ITV 2 – Evaluation
Evaluation
I’ve not written one of these for a while, so bare with me.
Alex, David, Thomas and Myself just finished the ITV 2 Ident brief for YCN Online, it was a long but short brief this one. Initially I wanted to do the Feel Good brief as I had several idea’s for it, but after having a word with my tutors and laying down ideas for the ITV 2 brief, I stuck with it. Straight off Alex, Tom and me wrote down quite a few ideas, we had one major idea of a 3D TV breaking out of a shop and racing or chasing a man home, another also major was the man fed up of the TV not listening to what he was doing (Pressing the remote to change channel, etc.) Around this time, David joined our group which was nice as I have wanted to work alongside Dave on a brief. After re-reading the brief, these idea’s didn’t really fit with the deliverables so we read over it with a fine tooth comb (A highlighter) and pointed out all the key elements and started from there. We settled for the idea of the ident’s being recorded in a pure White environment with elements of the cast or props being colourful. Also, our main aim was to make the logo itself to be more interactive than a static object on the screen.
In past ident’s, shadows would be cast and bent around the ident as if it was physically there when recording, this is in a way interactive but we wanted to add a fun and more physical interaction between actor and object. The brief stated the ident should take place in a day in the life of a 24 year old so we jotted down things 24 year olds would be doing. Working, moving out/moving house (as they would be leaving Uni at this time), music, games, socializing and more. We ended up choosing music, working and moving out. Thankfully, we have a rather musical group. Alex can drum and Tom can play the banjo and guitar; all of which we story boarded as idents. Other talents within the group was rather high too, I can edit in Final Cut/Premiere and After Effects, Dave can make 3D models and animations, Alex is good with a camera, ideas and editing and Tom is rather good with editing along with sound design. So all in all we had a rather well rounded group.
Dave, Tom and me hunted out places for filming. We knew we wanted an all White space so we checked out the theater in Blenheim Walk. It was a White breeze-blocked wall behind the projector screen which was good but had a Black lip at the bottom (Kinda like a 12” big skirting board) of which will not be easy to edit out when it comes to full body shots of cast members. We then had a look at the infinity curve in the Photography department and instantly said this is what we need. A few weeks later we booked the room out but come shoot day it turns out we shouldn’t really of booked it due to a crit being in there and also the tutor was being monitored or something by an external source so everything was a bit hectic. Due to that day (on the day we booked it) being the only free one it was a week from deadline and we couldn’t re-schedule for another day, so thankfully we were allowed to use it and the tutor took his class into another studio they have.
Filming on the whole went well, if we were to do this project again the whole process of shoot day I would change. I wanted to put the ITV2 logo into some tracing paper on the screen of the camera, this way we can act around it and know where we can and can’t position things. Unfortunately we didn’t do this so everything was very educated guesses of which all 4 of us put in. Another thing would to be more true to our storyboards. Alot of the work was done via word of mouth or someone telling another what it is were doing and going off that, I think next time we should stick to our storyboards like glue and also give everyone a copy along with a run down so everyone is in the know. I, personally, didn’t see a reason for us to hunt out actors for this ident. Other members of the group would of like to have them but I feel that when it comes to the music, Tom spent a good while working out what to play on both banjo and guitar, so when it comes to writing down the notes or telling other people what to play would of just been a massive pain in the rear.
Overall I liked the project. I took on the role of time managing and editing. I think I wanna get into editing when I finish the course, so I jumped at this position. I’m also, usually, very good with time management. Everyone does slip a bit and maybe on this project I did. Some things were out of hand such as booking times for the infinity curve and Dave’s friend not being able to make the day we booked, so some things were cut out. One main thing cut was the ident with a 3D removal man. Dave did spend a lot (and I do mean a lot!) of time making that van. Unfortunately, we filmed it and what we filmed physically wouldn’t work with the 3D Dave did. One MAIN thing for next time we shoot, if we shoot another ident would be to plan exactly what a camera would see and what angles we will use. I hoped to plan shots before shoot, but most were worked out on the day and this wasn’t exactly efficient when it comes to placement of the 3D and other elements.
ITV 2 Ident – Finished!
So, the idents are done and most of the work is complete. All we have to do now is finish off scanning our stuff in, present the work tomorrow and get a chop on with the evaluation.
Not a lenghty blog post this as I’m doing it via YouTube! Rather neat, but also testing it at the same time.
I need sleep! 
ITV2 – Editing
So today was the first day of editing our ident’s. It was a rather long day, I intended on getting to college for about 8 and start capturing our footage but 8am turned into half 9 – oops. 
But, all was not lost! I got in and started to gather the footage right away and after Final Cut Pro decided to lag and miss out some off the footage, we re-captured the footage and started editing.
