Day 44

Friday was a day I felt relieved as all of the assignments had been handed in and I’m finally free of all the workloads. I really need a good break. The screening of videos was very successful and I think that a lot of them had done a great job and I have to admit that a lot of them did better than us. However, my group members and I have also put in a lot of effort when doing this video. Although it is not as good comparing to some other groups but I think we really did a great job and I have to say I am very proud to show the video as I know it is a video that we produce from scratch, starting from the brainstorming of ideas to shooting and lastly editing. It was everyone in the group who made it happen and I really have to thank everyone who have helped us and gave comments in order to make this video happen. Last but not least, I hope everyone is going to enjoy their holiday to the fullest and stay healthy!

Zhi Yong

I was watching the works of others during the presentation, and some was quite animatic, some with lots of nice effects and some with lots of humour. As compared to us, I think we may lose out to them. But come to think again, what was the objective of this video? I realised maybe we had reached our objective, that is to tell our MOI story. Our audience? Our parents and potential MOI student. If we just focus on potential MOI students, we will neglect our parents and thus the objective is not met, and it is true vice-versa. Even though ours may not as interesting as others, but we did achieve the objectives, which may make us on par with others. Anyway it is up to our lecturer from here now.

Yanjun

It was a great feeling able to see my group's video finally shown to our fellow classmates and lecturer. As our video was being screened, I felt my heart thumping rapidly as I was keen to know the reaction from the audience. The moment the video had ended, the applause from the crowd was simply breathtaking. It was when I knew that all our efforts had paid off.

After working with Zhi Yong & Yanjun for the past 2 months, our friendship bond became stronger. As I had worked with Zhi Yong during our Video Fundamentals module, he was already someone I was rather familiar with. Whereas for Yanjun, I did not even know him at all. Like any other group, we had argued at times, but we also had fun together. Filming at places such as Chinatown & Boat Quay allowed us to reminisce the memories we already had when our classes were conducted at these locations as well as creating unforgettable experiences while we were filming there.

No doubt our video may not stand out as compared to our peers, but what we have achieved as a group was something money could not buy. I felt that I had also matured not only as a friend but also as a person. There are times that we have to be understanding when group members are not able to make it for our meetings or work slower than expected. However, this is a deep insight on an example how the working industry would be like when we enter it in the future.

Last but not least, I would like to thank both Zhi Yong & Yanjun for understanding and tolerance throughout these 2 months. Whether we would work together again or not, I do not know. But what I can sincerely say is that I enjoyed creating this video with you guys! Even 10 or 20 years down the road, when we all had grown up, I can still look back and proudly say that this video was done by the three of us.

Shaun :)

43rd Post

Alas! Its officially the end of MOI Project 1!!! Two months of battle and now ( I mean as of 9:07p.m.) is rest and sleep. Well, till now we have endured lots of suffering and all those shooting and editing really took the spirit out of us. But today was quite different from the past few days, as today is the day we need to submit our finished video.
In the morning, we were trying to finish up all those unfinished task like adding background music and refining our DVD cover. However, we met quite a lot of problems like audio footage being overwritten and having the wrong dimension for the DVD cover. Because of time shortage, we decided to distribute the workload instead of our usual "do-it-together" way of working.

Shaun went down to the 3D animation studio and edited the credits for the video. Zhi Yong stayed at the Mac lab to fine tune the audio and I took up the task of preparing the disk cover. We took quite a long time to finish up, plus the fact that the printing shop was having its monthly "traffic jam" around the last 2 days of the block.

It was quarter to four and we were ready to submit. Actually we were being "kay poh" at the General Office and discovered that quite a number of groups had not submitted yet. Maybe they were really having problems in rendering and burning, and some of them were having problems with their work a few days before the deadline. I was reflecting, it is very challenging for a film-maker to meet the deadline, especially when problems come in unexpectedly. A number of my coursemates had gone through this experience, even our group got that too. Maybe this is a lesson learned that we need to back up our data frequently, and not to procrastinate at the start and rush at the end. Surely, P1 is something that we will always keep in our heart.

