Thinking of a title.

I've wrote down a few titles I could use for my project, this is important because I want to show evidence that I can create titles and credits on the film.

• Playing My Guitar.
• Guitar Playing.
• Setting Up a Guitar.
• Ready to Rock.
• Let's Play Some Music.
• Plug It In, Baby.
• A Real Guitar Hero.

Project angles.

Haven't been able to get a camera out yet, so I'm going to stick with taking some still photos of the different angles that I could have.

11

10

9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1

(For some reason the images are in reverse order.)

(1) This is an angle of the 'Power' button on the amp, so I would film this as someone presses it to turn it on. I think this is a better angle compared to (2) because the composition of the shot makes sense when it comes to the next clip as it will have a noticable switch. Which is shown in (3) the angle has changed for this one and will fit nicely transitioning from the last clip. This is a still of the 'Input' button, which I will be filming the lead going into - See (4) & (5) - I'm not too sure how close I want the camera to be for the shot of the lead going in, but I'm leaning more towards the shot where the camera is closer. (6) is a photo I took of the amp, I wanted to see if a full shot of the amp would make an impact on the film, as I could have some sound coming out of the amp at this point, but I'll see how it goes and if I have enough time in the 10 seconds for it.

(7) This is a still of someone turning the volume up on the amp, again the same as 6 I will see if it fits in. (8) is just a quick photo I took of me playing the guitar to see what that specific angle would look like.

(9) shows the angle I would like to have for when the lead is being plugged into the guitar, I may straighten up the plug into the middle for when I film. (10) & (11) show two angles of which I could use for when I'm playing the guitar, although after taking the photos I'm thinking I might have to show it from the other side because when my hand comes into view it may block up some of the camera space.

Guitar sounds good.

Right, I decided on the theme of 'Plugging in guitar and playing', so I just need to think of which stages I'm going to produce and how I'm going to produce them.

What I want to do is have some very close up shots of the parts I'm going to use, I don't want to have it as a full straight record (ie, film someone plugging it in and then moving to the guitar), but rather have it as a series of short clips that I can put together, this will not only create a more stylistic approach to the video, but will help with the fact that it will require edditing, which is helpful in the fact that I will have shown evidence I've learnt how to edit videos and will allow me to make the video 10 seconds more easily.

Our breif explains that we should think about a soundtrack or audio track for the clip, so obviously my clip would contain the noises the amp is making when the guitar is being plugged in, there will be a natural hum that it produces when nothing is happening and when the lead is plugged in this will give off a certain noise, so there'll be no need for an overlaying audio track, but rather just the sounds that are recorded when the filming takes place.

I will take some pictures soon at different angles to create a sort of experimental storyboard.

Narrowing down ideas.

So I was very keen on the idea of making a 'Pulp Fiction in 10 seconds' video, but this doesn't seem very realistically possible. I could definately come up with a way to distill some lines, etc of the film down to 10 seconds, but I don't think I'd be able to execute the idea very well due to lack of costumes, sets, actors, etc.

My attention now turns to something more simple that I can create in an attractive way, I'm thinking maybe going with the 'Starting up a bike' idea or the 'Plugging in a guitar and playing' idea because these two things are very accessable for me.

Thinking about 10 Second Project

Okay, so we have to create a 10 second film for our next project, the idea is based on the 10 Second Film Festival (CLICKY)

So I've been throwing some ideas around and made a list of some:

• Pulp Fiction in 10 seconds (Or another film?
• Someone calling someone and then there be no answer.
• Starting up a car/bike.
• Plugging in a Hi-Fi.
• Plugging in a guitar then playing it.
• A drawing in 10 seconds.
• Drawing something then speed up to 10 seconds.
• Some form of stop-motion animation.
• Travelling from one place to another.
• A night out in 10 seconds (someone getting drunk, etc.)
• Getting ready to go out.
• Film a clock ticking for 10 seconds.
• An hour in 10 seconds.
• Time-lapse from a certain place.

Approval

Submitted my image, now I'm just waiting for approval of it here:

http://www.bigstockphoto.com/photo/view/3923234

Final image for BigStockPhoto submission.

This is my final image.

I picked .png as it's file type as I think this will not lose on quality and keep a small degree of file size.

Progress on final

This is the progress my final image took. (1) I changed the level of colour to something more suitable and more appealing, mainly just adding in some red and yellow to the scene, to take out the over powering blue. (2) I played around with the brightness and contrast until I could find something that stood out to me as being brighter, but not too bright. Not adding too much contrast helped this problem. (3) Finally I added a second layer onto the other with the same image, placed a layer mask onto the top one and took away the parts I wanted to be clear. A guassian filter was added onto this layer to add a sense of depth of field (DoF).

Decided photo

I decided to go with this photograph that I took in London, because I have the idea of zooming in and using it as if it was a background shot for a website of some sort.

BigStockPhoto

As of reading through BigStockPhoto's guidelines for images, I'm led to believe they don't accept over-editted images, like my previous attempts, so I plan on just taking an image and playing with the levels, etc. See what it turns out like.

Taking photos in London

Here are some photos I took for the project when I was down in London, some obviously need editting because of the colour and contrast issues, but I will resolve this when it comes to post-production.

The parrot on the rock.

As we've been told about how to create reflections I thought I'd go for something a little more challenging, getting a parrot to reflect on the water.

I started off with the two images (just found off google images) and placed the parrot image onto the water image, removing all the background I could. I then added some shadows onto the rock where I placed the parrot and some shadows on the parrot itself, so it would fit in.

Next, I created a copy of the parrot, added it to another layer and flipped it vertically. Obviously the colours wouldn't look right at this point, so I added a multiply layer blend to it, which gave it the depth I was looking for. After this I used the smudge tool to blue the reflection to fit in with the water.


All I did now was touch up some shadows and sort out the artifacts on the sides of the reflection by simply erasing it.

I'm quite glad with how the image came out, it's a good simple effect. What's wrong with the idea though, is that it doesn't look very "real" the pose of the parrot and the setting it's in don't exactly fit well together. Other than that though, it's been a good experiment.

(This image is saved as 1_parrotreflection.psd in the "Photoshop" directory, the progress images will also be found on the CD.)

When chickens attack.

Just thought I'd play around with some stuff, do a quick photoshop play-around and see if I can generate some ideas, obviously a fire breathing chicken isn't the greatest of things to do, but it gave me a feel of what I could do.

Wasn't anything complicated involved in producing this either, which I think is good, I just cut out the picture of the chicken with the lasso tool and placed it on top of the picture of the 'city', same went for the fire. (Which I took from this photo)

The smoke from the fire was just a few squiggles of the brush tool and I filled in some shadows with the burn tool. Oh yes, and I added in some color reflection for the fire on the chicken, ground, etc.

Reading is fun! Yay!

Just been reading through a book I took out of the library called The Art and Science of Digital Compositing by Ron Brinkmann, and it's a really good read! Alot of it consists of video compositing, like taking layers of video and image and creating an end result, but the information it talks about is just great.

I'll just quote a part:

"A histogram is a way of displaying a plot of the number of pixels for each given brightness value in an image. Consider the four-bit, single channel image shown in Figure 9.1b. With only four bits to represent the color in the image, each pixel can have one of 16 possible values."

I'll definately be using the stuff in here as reference for the stuff I do later on.

Welcome to my blog.

For all of those who don't know, I'm a student at Lincoln University studying Computer Games Production.

This is my blog for the progress of the module "Creative Technologies".