Logically Using Logic

We have been introduced to the Logic music editing/creation software. I've been having a lot of fun making songs for an imaginary fighting game. Really enjoying messing around with samples and seeing what I end up with!

Studio Recordings

Ok so there have been lots of goings on in the studio. I've spent a lot more time playing on the drums, getting fairly competent at it. Had 2 songs recorded now, that I will upload once they are editied properly. We have also done the Monty Python scetch called 'Four Yorkshiremen.' If you fancy a read here it is:

OWAIN:

Aye, very passable, that, very passable bit of risotto.

LIZ:

Nothing like a good glass of Château de Chasselas, eh, Josiah?

AARON:

You're right there, Obadiah.

PHIL:

Who'd have thought thirty year ago we'd all be sittin' here drinking Château de Chasselas, eh?

OWAIN:

In them days we was glad to have the price of a cup o' tea.

LIZ:

A cup o' cold tea.

PHIL:

Without milk or sugar.

AARON:

Or tea.

OWAIN:

In a cracked cup, an' all.

PHIL:

Oh, we never had a cup. We used to have to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

LIZ:

The best we could manage was to suck on a piece of damp cloth.

AARON:

But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

OWAIN:

Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".

PHIL:

Aye, 'e was right.

OWAIN:

Aye, 'e was.

PHIL:

I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.

LIZ:

House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.

AARON:

Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!

OWAIN:

Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.

PHIL:

Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.

LIZ:

We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake.

AARON:

You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.

OWAIN:

Cardboard box?

AARON:

Aye.

OWAIN:

You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.

LIZ:

Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!

AARON:

Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.

PHIL:

Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.

OWAIN:

And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.

ALL:

They won't!

 So that was alot of fun. The recording of this will be uploaded soon too!

Location Shots Part 1

I've been out doing location shots a few times over the term. So I thought I should share some of the results of my location/angle scouting. Enjoy!

Filming In Harlech

Stop Frame Assignment

So it's time to talk about another new assignment. Remember the whole Monomyth thing I talked about before? Well now we have to make a stop frame animation, using our story, of maximum 3 mins using 24fps (frames per second).......thats an insane amount of work for a single person. 1 minute would take 1440 individual frames of work..... Worried face.....

Update: Laura (may the gods bless her!) has expressed our concern over the work load and time frame for it's achievement. It has been brought down to 10fps, on the down side there is now a 3 minute minimum.....1800 frames. If you give 20 seconds to set up each frame (thats faster than an unexperienced student could ever be expected to achieve) then it will take 10 hours of work. May not seem that bad.... but it has to be submitted in a month and we won't have the matierals for another week. Along side all the other work we have. I don't see how this can be achieved.....watch this space.

Website Building

Ok, have been working on a website on and off for weeks now. I have scrapped it, not becuase it was rubbish...well it was but that's not the point. Laura came across a really simple and intuative website builder called wix.com. In a fraction of the time I have already gone waaaay past where my old page was at and created something pretty awesome. There is still alot of work to do and not all the links fully work yet, but I am confident that I will get there soon enough.

www.wix.com/azdavies87/aarondavies

I know the URL is lame. When it asked what I wanted to call it I delted azdavies87 and put in aarondavies. It must have made some stupid assumption and so I ended up with that. Ahh well.

Lighting Assesment

Thursday 23/2/12

BIG DAY!! I have been looking forward to this for the last few weeks. Today we had our first Theatre Lighting assessment. The basic idea is that we are given some scripts to choose from, then we have to figure out lighting cues, a lighting design, hang the designed rig, program it all into the desk and then execute it.

It was a bit of a mess at first, have 8 people in the same creative process is a bit of a case of too many cooks. In the end we selected Ikuta by Zembo Motoyaso, a 500 year old Japanese drama. Definately not what we were expected to pick haha. But I saw lots of oportunity for creativity and some great visual description and emotion that could be effectively lit in the space we have, with the equipment we have.

Anyway, long story short we pulled it off, just. I am really taking to this whole lighting thing. I seem to be able to visualise it really quickly and have enough knowledge to get close to what I want. With a bit more experience this is something I could be quite good at!

Filming In Conwy

Sunday 26/2/12

I went to Conwy today to get some filming done for my Multimedia Project with the assistance of my classmate Laura. There was quite an array of shots that I was after but as expected the proximity of the Castle to the road made it quite difficult to get exactly what I had hoped for, there could be no sound recorded that could be kept. So I ended up having lots of walk by shots, pans and that sort of basic thing. Well you'd expect panning to be basic, but appranty without a really good tripod it looks jumpy, what kind of tripod do you think we have been given? I'll give you a clue, it's not a really good one.

So there were some usable shots cobbled together from the 46 that were made....yes 46. As well as a nice day out and about, so there was no loss that's for sure!

(No stills I'm affraid, battery failure occured!)

Bradford National Media Museum

Nice change of pace, we had a trip to the National Media Museum over in Bradford. This was the furthest north I have been in the UK. It took quite a while to get there (almost 4 hours), with a brief stop at McDonalds for 're-fueling'.

On our arrival we were greeted with HORDES of children, it quickly became apparant that 1/2 term may not be the ideal time to visit a museum. Particularly one that was having a large corporate exhibition but on by Moshi Monsters. For those not 'down with the kids' Moshi Monsters is a website where you can sign up and adopt a monster as a pet, dress it up, build it a house etc. So naturally kids love it more than Norman Bates loved taxidermy. While deciding what floor to vist first, this happened!

