It really was an Epic Journey!

I came to school at about 11.45, just in time to meet the rest of the Crewsaders. We found an empty classroom and set up my laptop there and I showed them what I had done. They seemed to like it. This was a final green signal for presentation.

We made our way down to the LT at 12 sharp, only to realize that we were the only group there on time. The lecturers were there too. It was almost 12.15 when Alan told the four of us to go upstairs to the 3D lab to call everyone down if not their marks would be deducted. By the time everyone was down, he told us to have a break and be back by 1 pm, by when the screening will start.

So then, at 1, it started. The day all of us had been waiting for. The first group to go was Sholleh's group. First groups always leave the deepest impressions. I think his group did pretty well. The editing was good, but I felt that the fast-forward sequence was a little bit too long. I liked their ending titles with all the pictures of the MOI people. Oh one thing which I definitely found unique about their group was their set design. I really think that was awesome, because it was so nicely done and relevant.

Anyway, moving on, other groups presented. I guess everyone did a good job, and another group that attracted my attention was Snap. I think they really did a good job. I was just wondering how the skateboard guy at the starting was related to the rest of the video. But nonetheless, good editing. The animation was what that really catched my attention. The animation showreel, however, I was wondering if the part about the iK/fK clip was really their work or not.

After all the groups had presented their works, and we were the last to present. Actually, Kirin's group was supposed to present last, but for some reason, they swapped places with us so that we would be last. Oh well, so we went down to present, I introduced myself and the group. It was an awesome feeling. Our first screening, it was as if it was a movie premiere. I've always dreamt of having my own movie premiere =) So we sat down, as our tape rolled. The sound system in the LT was really good, and it sounded massive, especially the start where the sound effects were exaggerated. The screening progressed, and I realized that whatever I had colour corrected in my machine did not show up properly on the big screen. Everything looked yellowish. I had different shades of colours to make it look epic. Oh well, hopefully the music covered up for it. And then when it came to my part and my 3D lamp in the scene, Mr. Ronald from behind started clapping. Oh mAN!! That was the coolest thing that ever happened to our group, or at least to me. It really boosted my morale like anything. Thanks Mr. Ronald =D And then soon it slowly ended. I'm glad people appreciated it, as there was enthusiastic applause and a little bit of whistling here and there. I was really at the top of the world, and so was my group. Many came to congratulate my group. The day had ended really really well.

Come to think of it, it really was an epic journey since the start of MOI P1. From forming our groups, to deciding on the proper concept, to some things not being able to be delivered on time, to shooting schedules, to rendering issues, to the final product. It was definitely a tough journey. But I'm glad we covered the major stuff that we wanted to... things which we had planned the moment the rough concept was done...

1. Epic look through colour correction
2. Epic music
3. Specific music for opening and ending titles
4. Mountain animation
5. Wendy's mushi animation
6. Greg's dog animation
7. 3D lamp created from scratch and composited into live action footage
8. Map transition

I guess we more or less covered what we had planned, except that the transition from the 3D mountains to the 2D map could have improved. Oh well, reflecting back, being a director was a pretty hard job. I had to see through every single aspect of production. From story, to script, to dressing and costumes, to camera takes, audio on set, Wendy's mushi animation, Greg's dog animation, the background music, sound effects and the all the major stuff that happens during hardcore post-production. It was quite stressful to see over every minute detail, but in the end, it was definitely worth it.

Luckily, everyone in my group had this attitude of striving for perfection:

Jem worked tirelessly on the script with me, coming out with at least five to six drafts of scripts, working really hardcore on the camera angles and shots and coming out with two concepts of the map.

Wendy, needless to say, worked so damn hard on her Mushi animation. She did her animation, showed it to us, and after giving her our feedback, she carried on improving it. I think she definitely did more than what was expected. It must have been really frustrating for her to come to us at least 10 times, showing us the work, and telling her 10 times to get this right and try to tweak that thing a little bit. But it all paid off in the end. She did an awesome job and co-operated well with the team.

