EDITING and SPECIAL EFFECTS

The team originally wanted to submit just a plain video however from the beginning I knew that editing would play a major role in fine tuning our project. A lot of our footage was quite bare and I felt did not convey what we wanted to show as strongly as I would have wanted it to. I really wanted to learn after effects as I never had the opportunity before so I nominated myself the lead of effects. It was only at this time in the project that we began to go our separate ways and isolate our workload on different areas of the film. I felt as though I did my absolute best in after effects, spending almost every waking hour of the week and a half designing and animating interfaces, however I cant help but feel I could have done more than just motion track. If I had dedicated all my time over the semester to after effects I could have constructed a masterpiece instead of squabbling with the group pointlessly over concepts.

I had a rough idea of what I wanted to place over the top of the film from the very beginning of the project. I wanted to implement I kind of interface that followed the money around highlighting the emotions of the people who interacted with the money. Once again, I felt this was important due to the fact that our film did not do our concept justice. The problem was that I had a week and a half to learn to the program before the due date. I was sure that I could use a program called Boujou to motion track for me however the footage we took was far too shaky for this program. It was very precise for slow moving footage. Evidently this shattered my hopes however I worked around this problem by using the inbult adobe motion tracker instead. It was not perfect but it did the job just fine. And probably saved me a lot of time looking back. I started off making simple interfaces and slowly learnt how to animate them better over time.

I slowly worked out a workflow within the program and simply rinsed and repeated the same pattern over and over. I tried not to reuse anything from prior clips just to keep things interesting. However I got to the point where I needed to do further research to discover a new range of designs. Minority report was a perfect example where I took out elements and combined them with others. Originally I planned only to have the effects at the interactions where the money was transferred but I chose to challenge myself and try animate as many scenes as possible with the interface without taking the attention away from the footage itself.

The interface follows the money around from person to person highlighting emotions as it travels its journey. It shows that no matter where or who you are, emotional attachments to money will always exist. There is no escaping the system that you are trapped within. I wanted to show not only emotions but also other aspects of money such as the way that people view you in society based on your worth. For example when the drug addict is walking through the tunnel with strangers staring at him, I highlighted words such as 'ignore, shock, and disgust.' This was done so show how people may in fact view someone differently based on their place in society and ultimately this can be connected back to money. I also wanted to show how money has very different meanings to people. An example of this is the juxtaposition between for example the mugger and the mother. The mugger mugged someone for 'street cred' as shown in the interface where as the mother put all here hope into a lotto ticket to pay off her excessive bills in order to support her family.

I also played a major role in the editing of the film in regards to removing certain unwanted elements and also learning Boris FX to insert the animated transitions between videos within adobe premier.

Overall I feel that we as a group accomplished a lot in the past few weeks. All it took was a little bit of pressure to kick us into gear. If only we could have found this drive earlier in the semester.

Development

We have ONCE again decided to completely change our idea and venture away from the interview concept. I for one always wanted to do this because I thought that our questions we rather pointless and trivial to networks. Not only that but I did not want to confront random strangers on the street. It was risky, and unreliable. After doing a few tests with students and lecturers in the class we found that the answers they were giving were extremely similar.

We completely changed our direction into a short film, (which is what we wanted to do in the beginning I might add). The only trouble was coming up with a witty story that was both artistic and relevant to the topic of networks. Coming up with ideas proved to be our downfall. It seemed that everyone was on a different page as to what they wanted to create. I had a firm vision for what the film should be like but I felt that influences from other people in the group lead me astray and away from my vision.

I found that our workflow was extremely poor. We literally could not stay on task for more than 20 minutes without going completely off topic. I put this down to the fact that we all got along together TOO well. There wasn't really anyone in the group who made a stand and put pressure on everyone to get work done. We had discussed concepts for half a semester and researched many aspects of the money network however I think this was our main problem. The money network was so vast that our minds were scattered with thoughts and ideas that formed a jigsaw puzzle that did not fit together. However this greatly influenced the second half of the semester because we recycled many ideas that helped develop the final film. For example. We experimented with me sitting on the side of the footpath on queen street pretending to be a homeless man for 10 minutes while people walked  passed. I felt embarrassed and ashamed, feelings that I haven't felt in a long time. This influenced the tunnel scene in the film for example where people are judging the drug addict. It made me truly aware of the opinions that people have other other people both positive or negative. It gave me a new perspective to live a different life influenced  by money.

Every single time we would meet as a group we would leave at the end of the day agreeing on a certain idea but then the next day people would change it. And others would forget completely what we were talking about not having documented it in their workbooks. Eventually we decided to start from scratch to make sure we were all on the same page. I made a a list of every single emotion that I could relate to money such as hatred, love, jealously etc. From there we started piecing together certain events that could link together. After researching a few short films and examining their contents we eventually decided to go along with a cyclic style of short film. Where as the money would start at one point and eventually make its way back to its origin. By doing this it really showed the network within money.

However the filming was not very smooth at the beginning. We ran into many problems. The reason being is because we had not fully developed the story and were shooting the beginning of the film without knowing where the scenes were leading. This meant that most of the footage we shot (although very nicely done) was useless and was discarded. However this stage of development was not all a great loss. we discovered that we all were terrible actors. And because our film was aiming to highlight the emotions that people feel because of money, this was not ideal. Not only that but we needed actors for our film and we were not sure if we could find anyone this late in the semester to help us film. Because of these factors we decided that it would be the best option to shoot in first person for most of the film. It also allows the viewers to put themselves in the shoes of the actors and feel what they feel in their situations.

Ideally we would have wanted to use a wide angle lense on the camera but none of us wanted to spend 250$ on a lens. After looking at a few home-made fps 'Call of Duty videos' we decided to build a rig using a helmet so that we could mount the camera on it. After drilling a few holes and lathering a bolt in epoxy glue we finally finished our masterpiece. However we soon realised that we created a few problems for ourselves.
1) You could barely see where you were going while wearing it.
2) Without a wide angle lens it was almost impossible to see your body and arms when looking downwards, you had to physically move your hand in front of the camera to see anything. This made picking up objects extremely difficult.
3) Footage was also fairly shaky, but at the same time this shakiness gave a the film a 'feel' to it that you were looking through the eyes of the character.

All of the filming itself was shot over about a week and a half. Prior to this we travelled around to different locations to confirm what would be appropriate. But with all honesty it was not a very well orchestrated method of planning. I was loosing hope in the project looking at the footage we were accumulating. I felt as though we were extremely rushed in shooting. For example, in the dairy scene that I organised we could only shoot a few shoots because the shop owner did not want us in the shop for too long. This meant that re shooting the bad shots was out of the question. However we had a plan to overcome this during the editing by using the 'blink' transition effect to cut out the bad features of the film. During this time period Supa was filming and directing majority of the shots as he had experience with camera work in the past. However we all played a vital role in this stage of the project as we all gave input as to how things could be improved.

Experimentation

I experimented with a range of techniques for the interface well in advance of the final production. One of the techniques that I liked a lot was the chalk outline technique that I learnt from youtube. It gave a really nice effect and I could use it to show the transfer of money however I knew I would encounter many problems in the process. For one thing, you had to draw everything frame by frame which was extremely tedious and time consuming. We were shooting 50fps on the camera so this meant that it would be next to impossible to actually use this technique.