Yanjun

Entry No. 42

Today is the last day before submission date. It was quite a tiring day as there is still quite a lot of things that we still need to edit and put into our video.

Firstly, we finally finished editing the Video Fundamentals trailer.
Secondly, we finished inserting the slideshows of our exercises for Drawing Essentials and Fundamentals of Digital Photography.
Thirdly, we finished adding subtitles to the video.
Fourthly, the volume of the video is somehow balance.

However, we still need to add the background music and also edit the credits to credit the song providers and the artist of the songs.

Zhi Yong

Day 41

It was the first time I felt Yanjun and I became so serious in doing our work. As time was running out, as well as Zhi Yong rushing on his Animation Fundamentals final assignment, we had to trust each other in doing our job as a group member. Hence, Yanjun & I assigned each other with tasks to fulfill and constantly checking whether we are not behind schedule.

Yanjun was extremely hardworking today. As I was helping out Hazziq & Hana's Video Fundamentals video, he re-recorded his disapproved parts and started on the subtitling. He actually read the Final Cut Pro user manual to find out how it is to be done and we managed to finish most of the subtitles for today. At first, we thought it was tough as we heard from seniors and fellow classmates that we would have to export to iMovie or use LiveType to get it done.

Yanjun even completed the Fundamentals of Digital Fundamentals slideshow with Adobe After Effects and finished designing the disc cover. As for me, I felt that after all the hard work we had put in, I look forward in presenting our video on this Friday.

Shaun =)

40th Post

Today was another time for consultation and it was quite productive. Though we need to re-shoot one of the scene, it was not that troublesome and we could finish it under one hour. Wahidah had heard of our voice over and from there we carry on with our editing.

Things that we had done includes voice recording and re-shooting and further editing. We changed to another script as we find that some of our footage did not fit into the original one. There was a part in our rough cut that has a missing link. It was the part where the book dropped onto the protagonist head . We re-shot that scene, and found ourselves in a joke when the book was stuck on the ledge on the fifth story of the HDB flat opposite TP. Luckily there was a friendly uncle willing to lend us a bamboo pole so that we could trip the book down to the ground floor.

We went back to further edit our video and we used LiveType to add the intro into the video.

Well, I just hope we can finish up before Wednesday.

Yanjun

Entry No. 39

Today we went to Bedok library to work on our final assignment.

Firstly, we discussed our script for the voice-over for our video. It was a tough process as the lines that we are going to say needed to be related to the video and also be kept within the time frame. We will be consulting Wahidah tomorrow to approve on our script before we proceed to voice-recording.

Secondly, we had also written down the subtitles in a document that I believe will be put inside the video latest by Tuesday.

Thirdly, we brainstorm our ideas on how we are going to design the DVD cover.

As this coming week is the last week and I have 2 modules going on, I'm afraid that I will not be able to do as much in the last part of the editing as I still need to work on my final assignment of Animation Fundamentals which is quite time consuming.

Zhi Yong

Day 38

Reaching school around at 9-am, we scanned most of our works into JPEG files. They are then compiled in accordance to the modules and made into a few slideshows.

Even thought that it is a Saturday, we had to re-shoot the missing parts of our video as it was the only time our protagonist was free. We had to ask him to wear back exactly what he wore in our video. This taught us the lesson of confirming that every shot of every scene being taken, otherwise, causing us to waste precious time of both the actor & production crew.

Furthermore, Yanjun had outside commitments that he had to attend to this afternoon. This resulted in the crew to be short of manpower. However, we managed to to pull through this problem by filming the scenes that required more labour when Yanjun was around.

When Yanjun came back in the evening, he created the Fundamentals of Digital Photography slideshow. On the other hand, I managed to do a rough cut for the Credits. Both of us used Adobe After Effects. By putting the slideshow & credits into our unfinished video, it made us felt much closer to completion.