Gregory Poon.. my bro! Haha. He was as enthusiastic as ever, right from day 1. He did a good job in contributing to his part of the script. Whenever Jem was in the shot, Greg took over the camera and did an equally fantastic job. And how can I forget his animated dog, which he spent days and days sketching it out and getting the character designs right, and nights trying to animate it. Good job bro!

Thank you guys for working with me. It was really a great pleasure having you guys in my team. But hey, this is not the end of Crewsade. This day, we do not look back. Yesterday, is history. Today, is a possibility. Tomorrow... will be VICTORY!!

The epic journey continues... indeed.

Last Stages of Post-Production

I haven't been blogging the past few days because I had been freaking busy with post-production and editing.

Anyway, continuing from where I last left off, we had consultation with Wahidah the following day. We showed her the video. I have one suggestion for Wahidah. Instead of pausing the video every now and then to give feedback, which is a good thing for us because we definitely need the feedback to improve, I feel that she could have watched the entire video once without pausing, and then replay it the second time, this time pausing to give us feedback. However, in not doing so, the epic feel of the music and the consistency could not be captured by her, neither by us when reviewing it and it defeated the whole purpose of us showing off this "epic feel." This was strongly agreed by each of our group members and we were kind of disappointed with that. No offence to Wahidah, but just something that you could take note off =)

The feedback was that at certain parts, the audio was bad, meaning, sometimes the music was so loud till the dialogues could not be heard, and at other parts, the dialugues were really shrilling. Even after noise removal from the dialogues, this is what we faced and I did not know what to do. Wahidah mentioned that it was definitely an improvement from the 2nd interim assessment. THat relaly raised our spirits and I was even more determined to get the audio right.

That day at night, Greg sent me his animated dog sequences in PNG files. Just to digress a little bit, personally, I like to work with PNG and TGA files when it comes to compositing because they preserve the alpha channel really well and I don't have to worry about keying out the white background which leaves ugly, jagged edges around the composite. I really wished I knew how to do multi-pass rendering. I had gone for this talk by Lucasfilm at the animation workshop portfolio at NAFA and they gave a brilliant and useful talk on how to prepare your portfolio. After the talk, there was one to one critique session of the portfolios and I had signed up. When my turn came, I showed the Lucasfilm people my vfx showreel and my latest fluid dynamics R&D. They commented that they could clearly see that I wanted to go towards visual effects for live action films, and thus I had to take care of lighting issues. This could be done through multi-pass rendering in the 3D package, so that during compositing, each channels such as specular, highlights, shadows, reflections, etc could be controlled and colour corrected individually. If only I knew how to use this multi-pass rendering technique, I could have composited my lamp better onto the live action footage. Sadly, there wasn't enough time for R&D, so oh well, best not to complain.

Anyway, back to Greg's animation. It was kind of cute, and I decided to use it. After placing everything in the timeline in Premiere, I started importing the premiere project file into After Effects and worked on each scene separately. I did colour correction to have that epic look and feel. The hardest part in the color correction process was that of Jeremy's shot in the Photography scene where the shot is taken against a mirror. This shot had a lot of noise from the start, but I thought it would not be much of a problem. I did selective colour corrections for this shot. I used masks and colour corrected Jem separately, and then I colour corrected the rest of the background. This added a lot of noise and grain to the entire shot. Thus, I had to remove the noise and grain, which added to the render time.

Original Footage


Phase 1: Selective colour correction of Jem

Phase 2: Noise Removed from Jem's mask

Phase 3: Background noise removed

Phase 4: Overall Colour Correction

I rendered all the scenes individually through After Effects after colour correction and imported them back into Premiere timeline. Now was the time to focus on the audio. I spent at least four to five hours trying to get the audio right. Levels adjustment, audio gain, crossfade, etc. I did this in two phases. Firstly, I edited the audio with headphones to get a clearer sound. Then, I replayed the video through the big speakers and realised that at certain parts, the background music was too low, thus I made the final adjustments. Certain parts were very tedious to handle because in the soundtrack itself, the audio level tend to get very high at some points and very low at other points. I had to equalize the levels so that it would flow with the entire clip. I then played back the whole thing, and I was quite happy with it.

