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Please forgive me for not updating this in a while as i have been so busy that this journal honestly slipped my mind. due to that fact, this post may be a tad long as a lot has happened over the last few weeks. Since the last post, I had went on holiday during the 2 week April holiday for a few days with my family to Seton Sands. During this holiday, as well as relaxing and enjoying ourselves, I also took this opportunity to continue with taking more photos and improving my photography skills. I got most of my photos around the beach across from the caravan park we stayed in and also in Edinburgh, during a day trip there. I approached the photos in a way of showing off the landscapes and also looking closer at the sand and the shells although I admit a few of your typical holiday snap shots still made it in. I will post below some of the images I took of our holiday.
When we got back we still had a week left of the 2 week break however I found myself having some of the worst post holiday blues I have ever experienced and genuinely didn't feel better in myself until the week we got back to college. so unfortunately during this time I found myself unable to concentrate on anything. On the few days before going back to college, I took this time to make the final preparations for filming the interviews for my documentary and also finalizing my idea for my animation.
On the first Wednesday back I stopped one of my tutors to ask advice about my showreel as I was very much struggling to come up with a plan of action. I had done my own research on youtube by watching different showreel's and also tutorials on how to go about creating them but nothing seemed to fit with what i needed to show in my showreel, which was my body of work as a director. Thankfully my tutor was more than happy to help and overall helped me to not only find a way to show what I wanted to convey in my showreel but also helped me to find a general theme to follow which was showing each film as a trailer showing the plot of each story. Before I knew it I was already breaking up each of my films in premiere into their main plot points and piecing the first film together as a trailer and I am still currently working on each of the films one at a time.
on the weekend after our first week back I continued with working on the showreel but I also started working on my animation. I knew that my original idea was for too ambitious as it involved filming my kids in front of a greenscreen and have them act as though they were throwing a ball, which would be the logo. I also discovered through this, why they say not to work with kids as I already could tell that my kids probably wouldn't be able to do what I needed them to do. I decided the best thing to do was to go simpler. To do this I put more focus on the logo acting like a ball on its own. I started by looking up tutorial videos of how to animate a ball in after effects and through this I quickly found a video but a woman who calls herself, Premier Gal. She explained that she used an extension to after effects which helps to create the bouncing effect but in different ways. She also explained there was a free version of this extension available that didn't have a lot of the same features but was still useful overall. I proceeded to download the free version and started to play around with the animation effects so that i could used to using the extension and I have to admit, I love it and have every intention of buying the full version once I am able to as it is a lot of fun to play around with. I developed out of this, a rough animation that has no audio or sound effects, I do plan to add these through a voice over once that animation is finalized. the video where I found this extension and tutorial of how to use it can be found here: https://youtu.be/5VPwXhDRyS8 - How to Make Your Logo Bounce ft. Squash & Stretch (After Effects Tutorial).
The next big thing was I filmed my interviews on Friday 26/04/19. I choose this day as i knew everyone I needed would be in for the full day and also it meant I could film it all in one day also. The day started with my other tutor helping me and my small crew to set up the equipment and the greenscreen as I knew I needed to give myself options for the backdrop, as i thought it would be easier than filming in peoples houses and also it would let me show photos of game characters and even some game footage behind each person. overall I found the shoot day to be one of the least stressful filming days I have experienced as everything went very smoothly and I got a lot of great answers from people. I cant thank those people enough for letting me interview them and also thank you to me crew and my tutor for helping me bring it all together to shoot on the day. Not that all the interviews have been filmed. I am now working on the voice over and the editing of the game footage, images and the interviews. I will keep you up to date on the progress of it all.
Whats next...well, as well as continuing to work on all of the above and some stuff not mentioned like my short film Broken, This week will mostly consist of working on the group Project of Fever In The Blood in which the filming has started.
I apologize again for the long post and I promise to not go so long without any updates again. Anyway, as promised, here is some of my holiday images which I took while I was at Seton Sands.