Shaun :)

37th Post

Today may be an experiment day for us, as we tried to put in effects in our footage. Motion plus key-frame became our best friend and I experimented with different transition and animation. There were parts where we need to zoom in the first frame of the raw footage after the book scene (for 4 rounds), and we successfully done it with a very smooth transition and as realistic as possible. Sometimes when we had lessons on these software like Premier Pro, After Effects, Final Cut Pro etc, always we displayed a mundane look in our eyes, especially in Digital Media Fundamentals. But maybe I would like to thank my lecturers Alan and Yoke Ee right here who taught us on these programmes, which, in our production, became so important and I am still trying to search for my notes on these tutorials.

5 days left for us to complete our production, and there are still a lot to be done. I feel that this time round my team is exhausted from early February till now. Though for now Shaun and I do not have another module for this block, Zhi Young is having Animation Fundamentals and during this period of time, he is facing challenges in his final assignment for that module and may not be able to focus on P1. This means Shaun and I have to fill in, which may or may not be a good thing (for every stage of the production we used to work together, and normally we don't divide the workload that much as compared to other groups).

Till this day I have not put up any interesting things yet. During editing, I discovered that Final Cut Pro does not come in the software just like that. It comes from a package called Final Cut Studio, which includes the FCP, Soundtrack Pro, Livetype, Motion, Colour, Compresser Pro and some others. No wonder it is sold at around $1700 for students. Anyway, these softwares listed here are very cool in production and they can help us in adding effects and sounds into our video. They are something like Adobe Creative Suite for production but better. This period of editing may be a learning time to learn all these "shiok" yet alien stuffs from Apple.

Yanjun really needs to learn more =) ending here

Entry No. 36

Today, we went to consult Wahidah and after showing her our video, she advised us to re-shoot some of the scenes as the transitions of scenes seemed to look very sudden. Thus, we planned to re-shoot the problematic scenes to make sure that the video does not look weird. We had tried to make the part that the book flying to the camera. But we failed and decided to change the idea of to the book dropping onto the protagonist's head that caused him to fall onto the ground.

 

So far, I think me and my group are doing fine and we will be able to finish the assignment on time. However, we still need to work on some effects and also the opening, credits and the trailer of our video fundamental. We are still working on the trailer but I think that it should be ready by monday when we are consulting Wahidah again.

I hope that the video comes out will be a good one as we really put in a lot of effort and time in this project.

Zhi Yong

Day 35

Today, we finished filming the part of 2D Art Fundamentals. As Amanda finally came back after a week of absence, Yanjun & Zhi Yong managed to retrieve back their works. We also re-shoot the researching scenes of
Yanjun using the computer when researching instead of using his MacBook again.

As Zhi Yong has Animation Fundamentals class in the morning and Yanjun having outside commitments in the mornings, I had to do my duty of a team member in continuing the editing of the footages alone. It was similar to the situation we were in the last block whereby Yanjun & I had Design History Classes, whereas Zhi Yong, who had only one module, worked his socks off by contributing the most when writing the proposal. Hence, I felt that when it comes to group work, it is about give and take rather than taking advantage of each other by slacking.


Shaun :)

34th Post

Today is our Interim 2 presentation. Thinking about the past few days of stress when editing, I supposed that we were lucky during this period of time. Anyway, we rushed our editing for the rough cut even till this morning, Shaun was trying to add sounds to finish up the rough cut so that we can present it for the interim. Despite being late for a while, Wahidah still gave us a chance to present our stuff. Hence, we were very grateful to her.

When we edited the footage, we discovered that some parts were not smooth and presentable. We came to realize that Final Cut Pro is not a simple program to use after all. Nevertheless, we would use this editing time as a learning journey. By doing so, we can familiarize and practice using FCP for our projects in future.

Finally, we could get back our 2D Art Fundamentals works and we would be finishing the whole shoot. Maybe we are really fortunate and I believe that we can be on schedule for the post production work. 

Four more steps, and we will finish P1. Just waiting for this day.

Yanjun=)

Entry No. 33

Although we still lack of some of the scenes, we still proceeded to editing because tomorrow is the presentation for Interim 2. We need a rough cut to show our lecturer and the class what we had done so far and also the mistakes that we have made. We are currently still trying very hard to finish up the editing part. What we have left are 2 modules that still need to be arranged and cut properly.

