Shameless Self Promotion

A bit of a hectic, yet productive week; started with my baffling decision to volunteer myself to do the weather on live at five, everything seemed to be going ok until I had to work out the timings for it, which involved me having to sit in front of a monitor showing the run-through and count in my head how long it would take till the maps had to change and then adding the appropriate amount of frames in flash. This resulted in layers being all mashed up into a confusing mess which was made worse when I was presented with last minute changes to the script. Anyway, broadcasting ended up with some jpegs, but I did manage to eventually get it sorted, just not in time for the programme. At least now I know a bit more about what I’m doing and it will hopefully go a bit more smoothly when my group does it.

Despite Monday’s hiccup I am enjoying using flash and whilst the stuff I am producing on it is by no means brilliant I think I am starting to get the hang of it and want to try and start applying some of the theories that I have learnt from Herbert Zettl’s Sight Sound Motion, Applied Media Aesthetics, which I am finding really interesting and I hope will prove to be useful. I have had some experience with basic camera work and lighting in my final project from my foundation course last year and a film I did for a friend (spot the blue tack and cereal boxes), filmed in my loft. The first is a montage of a couple of shorts, edited in Photoshop, each trying out a different style; the first is Svankmajer inspired, the second is a rip-off of Frank Miller’s Sin City, the third was just an excuse to hack up some Barbies, and the final one is done with hand puppets and was inspired by a visit I had to the police station. The second film is a sort of music video but I did not pay any attention to the audio so it dose not really fit and there’s some improvised sound editing at the end because the music was not long enough (actually I think its better without sound). In both films I taught myself everything as I went along so it’s all a bit basic; the lighting in both is provided by a daylight bulb I popped in my bedside lamp.

After that bit of self promotion, back to Zettl’s book, it has shown my just how little I know but I am really looking forward to trying out what I have learned. A lot of the areas, such as lighting and camera work will be different in flash as I would have to draw everything as I wanted it, so I think it might be easier to try using a programme like Maya, where I can control lighting etc. much like you can in the real world.