So, audio was done. Left were the map transitions. When Jem creating the map in the earlier stages of pre-production, I had told him to make it a super high resolution version of it. Because the map would have to to be "moving" and the camera would be zooming in and out of it frequently, thus the scale parameter would be varied. If the map were to be low resolution and if we scaled it up really high, it would be pixellated. Thank God to Jeremy, he did make the map really high res. No doubt he would have been very frustrated every time he made any kind of changes in Photoshop, it would take very long to update. Thanks a lot for your patience bro =)

Anyway, I finised the transitions and rendered them out of After Effects and brought them into the Premiere timeline. The entire process from start to rendering probably took 90 minutes or so. I lined up the transitions and everything was good to go for rendering!

AND THIS IS THE PART WHERE YOU GOTTA PRAY REALLY HARD!! Luckily, I had pre-rendered all the complex scenes in After Effects already, thus Premiere did not really have to calculate all the colour correction and motion tracks and other things like that. BUT HOWEVER, I face hell lot of issues here. For once, I wanted to get everything done in Premiere, including exporting to tape. Thus, I used this feature that said "Export to tape." Estimated time remaining: 2 hours plus plus. Wow, good time to sleep. When I woke up, it said it was done. But when I checked my tape, NOTHING WAS IN IT. Okay, never mind, at least I have the rendered file which I can import into Windows Movie Maker and export it to tape through there. BUT... where the heck was the rendered file stored?? Or wait.. was it even stored in the first place? Who know what the heck might have happened when I had gone to sleep? I checked my harddisk space. Nope, no change in disk space. It was still the same as what it was a few hours ago before the render. Argh! So it did not get stored in the first place. Fine. Render again. BUT... OOOPSS... DISK IS FULL!! !@#$%!! Rendered to external HDD. After an hour... OOOOPSSS >>> HDD FULL!! WHAT THE !@#$!! Haiz, was really getting frustrated now. I cleared certain things from my laptop's harddisk and rendered again. This time, it was sucessful. The file size was 17.5 GB - uncompressed avi format. Good going to far.

I imported this into Movie Maker and exported to tape through there. Took 40 minutes, but at least it was done... or I THOUGHT it was done. Because when I played back, I found some lip sync issues! The dialogues did not match the video! It was a few frames off. Damn! Crap! I did not want to re-render the footage with the edited sound. Thus, after editing the sound, I just exported the sound as one single wav file and replaced the sound of the rendered video with it in Movie Maker. THANK GOD Movie Maker allowed that, even after it being such a horrible editing software. Also, in my previous export to tape, I found out that a few seconds of the starting was cut off. Thus, I inserted in a black image in front of the movie and made it last for a few seconds so that during export to tape, if it got eaten up, the black image would be cut off and the main video will not be affected. I was right! It worked great.

Awesome! My tape was ready to be screened. SHall blog somemore in the next post.

My lamp animation - modeled, rigged, textured and animated from scratch =)

