weekly comments

This week was pretty okay....got my Video Contest in on time (yay) but not how i wanted (boo...).  I was pretty upset about that..... lighting sucks. However filmig for the video poem went flawlessly.....I got through that one pretty good! Also the Walmart by me started stocking Mountain Dew White Out (AW YES) I was sooo excited about that! I need to figure out how to get the lighting right for filming in my basement...it looks so much different on the ameras LCD screen than it does on the computer...so yeah....problem there... At least i learned that i need more lights....like perhaps alot more..maybe even 12 or more. I did mange to beat the Stone Tower in Majora's Mask however.which took a while...yay.. Anyway here's an interesnting trailer for you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAHprLW48no

weekly comments

    This week went by pretty well. I was pretty happy to get second place in the regional Skills USA competition with Jake (woo!). It was really upsetting to try to navigate the campus where the competition took place, especially with the horribly unlabeled and pixelated map, and we had to stop early beause of weather(yay)...which also meant no stopping for food(double yay)... I learned that turtles dont like being cleaned...he bit the toothbrush...alot........ I'd like to learn how to block light without making it obvious on camera. It would make night vision effects much more believable....and thats all for this week...

Bouncing Light

    Using bounced lights helps give little adjustments to lights by giving a softer, more even illumination in confined spaces where moving lights is difficult and is used by pros to soften a subjects face but can also create atmosphere. There are three methods for using bounced lights, bouncing light off of walls, using a light card which gives more control of how bounced light is positioned on film, and bouncing off of ceilings which gives the most natural look but also is the most dangerous because it can burn ceilings or set off sprinklers.
     
      Bouncing light is something I've never thought of using (or really knew how). The video provides a ice tutorial on how to use the different types of bounced light and frankly, i wish I'd known this earlier, it would have come in handy during the documentary...

making spongebob come to life

        This article take a look at the making of the new Spongebob movie. The movie features CGI over live action scenes similar to The Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks movies, and keeping them similar to their original 2D forms while still making them believable in the real world proved difficult so little textural details such as pores on spongebob and tiny bumps on Patrick's skin were used to help with the problem. Small amounts of sub-surface scattering were also used to give them a fleshiness. 3D printed models were used in the acted scenes to give a feel of where the characters would be and actors with simple frameworks were used to give a feel or the human sized versions of the characters. Extensive research into how the characters moved in the series also helped with animating.
      Wow, alot of stuff went into perfecting this movie. As a spongebob fan I can appreciate everything that went into perfecting this film and seeing them come to life is only made better by seeing how it was done. I especially found it interesting how 3D printed models were used to simulate placement of the characters while shooting with the human actors.I was realt hyped for this movie and it actually lived up to expectation.

weekly comments

 This week was definitely a week.... not much happened... again. However one of my actors won't be able to at in my fictional short, so now I have to find a new one, that's fun and by fun I mean annoying. however I did see both Gravity and The interview, the Interveiw made me laugh and Gravity gave me astrophobia. I need to learn how to make distortion on purpose for my fictional short, as ghosts tend to cause that to happen to videos. I learned that geckos love tomatoes, i placed one out so i could slice it and fedd it to is feeder crickets and turned my back ad within 2 seconds he was out of his cage and sucking out the insides of the tomato.

This is how i'm making my ghot in my project (sort of)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwhFf1mnvBQ

The tortoise, the hare, and the car.

       This article talks about the making of the Mercedes commercial featuring the tortoise and the hare. Which just so happened to be made by the guy who directed Maleficent. The director, Robert Stromberg says that he was up for the challenge of building this new commercial  and liked that it was different from what Mercedes usually does. He states that the hardest part was the animals, because they were humanesque he had to fit alot of expressions and personality into a short period of time. And the other big challenge was trying to works with Oregon's uncooperative forests. The reason for this commercial even existing is because Mercedes wanted to do something different during the Superbowl to grab everyones attention.
  So the tortoise and hare Mercedes commercial was made by the guy who directed Maleficent. Yup that commercial where the tortoise drives the car to win the race was made by him. Quite a different tone that this commercial sets from that movie, but I liked it. It was cool to see something different like tha during the superbowl but I also found it odd that they tried to hype it up. I've seriously never seen a commercial being hyped up before this......

A few's a crowd

     This article gives some advice to create the illusion of much more people being in a film than there actually is. One technique for doing this is to close the camera in on someone with a small group of extras in the background and some party sound effects or whatever you need to make it sound like there's more of whatever's there than there actually is. The other option, which is more complex to pull off is to have a camera at a fixed angle and take multiple shots of the same actors in different costumes in different areas then editing them together to make it look like there's a lot of people.

        I've actually know about that second method for a while, but that first one was something I've never thought about. It's a great way to create the illusion needed for a shot with a low budget for hiring extras, the masking method mentioned in the second option for making it look like alot of people are walking to the camera is something I don't want to do, let's just say I don't have great experiences with masks.......