The part that we still need to shoot are the daily works of our 2D Art Fundamentals and I think some the shots may be needed to re-shoot if we have the time.

Each of our group had a chance to touch on the editing of the video. At the same time, while one member was editing, the other members took note of the progress and gave opinions on how the video should edited to make the video better.

Zhi Yong

Day 32

What we had to do for today was to film point of view shot of the protagonist, establishing shots of the 1st scene as well as close-up shots of the Book. As it was raining, we had to wait for a few hours before the scene would be dry enough to start filming.

The point of view shot of the protagonist was definitely the toughest shot for what we filmed today. This was because we tried throwing the book at the camera to create the protagonist being 'hit by book' effect. Unfortunately, the wind was a crucial factor as we kept missing the target.

As for the establishing shots of the 1st scene, we went up to the car park opposite Temasek Polytechnic in order to capture footages of TP & the fitness corner. I felt that we still needed more practice for panning diagonally.

We encountered the problem of the footage that was filmed being wider when imported to the MacBook than the footage appearing on the SONY miniDV camera. This caused us to worry as we may have to reshoot the close-up shots of the Book.

Shaun :)

31st Post

Today is a quite a productive day. We managed to complete 90% of the shoot and we will be ready to edit by tomorrow. We did the scene for Drawing Essentials in the Level 5 Studio and even booked the lecture theatre to shoot our opening scene for Creative Story-Telling. We felt that a big load has finally been cast down and now we are almost ready for the next step.

I realized one thing about video capturing. Compositions and angles are not as easy as what I think, and getting a good one needs a lot of trials. Maybe this is really a good experience for us in film-making. Anyway, a lot of time will be taken and work is challenging, but there is fun definitely.

Yanjun

Entry No. 30

Today we were suppose to go and consult Wahidah about what should we include for Interim 2 . However, we failed to consult her as I was stuck with my exercise in Animation Fundamentals. Thus, we proceed to the next plan which was the filming at Boat Quay.

While we were traveling, there was actually a bit of drizzle. Luckily, the drizzle stopped when we reached our destination. The shooting today was not as smooth as I thought as there was some sort of event happening near the place that we were filming. Thus, the recording of Shaun’s voice became hard for us to capture clearly. But thanks to Yanjun, who brought along his microphone, we managed to use it to amplify Shaun’s voice and we will try to remove some of the ambience sound using Audacity.

Another problem during today’s shoot is because we have quite a lot of shots to film and during the later part of the shoot in evening, the numbers of working adults started to increase as every single minute gone by. This caused us to retake some of the shots as they walked past our camera without knowing that we were filming.

Zhi Yong

Day 29

The weather had turned for the better today. As we had outdoor shootings to be done as soon as possible, it was a relief to be able to continue filming. This was in order to keep up with the schedule that is already far behind time.

Zhi Yong managed to get 3 of his secondary school friends namely, Dennis, Ben & Zhan Jie, to act in our video. We were thankful to them, especially Dennis, for taking time out in helping us out.
Dennis, who was our protagonist, had to do embarrassing actions such as lying down on the pavement in the public. However, he still carried on with his job and acted brilliantly.

We hope that the weather would be fine again tomorrow as we are going to Boat Quay to film my part.

Shaun :)

28th Post

People says that Mother Nature is not to be underestimated, and you just have to believe it. Also, there is famous children song that goes "Rain Rain Go Away, Come again another day..." I started to embrace this song. Well, we were suppose to go down to Clark Quay and do our shoot, and there comes rain, thunder and wind. Recently, we learned that the weather turn unpredictable.

So, we could only refine our voice recording in school, and to finish the design of our prop (which is the manual). Suddenly, the whole group come into a pressurized state as we have to push our schedule forward to a later date. Anyway, we have done what we can do in school and plan out every shoot that we are going to take so that we can start straight away when we reach our location.

Maybe today is the most sian in the whole block. We are stalled in the middle, and just not able to do anything productive. Is it that we did not plan well, or we are just unlucky? I really pray hard that when tomorrow comes, we can really do more that today and finish up more work so to be on schedule.

No rain for tomorrow please....