Post-Production

Wait, before I blog about the post-production that's been going, I would like to raise up this issue. With all due respect, I seriously think this blogging is a waste of time. Or more like, keeping a reflection journal is a waste of time. Not only does it take up precious time, but it is also pointless. For example, all of us have been so busy with our productions and post-productions. When do we get the time to blog? Or to update our entries? For me, I have another module and I have committments to doing assignments for that module as well, so it just adds on to our workload unnecessarily. Besides, why even blog? Honestly, if the purpose isto reflect, or the fact that we'll learn from our mistakes or whatsoever, seriously, the purpose is defeated. Because ti simply does not fit the purpose. I've realised that I've been blogging for the sake of it and writing down my feelings here. But how is that relevant to P1? Moreover, it being graded? I honestly feel that keeping a journal for every module is SERIOUSLLY VERY VERY VERY pointless. I mean come on, who looks back and reads it? I don't think anyone does, at least I don't. I don't even learn anything from it. You see, instead spending precious time blogging or updating our journals, why not spend that same amount of time on IMPROVISING on our final product for P1. As I speak and blog, my precious time, especially now that it's nearing the end of the module, is being wasted because I can't work on my post-production as I'm spending that time writing this entry. Not only for P1 module, but the same goes for the rest of the modules. MMFun expects us to write a reflection journal - I ask why? Especially in hectic times like these when most of the blood, sweat and tears should be spent on polishing up our final assignments. I can't stress how I'm upset over this matter, and I sincerely hope that lecturers do take note of my point and take some actions. Thank you.

Back to P1. Post-production is going. My workflow had been good, and bad at some points in time.

I started out with editing the clips in Premiere. Simple cutting and blocking out the timing. Once that was done, I exported all the audio from the edit and imported them into Audition, where I removed background noise for every single dialogue clip. I wouldn't say that it's difficult to do this, but when it comes to removing noise for over 50 different clips, then not only does it get irritating, but it also gets very frustrating. Anyway, once I was done with that, I exported the audio clips and brought them back into Premiere and lined them up with the rough edit that I had created. Once that was done, I adjusted the audio levels to maintain a constant volume througout the entire piece. Next, I moved on to editing it further with fade-ins and fade-outs and other transitions. My mountains animation was being rendered, but the render time was incrediby expensive - 2-3 days. However, interim was the following day thus I sent the files to Wendy and Jem who helped render the rest of the frames. We hasd managed to set up a mini render farm of 4 computers =) It did feel like industry standard.

Once the animation was done, the two of them sent me their rendered frames. Oh, Greg couldn't be part of this render farm because he owns a MacBook while the rest of us own Windows. Sorry bro =) Anyway, I then fitted in the mountains at the end of the clip. I composited my lamp over the live action footage as well. Once the rough edit with transitions was done, I decided to concentrate on creating and perfecting the opening sequence.

The scroll scene. Being the opening scene, it had to be massive and impactful. Like you know, it should grab the audience's attention. Thus, I decided to spend the rest of the time until interim just designing the opening sequence. This time, my editing style changed. Because previously, especially for the opening and ending titles, I edited to the music, meaning I matched up my visuals to the audio. However, this time it was plain video. No audio. The sound that we had recorded on the set was meant to be discarded because it did not play any role. There were no dialogues also - only Greg's performance. Thus, I wildly did some time-remapping and editing in After Effects and exported out the sequence. I imported this sequence into Audition and decided to work on the audio. I searched my collection of sound effects that I had gotten from the net and used some of them. For this scene, I wanted every movement of Greg's to look and sound important, thus I wanted to emphasize this through the use of sound effects. So during the slow motion scenes, I added specific sounds to heavily emphasize Greg's acting. This was a very tedious and frustrating process because it was quite hard to match up the sounds at exact points in time with the video. Once all the sound effects were lined up, I adujusted their volumes and amplification so that it did not blast and turn out all horrible and noisy. Now, it was time to add in the background score. I searched my iTunes for something suitable and I found it - from Narnia once again. That movie has some really good soundtracks. Awesome! I lined it up with my video and did some cuts and minor editing and voila - it fit. I was happy.

With that being done, I added sequnce in my edit and I was good to go for rendering for interim. The total duration of the clip was 10 min 40 sec. Exceeding way too much. I decided to further edit after the interim.

Wahidah gave us some comments for the interim - adjust the sound, further equalize it. Currently, there was no background score for the entire piece except for the start and end, thus I had to work on that. End of presentation - went pretty okay.