The first ident I worked on was the Guitar one. I thought it would be a fun one and an easy one… Fun it was, but easy turned into 7 hours of work. And it’s still not 100% complete! We need the sound of a guitar being plugged into the amp of which me and Tom will get in the next couple of hours. Also, we need to record some random voice commands for our builder ident’s as it seems a bit… empty without them. Anyway, 7 hours later I had key’d out the entire table of which the guitar cable was blue-tacked too. It kept moving and in the end when the cable rested still, it was plain sailing, but 6 hour worth of moving vector points… my eyes are seeing pixels! Then making the ’2′ vibrate kinda like a speaker… put it this way; 14seconds of footage of which the ’2′ needed to be shaking in… 24 frames a second = 336 individual key frames needed to make the 2 vibrate to the music! Knowing my luck there is a plug-in or tool in After Effects which takes music and makes objects move to the beat.
After this we did the Banjo ident. This took no more than a hour and most of the faffing about was with the syncing of the audio track we recorded to both pieces of footage. In one clip Tom played near perfectly to the master track, in the other he played a bit to fast overall so we had to work out exactly how fast and trim the clip down. In general this was a simple one and I wish I did it first really.
We then did one of the builder idents where me and Tom are directing the ident into place. At present, Dave hasn’t rendered out the craned logo so I did a stand-in within After Effects with the logo we been using for all idents. It’s static and looks very fake at the moment, so once the 3D deliciousness is rendered, we should have a sexy logo in that.
Dave was working on the positioning for the van for the remover ident today, so hopefully by tomorrow we should be able to work on that one too!
As for the last builder one where the logo falls and me and Tom scarper, that is yet to be started. I want to devote some time to making the camera act realistically and make it look visually epic, something of which I haven’t got much of as I want to get the main idents down and finished. If the editing goes well and I have time at the end, I may start on giving that a go as it could potentially be the best visual ident on our list.
Anyway, so far so good! 3 idents down with 2 or 3 to go depending on time constraints. I know it’s Quality not Quantity, but when you gotta make 40 credits worth of work, I would rather give Quality in Quantity’s.
Have a butchers and parts that we aren’t using in the ident. :p (Well, one clip is! But I bet you wont guess what one. 
)
ITV2 Shoot
Friday was D-Day and it went rather well!
On Thursday just as I left college, Dave rang me up and told me that there were some issues with the infinity curve. The man who said we could rent it had to take some last-minute time off to attend a funeral and the other guy (I forget his name, sorry. ) told us on the day that we really shouldn’t have that room as there was to be an all day crit in there! Yikes! He also told us that technically we shouldn’t of been able to book that room anyway as there is another studio used for hireing, that room is general a studio for just the course. He had a word with the guy doing the crit and eventually he said he will use the room opposite as we explained how we had this planned for weeks and Thursday was the deadline. What a guy!
So, anyway, we started shooting about 10ish. The first thing we did was get equipment from the AV suite and set-up all of our equipment. We got a boom mic to record things as well and, thankfully, the jack that goes into the camera for the boom mic worked perfectly in my laptop, so we did master recordings on here. (Would that mean this was the first time Windows 7 has been used in a production environment? ) We used the lighting the studio already had, we took off the attachments on them to reveal only the bulb so we could get better lighting and I think it worked well! Each shot we had to re-arrange the lighting so we would eliminate any hard to edit shadows. This proved harder the further away from the infinity curve we became. Because we could and needed to fit more of the background in, it would mean we would be more susceptible to shadows. If I think what has happened, has happened, there will be a LOT of keying out and editing come Monday, Tuesday and more than likely Wednesday too. *Makes a flask of Coffee to keep awake.* My main role in this project was the general running of the project and the Editing, which includes the After Effects and FCP stuff, so my work (visually) has yet to come.
But yeh, we did Tom’s Banjo first, we couldn’t be to far away from Tom with the boom mic otherwise we wouldn’t head the Banjo in the recording, although we will have him in the shot and the mic in a removable part of the scene. So, what we did is got as close as possible with the boom and recorded him playing a master track first, any shot’s after this were him re-playing the same tune but we didn’t use the mic for it. That, in post, should come up well.
After this was the Guitar. This took more setting up than most if I am honest. At first we tried resting the Guitar against the infinity curve but if it was resting on the flat area, it would be leaning over too much, if we rested it at the right angle, it would be half way up the curve and thus look like its floating; not what we wanted. We ended up using a table turned on it’s side. This was perfect really. But, when recording we released it takes too long for Tom to walk in, pick up the Guitar and plug it in, then play his tune. Alex came up with the idea of him walking in with the guitar already, plugging it in and play. This was far better. After taking several shots we rigged up the equipment to my laptop and recorded Tom playing the master track. It took a bit of tweaking but not as much as the night before, so was faster than anticipated.
