 days. So we sat down, got some snacks out and played back all of the footage we’d recorded onto the nearest wall via a slightly dodgy projector which didn’t show colours very well. 

Most of what we’d shot was pretty good, except for a couple of shots. For some reason, a couple of takes where we were looking directly into the camera appeared to have been trimmed slightly at the edges. Well I say slightly, a more appropriate word would be “cut so much that it looked like the shot was recorded vertically on a smartphone as some kind of video-selfie”. So yeah, that’s gonna need to be fixed at some point. And we can’t redo those shots, since the big fancy camera and lighting kits were taken away this morning.

Ah well, at least this problem only affected two shots and didn’t affect the rest of the film. Hooray I guess?

- Jay

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DAY 1: Clocking in

As you can probably tell from the excessively large prefix, today was the first day in our nearly-a-week-long-but-not-quite film shoot! Hooray for filming, etc etc. For the first part of today’s shoot, we went and sorted out the filming of the clocks, which would form one of our 5 different transitional elements dotted around the film. The main aim of this was to film the clock faces of three clocks for 15 minutes each. Then after this we fiddled about with the different coloured camera gels to try and come up with some strange colour combinations. This resulted in some of our shots having more colours per inch than the average 90′s music video. We have no idea if they’ll make it into the final film, but we did them anyway just as a weird experiment with lighting that may be useful as a weird piece of footage. 

Or, you know, it may not. The gel stuff could go either way honestly. Could be suitably ‘creative’, or it could just end up being too overly colourful-y (is that even a word?).

If all goes well we’ll be moving on to the next transition soon, which I think is gonna be about shadows or something. Which is definitely an excuse for me to try and do a dodgy shadow puppet of a dog. Woof woof indeed.

POST-SHOOT EDIT THINGY: The shadow stuff was complete and utter chaos. It took two hours for us to figure out what we were actually doing, and there’s a massive chance that we may not use it. Well, that’s what it looked like from my angle at least. 

- Jay

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Discussing possible ideas for our documentary ...