Saturday, 21 May 2011

Guess who's a mess?

Just spent 6 hours straight working on visual essay stuff, previews for those interested. No stealy my practitioners! Yeah I guess I'm gonna take a shower and get out of my pajamas before the whole end of the world thing happens. RAPPPTUREEEEEEEEEEE... whatever, enjoy.

p.s. apologies for random lines in these screen-shots, me and Photoshop had an argument and now he wont talk to me and he's taken all my vectors out drinking.



Thursday, 12 May 2011

Remains of the Day: Film

In this post I'll attempt to consolidate a quick and dirty film finisher with rationales, the film and any notes on my personal role in its creation.

For our film project we were given the script "Herds" written by our very own lecturer, Jools.



Most of the project files for this have been submitted but for this our group had to complete all of the following prior to any actual filming taking place:
  • Risk Assessment
  • Lectures on safety
  • Health and Safety/BECTU 
  • Brief 'Recce' of possible locations 
  • Location Release forms
It was during this none-filming period which I took the time to look into the camcorders which we could borrow and after discussing my findings with the group eventually we chose to shoot the whole thing using a Panasonic AG-HPX171E. Thats somewhere between a small studio camera and a handy-cam for most normal people providing a lot of features of the first, but the convenient of the latter. The first issue I ran into here was no manual was provided and personally having little-no experience using anything similar I definitely had to go hunting around for one once that was taken care of and a few tutorials watched later I was ready to fulfill my role as camera man.


Rewrites:
As previously shown we landed the script "Herds" but we decided to take it down a more sinister path with some underlying thriller tones. This elevated our strange but friendly man turn from sandwich stealer to near body-snatching status, replacing the role of the other character and throwing him out of his own home - all taking place right within an identifiable comfort zone. The makings of a solid classic in my opinion.

Complications:
We ran into a lot of these when factoring into account a randomly a lotted group the main two of which were outside work schedules and lazy damn actors. As many people as we managed to cast for our weird flaky roles it seemed none of them were pretending the flakiness, and therefore didn't really bother to show up. If  I'd been hitting the film pathway next year I would of been annoyed but instead between the group we just picked out those who didn't have an active production role, loaded a few extra responsibilities on the others and started shooting.


** One of this for 3d work coming very soon when I can find a good way to upload supporting sketches.

Thursday, 5 May 2011

Look at your font, now back to mine, now back to yours. Sadly, yours is not mine.

Rational to describe my choice of fonts.

I went with some pretty straight forward sans-serif fonts to convey a modern look and keep in with the punchy bright coloured feel while purposefully contrasting with the deliberately negative tagline/logo the whole thing is supposed to seem very clean cut official yet creative.

Logo - (Mayberry)
For the logo font I had to resort to using an image to allow a nonestandard font to be useable on computers without it's installation. To keep it crystal clear it's a decent size, anti-aliased and saved as a high-quality PNG while through some kind of witchcraft keeping a filesize of just a few kilobytes. Instead of redoing the image multiple times per section of website instead I just use different css placement options to allow the same image to be reused throughout, further reducing loadtimes.

Content - (Lucida Grande)
The main content font had to be something that is in common usage across different platforms (PC/Mac etc) so that each article can remain small to keep the website down. On the plus side apparently HTML5/CSS3 allows us to use some nifty server side font guff, but that's way outside of the scope of this first project, somewhere down the road and off into the english channel.
As with the classic design rule which was once again mentioned today, I do not currently intend on using many/any more fonts as 2-3 is that user sweet spot we all like to see.