Longest Day So Far

One day before the presentation, and almost anyone can imagine the pressure everyone would be under. Personally, I was quite stressed myself because we had so many things left in the agenda, and moreover it was one day before the presentation. I was really worried whether we could finish everything like how we had visualised.

The day started off quite early. Jem and I had design history and culture lesson at 9 and Jem happened to come early to school. He had created about two to three designs for the Crewsade, Inc. logo and we approved of the final one. The logo showed a dragon which was curved in the shape of a "C" and then the words "rewsade" that follow along after that. It was an awesome design in my opinion. That guy has got potential man. I told him to use Photoshop to digitise the hand-drawn logo later on in the evening.

Also, earlier in the morning, I was playing around with After Effects and decided to try and create the look and feel of the opening titles for our film. I made this smoke effect using particles. One thing good about most particle plug-ins in After Effects is that they are truly three-dimnsional when a 3D composition camera is used. In other words, when the camera is orbitted around, the particles appear with volume in 3D space. So did this smoke. This gave a very good advantage over using Maya or other 3D aplications to create and render out smoke. I created a wall and made it look like it was cracked by using track mattes and added the words "Crewsade, Inc." on it. Then, I created a red point light and typed in an expression so that it would flicker randomly. This saved a lot of time keyframing throughout the timeline. Lastly, I added a short camera pan around this wall. 4 seconds of animation, but render time was nearly 15 minutes. This is how it looks like:

My group members liked it, but Jeremy suggested to make the camera move in a more interesting way and I found myself agreeing with him. Jem has a really good eye for camera, and I guess he can be a good cinematographer or director of photography in the future.

When class started at 12, the first thing I brought up was to discuss the middle sequence, ie, the part directly after the opening titles lasting until just before the ending titles. This was a long, tough and tedious process and we nearly took almost four and a half hours to finish discussing this. But in the end, we did manage to come up with a rough skeleton of what our entire video will be based on. We discussed who exactly will be on screen and which point in time and also the way we transit from one scene to another. It was a little difficult to get ideas that worked all at once because we had to keep in mind that everything we shot had to be matched with our theme of epic. Jem did a great job here in contributing ideas and deciding on the rough cinematography of the entire film.

Moving on, we also decided not to use the zoom function on the camera at any point in time of our shoot. According to the research I did, some videos that I watched and personally feeling, zooming would destroy the feel of the theme of epic. Besides, zooming is a very traditional way. I may be wrong, but this is entirely my own openion. Anyone is allowed to beg to differ. Hence, we decided to track instead of zoom. We also clarrified whether we were allowed to output our footage with a 16:9 aspect ratio so that it would have a cinematic feel, and we were given a green signal for that. So far, Wendy was doing a great job in taking down notes. She would be in charge of doing the 2D animation sequence, together with Greg. I trust both of them would do an absolutely fine job.

Many a time during the discussion period, we got stressed and literally faced a blank mind. This is where Greg did his usual nonsense with his "group conflict" joke and really loosened us up. He's the guy who should be around when there is stress. He can really liven up the spirit of the rest of the team with one of his spastic facial expression. Good job bro, wonder what we'll do without a stress reliever in the team. Finally, we finished this process and went to the canteen to eat lunch.

Once lunch was over, we proceeded to the 3D animation lab to create the 2D map, through which our literal showcase of the "journey" will be based on, a compass, which would be placed on the map, logo for our title "D' Odysseus: An Epic Journey" and finally to digitise Greg's hand-drawn design for Crewsade, Inc. A lot of work, and we planned to finish everything by 8pm. Since there were quite a few things to do, I divided the work among us. I told Jem to make the compass. However, he had to leave halfway hence he decided to complete it when he reached home. Greg was supposed to digitise his design but he wasn't oo comfortable with Photoshop, hence he used Flash to create it. In my opinion, the end product looked simply awesome. Here it is:

One thing I realised about Greg - he works damn good when he's under pressure. His expression changes and he gets so stressed when he can't acheive a particular result, and then he would be all out to acheive it and won't rest till he gets that result. This, I saw in him today. Impressive.

Next, I told Wendy to make the logo of the film title in Photoshop. The logo obviously had to go with the epic feel, hence I thought that the best font to use would be something like Roman lettering. Hence we surfed the net together for the best font possible, chose it and did the logo together. Here is what it looks like:

Meanwhile, I was blocking out the rough outline for the powerpoint slides for tomorrow's presentation. Finally it was all done. The only thing left to do was the map, which I would be doing once I finish blogging. Also, the rough render of the piece of 3D animation of the flythrough through mountains would be done by me after I finish blogging.

Touchwood, all my team members are equally hardworking and all of them can clearly see their goal ahead in front of them. I really pray we do manage to get everything done right. Hopefully, tomorrow everything goes well.

That's all for today. Lots of work to do. More tomorrow.