Vappu Shooting

It was not planned to make a 2nd shooting but we thought that an extra scene would make the story more complete.We figgured this out while we did the first raw-cut and synchronized it with the spoken text. Nina, LeighAnn and Nathalie worked really hard on getting the lyrics right. 

They have to have the right length and must be easy to understand but have niveau at the same time. It took us a while because we were not sure if we should make the text or the cut first. I gave the girls my rawcut to work on and while the others will be in Russia Ill continue with the cuttingprocess.

In the missing scene we did today we shoot a VappuCelebration. It tooks place at the stone you can see in another scene in the video. A couple is sitting there in their student overall and with their a-level-hat and celebrating Vappu. Vappu is a holiday that the fins celebrate on the 30th of april and 1st of may. I liked the double meaning the girls had in mind. You have the memory factory on the one side but also the heritage factor on the other. Those who know Vappu can figgure out the traditions and clothes performed and shown in the scene.

The scene shall be some sort of memory that give a personal touch to a normal tourist sight. I think I'll use a soft overlay to highlight the memoryprocess...maybe also another colorkey would underline this effect nicely as well. Not sure how I can do this. Maybe I can ask Clemens or Shirin how to do.

I usually hate to be infront of the camera but it this case it was alright. I played one of the Vappu celebrating students. I wore the overall of LeighAnns husband Will. Was a kind of nice feeling. LeighAnn also organized lots of material for the scene like a bottle of champagne, glasses and some "fake-booze". Nina replaced myself behind the camera and directed this scene. 

 

I think its maybe good to change the roles sometimes to get a feeling for the different aspects of producing media. Don't be confused cause you see Nina on the photos. She showed me how the scene shall look like. 

 I think I ll really miss the others while they are in Russia but it will be also nice to have a bit of time for university and finish some projects. I also like to finish some other videos I made a loooong time ago and were unable to cut them since then. :)

Graphic Day

 I spent the whole friday night and saturday morning with installing the cutting software to Ninas laptop and cutting the introduction scene for monday. I like the result. Its much better than the first version and now the sound fits very nicely to the video sequences. I uploaded it to youtube but on private-mode to be able to show it to the others and also concerning the contest it is good to have it on a sharing platform.

Thomas and Nathi came around 2 p.m. to my flat. I first wanted to start later to be able to do other things but Thomas argued that we have so many things to do and we would really need this time. He was more than right. Nathi started with a Prezi to conclude all our ideas for the project in a short form that is good for presentations.Thomas and I focussed on the graphics. 

The funny aspect was that we were working on four laptops. One room. Three People. Four Laptops. Meters and meters of kables. Thomas and I worked on the same computer most of the time. I usually prefer to work on my own but on this day we were a great team.

We started with working on the background. Thomas first idea was quite similar to the final one we have now but instead of leaves we included footprints. We tried for a while how we should arange them. When we talk about tracks it would be good to show a path and so we ended up in showing a row of footprints from the left bottom to the right top corner. We placed the smartphone a bit to the left.

In the next step we focussed on the screen of the smartphone. We wanted to create a unique style that is visible on all graphics we will show in the video.

We want to look professional and so we want to have one certain design for all our graphics. We used the font that I had chosen for the track button and the logo before. It fits nicely for buttons and headtitles. For other texts we used a more simple writing without curls to make the design not to overload. 

We also created a menueline and highlighted the category where the user is right now. Thomas and I wanted to wait till the others set up a order for showing the different graphs before we go on with the graphics. It would be nice when the menue-buttons get pushed in the right order from the left to the right.  I think we did an awesome job. Also the others seemed quite happy with it.

I also made a very raw cut of the other scences so that we have at least a brief idea of the story. I have to transform this data to make it available for the others too.

...early birds catch the worms...

Getting up far to early to fix some problems with the technique. I could not solve them but at least I found a good way to transform AVI into MP4 from 1,1 GB to 80 MB :)

There is still the cutting mistake inside but I had no time to do it again because the rendering needs so much time with the old programme on my computer. Anyway I was quite satisfied with the music and cutting. 

We presented our concept, graphics and video to our professor. Its always hard to say whats his opinion about our work. He seems to be happy with everything. Maybe our work is really good but it feels a bit strange to get little critical feedback or feedback at all. 

We arranged a deadline for our individual work and also fixed a day when we'll travel to Pori. Maybe we'll be able to present our video to a small audience there. I think this would be great to get some feedback. 

After we left the history departement we went to the school of economics and had some coffee/tea there. I also tried some sour milk thing which was slimy  but not so bad at all. I had had no time for breakfast in the morning because I tried to fix the issues with the software. 

We discussed further steps. There is a contest in the CHIEF-forum which fits like the fist on the eye to our tracker and we want to participate with it. We told again about the division of labour. Some of the things have to be done till monday to present our project to Kimi Kärki as well others should be done soon but there is no concrete deadline. 

Ill try to continue with the cutting. First I have to check if I can install the CS5 Mastersuite on Ninas Laptop. I hope it will work. I also will try to transform some snapshots out of the video sequences to a cool comic storyboard and will have a look at our blog too. Thomas and I also arranged a meeting for tomorrow to do a Prezi for monday and continue working on the graphics.

stay tuned :)

Action...CUT!!!

The title of this blogpost is inspired by an "outtake" of our videoproject. I just gave Thomas the signal to start acting and only a few seconds later he stopped the shooting through yelling CUT!!!