Now, back to some serious hardcore post-production. Been further editing to get the sequence under 10 minutes because transitions and all the extra stuff will take up time. I started out with Jem's photography scene. I found the right music from the movie Troy and put it together with the edit. I then imported the sequence into After Effects for further editing. I did overall and selective colour correction, did some introductory titles for the module, removing grain and a few other effects (blur, shake, etc.) to make the video look interesting. It was horrible to work on my laptop as it was slow. Scrubbing through the timeline was laggy too. Thus, a lot of patience required. Once, the rendering failed on my laptop thus I brought everything down to my desktop pc and rendered it there. It took 45 minutes for a one minute clip to render. While it was being rendered, I worked on my lamp animation for the second shot. This time it was longer and a little bit harder. I was trying out the graph editor in Maya to get the weight and physics right for my lamp. Again, I rendered it with global illumination and composited it my live action shot.

The rendering downstairs was done. Next, I moved on to working on the animation fundamentals sequence where greg, Wendy and I are involved in the sequence. Again, I worked on colour correction, titles effect and this time, I added grain to my lamp animation to match it with the background footage. It's rendering right now.

After that, I would be further editing other clips and doing the final touch ups before tomorrow's consulation with Wahidah.

Hope Greg is doing well with his 2D animation.

Stress stress...so little time..so much to do
(hope that hasn't become my cliche line)

Shall blog once I'm done with everything.

More Updates

Forgive me for not blogging for quite some time, whoever is reading this.

So, one more week to go before the second interim assessment. We have been pretty busy with our shooting. On Monday, I came to school at around 11.30. I saw Wendy and Greg along with a few other people sitting down with Mr. Ronald. Apparently, he was teaching them drawing proper human anatomy. After he was done, I showed himth lamp animation that I had done the night bfore. And he liked it =) Good thing too. Wendy had showed him her almost finished aweomeMushi animation. And according to her, Mr. Ronald liked it. Yay. At least a few stuff off the agenda.

Then, we went over to theP1 classroomand showed Wahidah the footage tht was shot at my house along with the lamp animation that I had done. She said it as clear and concise and pretty much to the point. I felt good. Things were being done pretty well, even thoug wewere off schedule. After consulting her, we decided to take Drawing Essentials shot of Wendy and Jem. Wendy and Greg went to eat wherea Jem and I went over to the amphitheatre to check it out. It was a wonderful place. It was so peaceful and quiet there, both Jem and I agreed that it was a really good place to de-stress. Also, the amphitheatre reminded me of those collosseums in those ancient Roman movies where gladiators fought. We realised that the tripod I had was kind of creaky and moved jerkily when wanting to pan the camera. Thus, we decided to borrow a tripod from the school. Greg and Wendy then brought the tripod over, and it was much much better. Really smooth and made no noise at all when panning. Awesome. Jem went over to set up the shot and did the settings in the camera - the aperture, shutter, white balance, etc - Jem, he's a real pro at this. Hats off to you bro.

After thinking about how the shot should look like and memorizing the scripts, we got down to business. Greg was behind the camera this time and I was holding the microphone. He pulled it off pretty well. After one or two wrong takes, we managed to do it. We were just about getting really tired by now. We packed up from the amphitheatre and went over to the canteen to take a break.

After the break, Greg went over to find a senior who would make his computer fast. Macbook 'pro' eh Greg? :p Haha, no hard feeling bro. Anyway, the rest of the three of us went over to the P1 classroom. While waiting for Greg to appear, Jem took my voice overs for DMFun module. Greg still did not appear, thus Wendy remained in the classroom to take care of our belongings and work on her Mushi whereas Jem and I went over to the 2D animation lab to shoot my DMFun scene. He had this great idea for this module, and I won't let it out because it might spoil the eventual surprise on the actual day =) And for that kind of effect which Jem wanted, we had to go to the 2D animation room to film. There were people there and the ambience noise was pretty loud and we were hesitant to shoot there. However, all the more, this ambience made it look more natural that there were students working on their projects. I had to compete with the background noise and speak even louder. Finally, the scene was done. Pretty good progress for the day.