Next was the Builders. This was Me and Tom’s acting part. We did two versions, one was what we story boarded with builders directing a crane with the ident attached to a chain/rope. The next one was what Alex came up with on the spot where we would be directing the ident but it falls down and we shit ourselfs and scarper. On Saturday me and Tom were talking and I said about how when the ident his the floor and we GTFO, the camera could fall over due to the impact and this make the ident land in the right place… It’s definatly do-able as it requires playing about with the camera in After Effects to make it look asif the camera fell over, but I wont be doing it first due to needing to get other things done!
The last shoot was Dave and Tom as the removal men. (Tom has been in every shot. Not our fault Tom can play Banjo, Guitar, fit into the boiler suits and builder jacket. :p ) The first shot was of them getting out of the Van and putting a sofa in and bringing the ident out. This, was a bit to ambitious for 20 seconds as we found out on shoot, so we had them get out the van, move the sofa out of the way and bring the ident out of the van. After this, we found a broom and a ladder in the studio which happened to be very useful. What we did was have Dave come in, erect the ladder and go up it, Tom walked past sweeping then Dave come down and they both brought the ident in. The idea being them setting the area up for the idents arrival. This might be a bit longer than 20 seconds, as with the van removal jobbie, but we came up with the idea of speeding parts up (Like they do in The Green Wing, if you have ever seen it..) and making the parts that are valid normal speed to fit inside 20 seconds.
The fun comes Tomorrow when we capture the footage and see if we have shot a load of shite or if we have struck Gold. Expect some funny mistakes or outtakes to hit YouTube in the next 24hrs. 
Meet the team!
So, all in all it was a good day. A bit of a hick up with the studio booking and initial start to the day, but we were finished by 1pm and had a nice pub lunch in the Library to unwind. I personally had the Smothered Chicken with Curly Fries. Om nom nom.
ITV2 – Sound testage
So tonight myself and Tom had a dabble with a Guitar, Foot Pedal, Amp and Laptop. The results were very successful!
The idea is that we have Tom playing on film and what he plays is recorded straight away so we don’t have to make him mime to his own tune and possibly get out of sync. With the process we have formed we have made a mini-studio in essence and should make life easier.
Below are the test tunes we did; both are Metallica covers. Not that it matters, but their the raw files without messing about other than noise removing and adding bass in Audacity.
Turns out I need to purchase hosting for uploading an .mp3 to WordPress. BOOO!
Master of Puppets is louder than Seek and Destroy because Tom’s pedal runs off of batteries, and as we noticed, the batteries were dying on us and thus us playing with settings to get it louder was messing with it! So, problem sorted, get some new batteries. Just requires a bit of a tune-up when we get up tomorrow.
So, a little list of what we need to take in tomorrow to shoot:
-Guitar
-Banjo
-Laptop
-Cables
-Foot pedal
-SLR
-Amplifier
-Builder Jackets
-Boiler Suits
-Other clothes associated with builders/removers (Such as Jeans, plain tee’s, Boots etc)
-Headphones
-Cigs
-Notes
-Dave
-Dave
-Alex
-Tom
Things we need to borrow/take out:
-Sofa
-3+ lights
-1 Camera
-1 microphone w/ boom
-Tripod
-Tape
-Sketchbook + pen
Can’t think of much more at this minute, if we remember anything before tomorrow I shall add it here.
But, as of this minute, were prepped and ready for a good day’s shooting!
Looking into Infinity Curve adverts.
So today myself and Tom are looking into adverts that use an all White background. We might throw in some movie clips permitted YouTube has them, but it’s just to see what we can or can’t do when it comes to filming. We know what we are going to do, but that doesn’t stop us having a look-see.
First off:
This is another Ident for ITV2 we found. The main colour is White as you can see throughout the bedroom and any vibrant colours such as cushions are Green. This is what ITV2 is looking for in the brief. Fluorescent green builder jackets and Green boiler suits should help us here on ours.
The above is a Tesco advert. You can see they too use what looks to be an infinity curve of some description but they seem to have a far bigger one than we have… Unless Frank Lampard is a Dwarf…
Ok, YouTube is being a mofo and won’t find what I want! But, there are several Morrisons and Tesco adverts, along with loads of make up products, Direct Line, price comparison websites and other which use an infinite White space much like in the Matrix. We wanted to look at them again and work out how big their screen really is or could be, and how they trick the viewer so to speak with editing.
I came up with this today, were thinking of modifying our Guitar Ident to start much like this…
So now the idea is, Tom walks in, picks up the guitar, plugs the wire into the guitar and jams. Should be mint! 
Not much more for today due to YouTube being failworthy. Shall try and find some press links.
Adios!
ITV 2 – Even more of an update!
So today we did a bit of a prop-hunt. We hit the Leeds Market in search for what we wanted, and it didn’t let us down! So, lets show you what we got..
