Work experience 25/03/2013

Hi folks. This week has been a busy one and here's the update:
I have just finished my last day of work experience with 2020 productions - a production company in edinburgh which does everything from video production to event management and organisation. Over the course of the week I took part in shadowing the editors, watching the general work flow of the company and working on my own personal project set by one of the editors.
Here is a breakdown of my week:

• Day 1- I met the staff and was shown around the building. Once everything got settled down, I was shadowing in one of the edit suites and was impressed by the speed of the editors workflow when either editing in Final Cut Studio 7 or After Effects CS5.5. I was set a task of pitching, designing and creating a 30 animation which revealed the '2020 Productions Logo'. I would have any assistance I needed through the process and would be given feedback once the animation was complete. So I began drawing up potential ideas with a few paragraphs describing the look, technical challenges involved and how I would intend to make it. In the end I was happy with 3 ideas:
• A computer interface 
• An Idea being Communicated  
• A Conveyor Belt Factory
  
  In the end I decided to use Idea #3 as I thought developing it would be a good challenge to create and would demonstrate my skills of After Effects and Adobe Illustrator.

• Day 2 - I began researching searching methods of creating the animation: Expressions to create the robot arms on the conveyor belt, animating the cogs in a realistic way, camera movements and background music. For background music, I found that using a royalty free music service called Audio Network which allows students to use the music for a fee of £0.83, as long as the material is not sold and is distributed on a website such as Youtube, Vimeo etc. For the remainder of the day, I worked my way round the office meeting some of the people who work there and find out more about the workflow of 2020 Productions
• Day 3 - At the start of the day, a portion of a promo video for a client needed to be filmed that morning, so I went along to see how they worked. The mini-shoot was fun and watching it be cut together was interesting as some of the shots they really liked on the shoot, ended up not being used at all. I began working with my project, creating all of my assets for animation in Illustrator.
• Day 4 - I continued working on my project, getting feedback as I continued to build my scene in After Effects. I was advised on using Quicktime's Animation codec as it would produce a close to lossless video. 
• Day 5 - I spent the entire day working to finish my project as I realised I left some of the project a little late so had to make up for the time. Although it was not needed to have the project finished, but I wanted to complete it in the time for my own purposes. In the end I managed to produce a finished render which was given feedback. The video was liked and I was asked to continue to work with it to see if I could build a better version and fix some technical issues etc.

Overall, I really enjoyed the work experience and will try to keep in contact with the company and gain more work experience with them.

Major project week

Hi folks

The time has come where my major projects principal photography to commence. So far the filming has been going very well. Here is an update on each day:

Day 1: The day started with the  disorganisation of equipment booking... I realised I did not have enough equipment booked out to make the shoot possible, so I checked my equipment checklist which allowed me to add the correct equipment.

Once myself and the crew made it to the location, I confirmed the booking with the apartment and met the actors.

The shoot went very well due to the actors being very easy to work with and very quick at getting into character... the argument scene we filmed looked like they were furious with each other!

As I checked off each shot on my shotlist, I noted down some notes about each take and what my comments were (very useful for the editing part of the process).

Day 2 - this day was very interesting and had situations come up which I will account for in my next production:

- scheduling time for makeup - on my shooting schedule, I only allowed time for filming, so when my actor sat in the makeup chair, we were running about 30 minutes late. However, this wasn't a problem as we had the room for enough time to cover this.

- organising a room for makeup- this problem was solved by using an empty editing booth which was a suitable size to get makeup done.

Once all these problems were solved, we sorted out a really cool lighting setup which was fun to play around with gels with different colour temperatures.

When shooting began, it only took around an hour as only two short scenes had to be filmed.

Day 3 - this day we were filming at Easter road at a friends flat. Everyone arrived at the location, found parking and got ready for the shoot ok. I had arranged 2 scenes to he filmed- scene 6 (Chris's last video diary) and scene 7 (where Chris discovers Amy with another man).

I had scheduled for make up for all three actors, shoot all scenes in the flat, shoot scene 6 and leave but about half one...the problem was. Makeup took longer as detailed prophetic were being applied which took time. In addition filming took longer than I expected. So lesson learned. Try to factor in more time into the day to allow for tasks to be completed in a realistic time frame.

Overall filming went well for all three days, however I would have benefited from a camera operator to allow me to concentrate on controlling the shoot rather than doing two jobs.

As from now, post production has started. More posts to follow about this.

Cheers

A big truck and a 47kg lens

Hi folks,

Today has been good for experience. Yesterday I was called to go to a tour of sky sports multicam working environment at the Hibernian football stadium, ahead of the match tomorrow.

When we first arrived we were shown where all 13 camera feeds will be capturing the game from, the surprisingly small studio where the presenter and guests would sit, the vision mixing desk (which is part if an enormous truck which can be transported anywhere) and the commentary stand.

When we were getting shown round one of the camera operators allowed us to shadow him rigging one of the HD cameras - the camera was split up into different parts:

-  The pan and tilt head (which is mounted to a cradle)
-  A 47kg Canon lens
-   A Sony camera head which attaches to the lens
- and the viewfinder.

It was a good experience and I hope there is more where that came from.

Cheers.