Today we invited LeighAnn to Nathis kitchen. We had lunch together and then started working. We discussed which scenes we liked most and will use in the final video. We also had lots of fun watching the outtakes. Everybody made making-of-pictures which are also quite nice. 

We had some difficulties with recording the narrative. LeighAnn brought a headset and we took care that had a silent room for the record. The software first didnt accepted the microphone but after some changes in the settings Thomas made it and we could record the sentences for the intro of our video. LeighAnn spoke them. She has the best english for sure and its also good to have one with english as first language in your team which can do the corrections. 

When I think of all the troubles we had in the beginning of our project, the more do I enjoy our work now. It is very creative and we now work great as team. 

After LeighAnn had to go to pick up her kids from the daycare we continued for a while looking for some music that could fit to our video and we also had a look on the graphics we want to use. 

Tomorrow we'll have a presentation and we also fixed the things we wanted to include in our projectpresentation to our professor. Nina and Nathi wrote all things down in a googledocs and I did a first cut of the video with some music. Thomas really helped me with the music selection. 

While writing this post Adobe Premiere is still running and I hope this time there won't be any mistakes in the video. It takes a lot of time to render the frames. I really need a new computer. Its so crappy. You have such a nice camera and has to work with so awful software which is far to old for your technical equippement and no longer state-of-the-art.

Hope that the others will like the preview of the introduction scene :)

Videoshooting

I got up very early. I had bad headaches the day before and wanted to fix some things I couldn't finish on monday. I had prepared the equippement the day before. Recharged the batteries and remove all pictures from the memory cards. I m not used to film with my "baby" but I hoped that it would work. I decide to bring along my 18-55, 28-75, 8 and 50mm lenses and also my tripod. 

When I got up it was extremly foggy and I was really afraid that we had to cancel our shooting but then the sun came out and we had best conditions. 

We met at the cathedral with LeighAnn and Nina who had breakfast before together. Together we started to look for an open entrance door to shoot the first scene but all doors seemed to be closed. I had the idea to go to the history departement because there the doors would be open for sure. I was right and Thomas did a nice job infront of the camera. We went back to the cathedral and continued with the next scenes. We didn't do this on purpose but for some reasons we filmed all scenes in the order of their appearance in the movie. 

I think all actors and especially Nathi did a great job. Nathi often looks so insecure especially when she has to talk english but I was overwhelmed by her behaviour in front of the camera. She made it really professional.

I was sometimes really stressed and hope that I didn't act to unfriendly to the others. They really expected from me that I have a plan for all scenes and completly know what to do.  I just entered another place and had not even an overview and so I was unable to tell them where to place the camera. Anyway I think we made it in some way.

 

We finished the shooting with a lunch at Arken and decided to meet again on thursday to discuss the cutting. Nathi, Nina, Thomas and I also had a little sighting of the raw material.We classfied some of the videos and told each other which one we liked best and what are nice "making-of/out-take"scenes.

I also tried to prepare the cutting-programme at my computer but for some reasons it crashed down 3 times. Maybe it has to do with the main storage. Ill try to fix it so that we can work on properly on thursday.

Tell me why...I don't like mondays

Monday is not my favourite day of the week but I'm usually not one of those people who complain about it all the time. Today we had a very early meeting at 9 o'clock to browse through the storyboard and fix details for the videoshooting. 

We met in the cafeteria of the school of economics. We started to "walk through" our storyboard and also discussed the graphs we want to include in our video. I was the responsible one for the storyboard but it was so hard do decided what we want to do in a certain way. I had done the first pages but the middlepart was empty cause I needed feedback of the group. The final scene was also a bit unclear and we decided to it the next day spontaneously.

We made the "casting" and decided that Nathi would be the mainactress playing the tourist using our tracker. Thomas would be the local one and Nina and LeighAnn would be the other tourists. I dont like to be in front of the camera. I think I always look so ugly and fat and behave like a troll so its fine for me to be behind the lense. 

We were a bit worried about the weather because we had snow and fog on sun- and monday and thought that we maybe had to cancel the shooting because of bad conditions. We decided to stay in contact and to shoot at least the first scene for the video to be able to show something to our professor on friday.

5 1/2th Meeting - VideoProduction

It has become something like a tradition to have a meeting at 11 a.m at CafeArt. As I mentioned before its a nice place. They offer nice drinks, cakes and sandwiches. The prices are affordable and they dont force you to consume. We usually all have a drink and some of us sometimes have a little second breakfast. Whats not so charming are the old ladies or as I would call them "the grumpy grannies". This is a group of old ladies and the tend to rend the same room after our session.
They are unpolite and interrupt us before our time is over. Anyway its a good location for working. 

We talked about our video and how the concrete plans look like. We want to make a promotion video instead of a tutorial one. Finally we figurred out how to communicate. There are still some differences but we learned to talk about them and so they are no longer blocking but boosting our working flow. Its challenging no question to include different ideas but so it becomes a real groupwork in my eyes.








We figurred out that we want to include the aspects for tourists and locals in our tracker. We also thought about a name for our tracker "FOLLOW ME" is just a working title but I like it. 

We had to leave the room because of the grumpy grannies I mentioned before and we had lunch together at Arken Cafeteria. First we wanted to arrange another meeting for thursday but then we decided to stay a bit longer. We had coffee and tea and started with planning of the script for our video. It went pretty good. We fixed the storyline and now we have to write the off-text and draw the storyboard and decide where and how we want to film.

I want to work on the storyboard. Its fun to scribble a bit around :3