"Ghost" Emile's Final edit. from Emile John Sawyer on Vimeo.

After getting feedback and generally not being pleased with thew final product , i decided to look back to the drawing broad and re-re-edit my final one shot film , this time i added music to the film and after looking at youtube tutorials i figured out how to change the hue to give the film that blue look i wanted to achieve in the first place,

Untitled from Emile John Sawyer on Vimeo.

FINISHED

This is my final edit of our one shot film group film entitled, “Ghost” , at the moment it has no sound the reason being that I am trying to find the right sound track to put into the film , the film was directed by me , the camera man was Ollie and the actress was MG , and Rob was the Runner. We wanted to go along with a ghost looking at her own grave narrative because we thought it provided an interesting concept and after researching several Japanese films as aswell as popular American film such as “The Ring” this is the route we wanted to go down, overall my experience on this project has been mixed, we were the smallest group (4) and we came up with some great ideas but since our crew was so small compared to the other groups we couldn’t film or think big. We tried to get other people outside to come along to help but to no avail , But apart from the actual filming and group work , I feel that I have a better understanding with film as a concept then ever before , I lot of consideration goes into the littlest of details , camera angles , camera position , lighting , where the actors stand , the inspiration behind your idea , it counts towards making the film in your vision , something which I have never took into account , even in my short film animation days , until now. If I had more time I would look more into colour grading as I feel that I could have made this short one shot film look much better then it does, but since the deadline and final presentation was so close. I felt rushed in the process of editing this short film. DP2 will be a completely different story in terms of the visual aspect of my future films.

"Ghost" One Shot Final Edit - NO SOUND from Emile John Sawyer on Vimeo.

Working with animation has been hot and cold to be perfectly honest , at the beginning with the jelly text I thought it would be simple to animate (which it still is ) but once we got give the jelly head task , that is when the problem started to appear , and by the last week i was really really struggling , even up to the point where i was scared of using the program , after revaluating...

... my design , I feel that now have a hold on the animation project and my studio ident – I think .

So my first design although simple , didn’t really do it for in terms of the visual appeal , so i decided to make a risky move and re-design the whole thing from starch and changing the name of the ident from “Emilio TV” to “JJ Network”.

So when i was designing the new indent I decided to make the words chrome using the material editor available on 3DS max , I achieved this by using the raytrace and bit map features , the chrome gives the scene a very nice feel ,but after I animated the indent , I felt that the area surrounding the indent was rather plain , so I wanted to play around with the lighting to give it a more dynamic view , so i decided to add Omni lightning which using globe light in order to add a realistic feel to the indent and it give a depth which it lack before.

The last in our 3 week tasks and this is time it is one shot film , even though my mind and heart is set on Interactive Spaces , i was always interested in doing experimenting in film and shorts , ever since i used to make short animation films using a game/program called “The Movies” which allowed you to make films using pre-animated scenes , although the game did not sell well , which led to Lionhead studios – the developer of the game withdrawing support to it from 2009 , but the game gain a strong cult following and members sooned started up their own website dedicated to it , Tmunderground.com (although nower days it is open to other animation software such as iclone and the more recent Moviestorm) for better examples of the possibilities capable with the game take look at these made by other members of the site.

MefuneAkira's Saimaya

chatNoir's Death in Venice.

After we were introduced to one shot film and soon put into our groups, which includes me, Ollie, Rob and MG. At first we decided to film a sort horror film using the tunnel in the Arboretum, but we soon changed our idea completely after we found out that so many groups were using the same location, this name we wanted to go with the idea of a ghost visiting her own grave, we placed our actress (MG) in front of her own grave (named Emma Marsh) and she leaves into the background and eventually fades away. This is what my other crew member Ollie had to say on the project:

his films causes the audience to be unsure as to whether the character visiting the gravestone is the ghost of the buried or a younger relative with the same name, and contributes successfully to the eerie feel we aimed to create. I feel that this short film project was successful, bearing in mind that it was a first attempt. We achieved our goal in terms of what type of mood and thoughts we wanted to plant in the audience’s minds. One small think I would change given a larger budget was a more intricate support system for the camera as the shot slightly shaky using a tripod without moving support.