Greg STILL did not appear, thus we got ready for the next scene. It was already reaching almost 7 pm. We had to re-shoot 2D art fundamentals because in the previous shoot, due to some inconsiderate designers who wouldn't let us shoot, there was a lot of ambient noise. Hence, we re-shot the scene. While waiting for Greg, Jem and I went upstairs on the 5th floor to get Greg's and Wendy's paintings. When we went back to the p1 room, Greg was already there. Good thing. Unfortunately, the battery had run out. I told Jem and Wendy to set up the shot while Greg and I waited till the battery was a little bit charged.

I was quite surprised and pleased with both Wendy and Greg. They had happened to memorize the script while waiting for the camera's battery to be charged. This really sped up the filming process. Once we began shooting, there goes the battery again. We had to wait another 45 minutes before the battery was all geared up for filming. We finished the shoot at around 9.45 pm. Very productive day, and definitely very tiring.

The following day, we had initially decided to do the scroll scene. However, we spent most of the time planning the scene because we all had a different understanding of the scene and were all confused. After a few minor and heated arguements, which were all settled, we came to an agreement. We also had to film individual shots of us for the starting. We started off with Greg. This was when I had a bad accident. I fell off a ledge on my knee and hurt myself quite badly. However, Greg bro was there and being trained in first aid treatment, he helped me and got my wounds cleaned. Thanks Dr. Greg, really appreciate it bro =) Meanwhile , Jem had gone to shoot Wendy's shot. Next was my shot, which I found it to be really fun and finally it was Jem's shot. I won;t describe in detail how the shots looked like, otherwise where's the surprise? =)

We were all tired, thus we decided to take the day off. Today, we had planned to shoot the scroll scene, ie, our opening sequence. We prepared everything, and Jem had come with a new map. It was awesome and looked much better than the previous map. We went opposite school to get lighters and burnt the edges of the scroll to make it look ancient. However, the wet weather screwed up our plans. Thus, we decided to finish off our shots tomorrow.

I'm losing it here. Very tired. More later. Good night.

3D Animation Almost Done

Above is the lamp that I created. The entire animation was done over a period of 2 days. I started out by the modelling the lamp. I started out with low poly modelling. The modelling part was tricky because I wanted to do my own kind of lamp without the use of any reference. The difficult part was designing the mechanism through which the lamp would be able to turn it's head in three different directions - nodding, shaking and twisting. Finally, I came up with the design and modelled it. Once the model was complete, I converted it into a high resolution model using the 'smooth mesh preview to polygons' function.

Next came the rigging process, and the most tedious process because I could not get it right in the first few times. I started drawing the bones and adding IK handles. I used curves to make the controls for animation. Since my lamp had this bend which looks like a knee, I used the pole vector constraint for the IK handle. However, now I could control the direction of the 'knee' but it could not bend proerly as it affected the rest of the bones in the heirarchy. Thus, after a few tries and tweaking the model a bit, the rigging was done and tested it out and it worked fine. I learnt a lot about using the different constraints in Maya to create a good rig. I then attached the rig to the lamp model and got it ready to be animated.

I wanted the lamp to look nosy and restless. Thus, I animated to have that kind of personality. I was supposed to have this lamp composited over the live action footage. Luckily for me, my shot was a static shot which was shot from a tripod, hence I did not have to worry about 3D motion tracking, which I don't know how to do yet. So anyway, I imported a still frame from the live action footage and matched the placement and orientation of the Maya camera to match that of the live action footage's. Once that was done, I applied a background shader to the ground.