On the top-left we have me in a Fluorescent Waist coat-thing. This is the builder kinda look were going for but they will have Blue jeans on, boots. On the top-right we have the remover sort of guy in his all in one Boiler suit. We have two of both so we can have both people in shot acting together along with the ITV 2 logo.
The bottom-left is the final ITV 2 logo Dave has worked on. Near enough spot on don’t you think? On the bottom-right we have half of a van Dave has also worked on. This is what the builders and/or removers will be using and coming out of. We wont see the front so Dave hasn’t had to model that, but what he’s done so far is amazing and will do the job. I hope to do some After Effects testing today or this weekend to get the lights looking realistic and should add more to the composting.
We’ve also worked out what is defo going to happen come D-Day next week.
So, ahoy!
ITV2 – Shadows from the Logo
So today, being’s I’ve not got my laptop on me here at college, I found myself wondering what to do. Other than going to book the infinity curve, booking equipment, talking to Matt about lighting and prop hunting with the group, there’s not much else to do until D-Day other than practice and research.
So, I loaded the only two files on my userspace and had a go at making the shadows casting off the logo to look realistic.
Hopefully you can see whats happened here shadow wise. I need to get some footage really and practice but if anything, were using a plain White background so shouldn’t need to edit shadows much..
Update on some shizzle.
So, of late I have been questioning my pathway at college. I love video editing, I always have (as can be seen here with my first ever video, asif Google Video still has it up!) but I also do like the post-production effects side of things, but if I am honest, I don’t see myself getting good enough to blow windows and buildings up anytime soon.
I’ve always liked or not liked videos down to their editing. If something goes on too long or to short, I’d have a weird feeling inside me and thinking ‘err, wtf, that was a bit short/long..’ Music videos and extreme sport’s videos are a prime example of the feelings I feel. Some videos are brilliant, everything goes with the music and cuts perfectly (that’s how I try and edit) yet other’s don’t cut where they should and/or make a complete hash out of it. The same goes for films really. The first 5 minutes of Quantum of Solace was painstakingly hard to keep an eye on. When i watched that in the cinema with some friends, it was rather hard to get the full picture if that makes any sence? Each cut from angle to angle were ALL less than 2 seconds. After watchign the film about 4 times I now know whats going on, but for that intial watch it was rather hard to distinguish things. The same goes for a scene where Bond is chasing someone through a crowd. It’s hard to see where the hell Bond is when the camera is constantly cutting to other views.
Anyway, I kinda of set out to blog the for and against of me being an editor or a post-production guy and I really can’t sit here and weigh it up. I could go on about editing videos for ages, but with port-production I cant. Maybe I should stick to editing and polishing videos to look perfect and maybe use a little bit of effects for certain things if needed, but other than that stick to raw camera fun, like below.
So, a list of things I currently like would consist of Videos, Music, Film, Photography, Computers, Editing, Recording and Photoshop. (These would be things job wise I would consider doing after the course kinda thing.)
Very random blog, no formatting at all and no thought gone into it. Just wanted to get some ideas out of my head before the next time I talk about my career path and draw a blank.
Professional Practice – Another Update
So, today is the day before our Interim Crit. We have all our completed storyboards done! Tom, Alex and Myself have done them (and you can tell which is mine as I suck at drawing and Alex and Tom are epic!) and Dave has been working on making the models for our animatics and final pieces. Unfortunately, we haven’t started the animatics today, at least not while in the studio. But the day is young and anything can happen I guess. Were still on track, just if we don’t show animatics tomorrow it will be walked through storyboards along with plans for filming and equipment borrowing we will be doing.
We have quite a few storyboards for things we wont be doing. The original ideas and also idea’s we wouldn’t be able to do. For example (this will be in my evaluation no doubt, but in more words I imagine) our original idea of the TV chasing a man home or the TV racing a man home. As much as these would of been amazing to shoot, edit, post and finalize, they didn’t fit the bill for the brief. We also have a few ideas we couldn’t do even in the new style ident were sticking with. Mainly due to limitations with what we can do with the logo (were trying to incorporate the logo into the action as much as possible. Gives it something more that just a logo on a screen. :p ) but we do have many to do!
With any luck we should get some good feedback on our ideas. If not we will be rather stranded as the ideas are based on one look, three themes and 10 different idents. Re-working or coming up with totally new ideas of that amount will be hard in the time we have left. Were hoping to shoot ASAP. I’ve yet to book out the Infinity curve, which is bad as potentially the longer its left, the more people will book it and shift our slot back, but it’s not my fault I cant find the guy when I’m about. So, with any luck we can film in the next three weeks, this gives us 2 weeks in post and finalize the idents to be submitted. 2 weeks is easily enough time, if anything filming should only take a day but the main delay will be in waiting for shoot day.
So yeh, a lil update, nothing major but keeps things flowing.