I Wanted to go down a rather abstract look to my interactive space project, in terms of look, feel and styling , so I choose to focus on camera angles , hue , saturation , brightness and contrast, as a consequence the design formalism leans more towards a graphic style, limited palette and maybe even a s

ense of negative space. I also wanted implement space and proportion, so in some of my photos you can see elements of extreme close up's using my camera super Marco feature and in other photo's such as the stairs , the scope is much wider.

An example of the different camera angles.

The main thing i took from the classes before I fully got to work on this project , was how I was going to represent the visual drama on the screen , so when doing this , I wan

ted to have a contrast (e.g. from small to large , from high to low contrast etc) Like i had stated before , I wanted to focus more in the look of the project then the narrative at first , so that’s why the story is rather plain hence the title :”Mundane” The story is basic just you the user taking down some washing , later on when revise this idea I will focus a lot more on the narrative.

Two shots from my finished project with the "Futura" Font.

I wanted to experiment with network and tree hierarchies and also way finding when I first started this project, but although this is the case in the first few screens due to me not using Dreamweaver before i was at first overwhelmed with the HTML coding (something which i haven’t used also) by the end of the narrative the user will follows a liner path. But now that i fully understand on how to use Dreamweaver and HTML coding , i am now at the stage where i can follow my original l idea and having a much more complicated narrative with multiple wayfinders and branching narratives.

On reflection i am pleased with this project at this moment in time in terms of visuals (even though i planned to re-do this project the way i wanted to do in the first place) i partially like the typography used here. The font i used on this project was called “futura” , this font really worked well with my images and i wanted to experiment more with this font , but unfortunately when I tired to download this font at home it was brought to me that i could only buy this font from adobe , to say i was disappointed would be an understatement , so for my next version of this project i have to try and find a typeface which works well with my images but i can also find online when I continue the project at home.

So after the 3 weeks of doing interactive space , we are now moving on to the method which has scared me the most since I have started multimedia at NTU – 3D Animation. But after the first session with Andrew, I have been really surprised at how simple the program is , once you learn the basics , now I am really looking forward to getting more into the program. So let’s start with the brief – we have been told to make a 30 second ident animation for our very own cable station that holds audience interest in the interval between show slots , we have to use 3DS max and Adobe premier pro to design , build and animation.

So here we have a rough layout of the 30 ident that i what , as you can see it is simple in its design and layout but this will allow to focus more on the individual aspects of the animation (where and how the letters will fall , angle of the camera etc etc)

Image Meaning and Composition

After this week’s seminar, i recently came across the rule of thirds, which states an image should be imagined as divided into nine equal parts by two equally-spaced horizontal lines and two equally-spaced vertical lines, and that important compositional elements should be placed along these lines or their intersections. Proponents of the technique claim that aligning a subject with these points creates more tension, energy and interest in the composition than simply centring the subject would. This is something which I never come across before when taking photographs or filming but in terms of ratio, proportion and balance, I guess it makes sense to follow them for a more coherent design.

The Rule of Thirds when appiled to my images.

I was interested with the history of design also, and a good example of this is the swastika – once an decorative Hindu item now over time , the swastika is normally associated with Nazi Germany , just one example of how imagery is used to convey meaning.

Here i wanted to talk in detail more about my final interactive space project i have entitled "Mundane".
Setting: the setting I have choose for this particular project is my halls of residence (Manor Villages) , starting from my bedroom , the corridor , the main corridor and stair access and the laundry room , the reason I choose this is because I wanted to familiarize the user in an environment that they could all find themselves in.

Characters: the main character involved is the user i.e. you , so the story is being told from a first person view or POV , the reason why I have choose this to display the narrative is because I wanted the user to feel engaged with the surroundings plus I feel that the best stories are told them the first person view.

Mood: this is where i wanted to really display my skills with a camera and editing skills in Photoshop, whatever I take a photo, I always feel the need to experiment with them , no matter what the subject , I think this urge comes inspiration taken from German expressionists , whom used to experiment widely with painted shadows and weird and unique camera angles. For me i wanted to experiment with light and dark shadows, that’s why my interactive space is more experiential with shapes and shadows rather than a interesting plot hence the reason why i have called this project “Mundane”

so far i have nearly done with the project , just having to link the images up in Dreamweaver and then email them to simon which shouldn't take more then a week. I will keep you all Posted.