...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

SkypeSession

We had a Skypemeeting today. I had no real high expectations concerning that meeting. I was wrong it was quite good. I was a bit a bit confused and behaved like a fool in my eyes. I was unable to answer the first questions of the professor. But since I have great coursemates they gave me another chance.

The professor asked what we have done, what we have learned so far and what are our aims for the porjetct and the difficulties we had.

I did..

• benchmarking about cultural heritage sites on Facebook
• reading Chapter 9 of the Social Media book - presented it to the others and wrote a summary
• research paper about tourism photography - presented and summed up
• analyze the "Mu Pori o kaunis" page and write a summary about it
• create a Prezi about our current Step in the working process

 I learned to look for different social media tools who fullfill my needs. There are so many available and its worth trying out new ones. We thought about using tumblr for our project but in some way wordpress seemed to be the better option. It has a better structure and is in my eyes easier to handle and guarantees an better overview to the visitor of the page.
I also gained some experience through the groupwork. It was really hard to handle all this perspectives in the beginning but after lot of talkings we made it or at least we are on a good way. It was never so hard for me to be part of a groupproject and the others had the same feeling. Maybe it had to do with the unknown freedom we had. Usually someone - the teacher/professor - tells you what he/she is expecting from you and what shall be the outcome. I guess we whined a bit about being lost with so little information but right today I got the feeling that we made it on our own. That is a quite good one and I were a bit proud of us as group. I think that we are a great team not only cause we solved our troubles ourselves but also cause we are so different and can gain from this different perspectives about the same theme.

We are no nearly done with the theoretical background and can look forward to the "fun things" like making the video. I got some experience in video-making so  I hope that we can benefit from that knowledge.

Back to work

I had a horrible weekend. It's not really relaxing when you have no clue if you have to rewrite all the texts from the past 1 1/2 months or if things are saved somewhere and can be restored. I finally found out what was the mistake. I contacted the admin of the wikiversity pae who had deleted my content. We figurred out that this was a mistake and they re-activated my account. All the texts from my last evening - quite a lot - is gone but its better to rewrite one session than to redo all stuff. Sigh....