Week: 17 – 23 May

This week, I didn’t spent much time working on my personal project since I’m a bit busy with the collaborative indie film project.

I actually planned to (and should have) finalise the scenes and actions for the storyboard as soon as possible so I can shoot the background plates (video footages) for the camera tracking process. I thought long and hard to design a good actions sequence for the story but I still don’t have any concreate idea for this. I felt a bit stuck that I finally decided to follow some of the actions and shots from the old Killer Bean animation since the motive of my project was not to design the choreography but to do character animation and camera tracking.

I quickly referred the Killer Bean animation and drew a new rough story sketches to finalise the actions, the number of shots, angle and camera movement for the video shooting. There will be 12 shots, and I targeted it to have a duration of 30 seconds maximum for whole animation.

I woke up as early as 5 am in the morning to shoot the background plate videos to avoid the crowds and people that coming out in the morning to go to work and school. I shoot the videos using my iPhone only since I don’t have any better camera equipments. The angles were based from the story sketches I did last night. I made several variations and alternatives for each shot as backup.

Right after the shooting, I went to my computer and I made a quick editing see the result and how the shots coming together. Honestly, I’m not satisfied with the video. The location was not very good and since it was in between two buildings, the area was under the shadow which forced me to increase the camera brightness during shooting and made the other already bright areas to become over exposed.

I planned to do a re-shoot in another day, probably during the weekend or early next week.