Brought to you by Yanjun from thr33

Entry No.27

Today we met in school to try out audio recordings for voice over in our video.

I expected the recordings to be clearer than our current audio. Thus, I think that we need to edit the recordings using Audacity to remove the environment sounds and see if the voice is suitable for the video or not.

If there is no improvement in the audio, I think we need to buy a microphone and record the voice over again.

I hope that the production time will end sooner so that we can start on the post production, which is the editing part and choosing of music to add into the video.

Zhi Yong

Day 26

Sadly to say, we encountered a few problems today.

Firsly, I accidentally edited on the wrong draft of our script. Thus, confusion arose and caused a bit of a panic.

Secondly, we mistaken that Yanjun had his 2D Art Fundamentals works with him. They were still with his lecturer. By the time we realized this, we tried getting back the works. However, it was to no avail as we counld not find the lecturer.

Last but not least, the casette tape of the Sony miniDV camera was faulty once again. It made us restless as this problem kept recurring for the third time in a row.

Despite all these setbacks, we still managed to overcome the problems and continued filming. We also decided that the scenes that were not filmed that day would be postponed. I guess such delays are imminent in a production.

Shaun :)

25th Post

Yanjun is here again.

This time we were filming on the module Creative Story-Telling. We were at my house and we thought it would be a breeze for us. We needed not to record any sound and the environmental variables could be controlled. However, the tape encountered problems again plus the battery of the camera is running low. We had to charge it first before recording. Also, a lot of takes were NG, as there were shots which requires us to throw a crumbled paper ball, and the ball landed quite far away from the targeted area. Fortunately, we are able to wrap up everything and get the scene done.

I realised that production is so much challenging than pre-production, as problems are imminent during shoot. I think as we go on, we may face more problems, but I think we are able to solve them better than we are last time.

Here we go again!

Entry No. 24

Today, after we consulted Wahidah to confirm the call sheet, we went to Pagoda Street to start filming as it was the furthest destination in our video. It was a tiring day as we need to travel all the way to Chinatown from school with our equipment.

I was the actor for today's shots and because of my poor memory, I had slowed down the whole process of filming. After that, we decided to split the paragraph that I suppose to say for different shots and for each shot I will say a different sentence.

Because this was first time we shot our video in a crowded place, we thought that the audio should be audible even in some distance. However, we found out that my voice turned out being covered by the surrounding sound.

We have also encounter some problems with the tape of the video camera, it was somehow faulty in some way. But luckily it turned out fine after some time. When we were filming, some of the people in Chinatown will just walk past the camera and we have to re-shoot that particular shot again.

Zhi Yong

Day 23

Being a calefare in a our seniors' video todat was an invaluable experience that money cannot buy. It let me have an inside look in how MoiP2 works with the use of a 'boom'.

What we did today was finishing up most of the call sheet, 2 column sheet as well as starting to work on the Moi Series 1 guidebook.

As Wahidah felt that our script was too plain and not enough sharing of experience, we decided to add an additional module as well as extending the script. The 2 column sheet was not as easy to do as it looked. It required us to match the audio with the visuals for every single shot of the video. Meanwhile, we decided to soak the papers, which is used to make the guidebook, in coffee to make the papers look old and brownish. This is to maintain the feel of a martial arts manual.

As for tomorrow, we would like to start filming the Chinatown scene. We hope that the weather would be ideal for us to film the scenes that we require as it has been pouring heavily these few days.

Shaun :)

22th Post

Today maybe one of the bad days we ever had. Well, we actually had our ideas, but it was just not good enough. Wahidah commented that our scripts were boring, and we thought we were quite slow since there are still much left not done.

No worries. We can do it! Now we have finalise the call sheet, and the script is 50% edited to make it interesting. We still have the 2 column sheet and the script to finish by tomorrow, but I think we can make it. Nothing can hinder thr33, every stage we go will be a learning journey, and it will bring us closer to our goal.

Let us advance!!!
Brought to you by Yanjun =)
P.S. actually we heard that other groups are at the same rate or slower than us...well not sure but can't afford to slow down.