As for texturing and rendering, I tried to do UV layout for the base of the lamp as I wanted to put the Crewsade logo that Greg created on the lamp. However, it did not turn out good as it was very small. I took a few snapshots of my room (since where the footage was shot) at different exposure levels and turned them into a single HDRI file. I used this HDRI file and used it as image-based lighting by turning on Global Illumination. This is what it looks like:

Finally, I rendered the animation and composited it over the live action footage. The final footage? Watch it on the D-Day =)

Production 'almost' Complete

Been a while since I last blogged.

Production has been going pretty alright I guess. The other three Crewsaders came over to my house on Thursday after school to shoot my scene about 3D animation. Finally, it was my turn to be on tape. We set up the scene using all my toys and collectibles that I had since my childhood and used them as part of the set design. Jem composed me in the shot and adjusted the setings in the camera so that the lighting would look as perfect as possible, as light was directly shining at the camera from my window. Greg was trying to distract me while shooting me, and I have to say that he did succeed. As I mentioned earlier, that guy is really good in de-stressing the group. Keep it up bro. Wendy took over the microphone and we began filming.

A few wrong takes, but after a while, we did it. In the last shot, I was supposed to say "You may ask me, why spend so much time on it? I would say, why not?" Greg pointed out that the last sentence doesn't really make sense. The audience would not buy because I would be posing a question and the audience would be expecting an answer to that, but instead, I simply say "why not?" The audience would be confused and wouldn't accept it because one moment I pose a question asking why and then to reply that, I say why not. Am I making any sense here? Anyway, I hope you get the point I'm trying to make here, whoever is reading this. So we spent a while thinking of the ending of the scene. We have this consistence in this script whereby the speaker at the end of every module would say something inspiring and thought-provoking which would leave the audeince wondering about it. And we wanted to maintain this consistency in this module as well. Eventually, we decided to stick to the old idea because we felt that it is thought-provoking. Oh well...

A 3D lamp will be later added on the table in the scene, and hopefully, it would seem that I'm interacting with it.

The next day, it was Jem's turn to be on tape for Photography and Video Fundamentals. Greg, Wendy and Jem came to school at 11.30 in the morning to check out locations to shoot (I was having morning class). They did a great job. Initially according to script, our plan was to shoot at in the classroom next to the P1 classroom. However, the three of them found a great place to shoot - the dark room on level 4. It was really eerie there. Scary! Because it was so quiet, and so dark without the lights, it was as if you were walking with your eyes closed. We saw another room deeper insider, which I pressume was a lab where they developed photographs. That place was the scariest. Reminded me of the laboratory in 'I Am Legend' where Will Smith maintained checks on the zombie. We decided to film there as we thought it was quite interesting, but thought that the audience woldn't find it any interesting. Thus, we changed location, but still inside the dark room.

We decided to film at the dark part where the "alley behind" could be seen clearly with the proper lighting. We found that the lighting was also kind of interesting. We also used a new technique to film Jem's reflections talking to the camera instead of Jem himself talking to the camera. Greg did a good job in handling the camera. His hands were pretty steady considering the fact that we weren't using a tripod to film in some of the shots. The audio also turned out pretty good.

Okay, so that's what we have shot so far. Let me go over the things that we have already done and things that are yet to be done.

Things that are done:

1. Ideation shooting
2. 2D Art Fun shooting
3. 3D Art Fun shooting
4. Photography and Video Fun shooting
5. 2D Animation shooting
6. 3D Animation shooting
7. Opening Credits (roughly)
8. Ending Credits (roughly)
9. Map (roughly)
10. Wendy's Mushi Animation (almost done) =D Good job man!
11. A rough cut of all the modules combined into a sequence

Things that are yet to be done:

1. Drawing Essentials shooting
2. DM Fun Shooting
3. Scroll Scene shooting
4. 3D Lamp animation
5. Greg's animation
6. Mountain animation
7. Finalising opening credits
8. Finalising end credits
9. Colour correction
10. Testing out which codecs are the best

Phew! So many things left, so little time. Have to stop procrastinating already =(