Team Name & Film Title Finalised

Each day gets more productive than the previous one.

Firstly, we talked about our team name and film title. Everyone did their jobs of researching and brainstorming for a good team name. As for the film title, we came up with a few names such as voyage, odyssey and journey as our video is about our journey through year 1. It was hard to decide between voyage and odyssey as all of us liked both these terms. We were talking about "The Voyage" as our title and were thinking whether we should make our journey like a sailing voyage with CG ships and waves. And then we were like.. wait a minute! CG ships? CG water? Isn't that too ambitious? CG ship perhaps, but then compositing actors would be an issue and CG water is definitely hard. Then Jem suggested this cool idea of using miniature Tamia model ships and filming them like how they did in King Kong and Titanic and spending more time on CG water and then compositing the two together. This sounded very cool and interesting as this was a totally different technique. But then again, comparing to the amount of work we have to do on the rest of the video, we decided to avoid this complication of advanced compositing., because if the compositing is not done properly, the audience is not going to buy any of it.

Then we went onto thinking about the word odyssey and we thought of having this title "The Odyssey." But Greg felt that it was lacking some "oooofff" in it, some kind of impact it was supposed to make with the music. He suggested we have something foreign in it, like play with the words to come out with something interesting. See one thing I love about each of my team members is that they're freaking daring to try something they haven't done before and constantly pushing themselves to get the best brainstorm possible, and this is why I'm so proud to have them in my team. =) Anyway, we surfed the net to research more about this word and found out that it came from the word "Odysseus," which was actually the name of a Greek king who was returning home after a 10-year war with the Trojans. Immediately, the word "Odysseus" caught our attention and Greg came out with this title, "D' Odysseus", which actually means The Odyssey or The Journey. Perfect. All of us felt that this was very related to our concept. I suggested to add on to the title and put small text below the main words - "An Epic Journey." And we tried to visualise this with the opening titles sequence together with the background music - D'Odesseus: An Epic Journey - and it suit well. Everyone was happy. I could see the inspiration and motivation in everyone's eyes after finalising the title.

Next, we had to decide on our team name. Jem came out with this interesting title, "Crewsade". He derived it from the word, crusade which actually means any vigorous, aggressive movement for the defense or advancement of an idea, as quoted by http://www.dictionary.com/ . But as witty as he can be, he played around with the words and changed it to Crewsade, which emphasized on the word "crew" and also had equal significance on the fact that we as a team do get aggressive for an advancement of any particular idea and would try to push it to our limits. After a little discussion, we decided to call ourselves "Crewsade, Inc." to have it an official shine. We checked the internet for this word and we found that it's perfectly original. Perfect!

Oh, and did I mention? Wendy is doing a wonderful job as a scribe and taking down the minutes of each session. She's patient in listening to all our ideas. She would be in charge of making an animated 2D character when introducing animation works.

Next, we went onto discussing our basic structure of our 10 minute film. Although we had all the ideas listed down all over the place, we still had to piece them up together to form the skeleton of the film. Thus, we finalised the opening sequence with the graphics, leading upto the opening scene and transitions in between scenes and the final ending credits with the relevant graphics and background music. Jem came up with many interesting framing and camera composition styles which we would use in the scenes in the midst of our film. He also came up with this cool idea of having moving vectors in the background when introducing our works. Greg came up with interesting ideas of transiting from one scene to another while still maintaining the epic flow of the video. Wendy will be in-charge of 2D animation as mentioned earlier. She'll be making character designs and animating the final character. All these techniques are really hard to describe in words, thus I'll upload the animatics by the end of our pre-production process.

We still have some rough audio planning to discuss and a rough timeline of our entire process from pre-production to post-production. We would also be paying a lot of attention to our audio as well.

One thing I realised about our production, personally, is that it's kind of ambitious. The elements that we plan to have in our 10-minute film, are a hell lot. It's heavily based on graphics and integration and blending of CG elements with live action footage. But I think it can be done by the end of 2 blocks. I kind of have it visually in my mind, but nonetheless, I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Some words for my dear team mates:
Jem:
Keep up the good spirit. Keep ur creative juices flowing bro =)
Wendy:
Don't stress alright? Get well soon. You're already doing a good job in researching. Keep it going =)
Greg:
Bro, keep your ideas, enthusiasm and laughter coming! =)

Guys, keep this spirit going okay? Obstacles will come, so will criticism and the frustration that follows. Don't let it kill the positivity in you! A pessimist sees a calamity in every opportunity whereas an optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity. So be an optimist if we want everything to come out on screen just like the way we visualised it =) Good luck!