So after much tomfoolery we set off into the museum itself. The first floor we visited was a sort of, journey through broadcasting history. With examples of early televisions and other broadcast equipment. This area also covered early recording devices and methods.

 
The area was my favorite, it had all sorts of relics and artifacts from TV of the past, particularly pupetry and childrens TV. So many favorites like the Wombles, Zippy and George from Rainbow were side by side with Darleks and Thunderbirds.

Another of the facinating exhibits was the animation floor. Every kind of animation was represented. From early methods on to cells and stop frame. There were many things on this floor that I would have loved to take home and hang on my wall!!

 There were more exhibits but not much to write home about. One of the major highlights of the day was visiting the IMAX theatre to see 'Born to be Wild'. The 3D effects were frankly mind blowing. This is indeed the future!!

You can see the projector too on the top floor.

Seminar

On the 7/2/2012 Coleg Harlech hosted a seminar called Creative Technologies within the Welsh Environment. There were 6 speakers in all, 2 of them spoke as a pair, about various topics from environmental impact caused by Creative Technology to how best to market ourselves to the industry. The talks were followed by two workshops, the Inventorium from Bangor University and one run by one of Harlech’s tutors Chris Headeland.

On the Thursday before the event I stayed behind my Core Theatre Module lecture to work with Chris Hughes to create the lighting design for the event. I came up with some creative ideas to use the space effectively and make the theatre as professional looking as possible. After seeing how all the different kinds of lights work in previous lectures; I broke the theatre down into it’s component parts, stage, walls, auditorium and ceiling. The colours used were the college colours blue and purple, we then discussed the best ways to light the different spaces. For the ceiling we used two Parcan lanterns with a purple gel filter placed on the floor angled upwards, this created a purple glow in the central area of the ceiling. For the walls I decided to pair a blue light and a purple light, to create a split colour effect on the walls. The auditorium was just a dimmed version of the house lights, giving enough light so that the audience could find seats, but not interfering with the overall lighting effect. Lighting the stage was the most challenging part, I had to consider that the speakers could move away from the lectern; so with that in mind we chose a row of 4 Fresnel lanterns with barn doors on to shape the light into the area in front of the projector screen. For the lectern itself there were a total of 6 Profile lanterns, two placed at each side of the rear of the theatre, one in the side slots stage left and one directly above the lectern. Overall I was very happy with the plan and how it was translated into the actual lighting rig, unfortunately some of the lanterns were not working and we didn’t have the equipment or time to create some of the moving light effects that I had originally envisioned on the day.

The Monday before the event I worked in the theatre between 4:30 and 5:45 then between 6:20 and 9:45. A lot of the time earlier on was wasted, as with any kind of production different departments have to set up in order, due to safely reasons I couldn’t alter or program the lighting levels. Once the screen was in place we set about angling the lanterns into the correct position, I was on the lighting desk operating the correct lanterns to enable Chris Hughes to focus and shape them appropriately. After all of the lanterns were in the correct position it was time to set the levels that the lights would operate at. Initially this process went well, it was my first time in charge of the desk and I was enjoying the creative and technical aspect. However there were some quite major bugs with the lighting desk software leading to Chris Hughes spending some time finding ways around faults and flaws in the grouping of lights and pre-set levels. Overall these errors set us back at least an hour; while Chris was sorting the issue I was up in the roof space assisting with the placement of the projectors for the twitter wall and camera for the live video feed.

For the event itself I had been given the task of stage manager and started at 8am. However there were a lot of technical tasks that hadn’t been finished and/or needed checking. This included all the previous night’s work on the lighting desk and fine tuning the projector placement. As stage manager it was my responsibility to make sure that everything was running on schedule as well as checking on the different crew members to co-ordinate all of the tasks and work within the time schedule. I was having to run around a lot and frequently was going to Chris Headland (event organiser) and Chris Hughes (technical lead) to point out issues that needed resolving with the relevant team members. I was briefed on my tasks during the actual speakers’ presentations; I was to give timing cues to the speakers so that they finished on time and didn’t cause the event to overrun. Unfortunately I was placed behind the speakers. So I re-positioned myself over the other side of the stage to give the speakers an eye line to me during the talks. Thankfully my work paid off, mostly, the event opened only slightly behind schedule however the sound hadn’t been handled properly and the music failed to work. At this point it was too late as audience members were already coming in, so we had to continue regardless. One of the speakers also stepped too far back and ended up out of the lighting field, I attempted to direct the speaker forwards into the light but was unable to. I think that the even went well in all, if the sound had been done the night before then faults would have been found on the morning. I also would have liked some time to brief the speakers on the microphone set up and where they could and couldn’t stand to maximise the lighting effect. As this was my first real experience of even working as part of the crew for an event, and more so being the stage manager there was little more I could have done. A lot was leaned from this event and other than the things I have already mentioned I would have liked to have some communications devices between myself and the other crew areas, this would have smoothed over some of the bumps of the event.

Monomyth

Ok so we have been atalking alot about something known as the Monomyth or Hero's Journey. The basic idea is that most stories follow a certain pattern of events.
Demonstrated quite well by this:

A monomyth is made up of multiple stages, that document the main character's journey, development and plot points. We have been asked to write a story that follows the concept of the Monomyth using 8 of the stages or more. In 1200-1300 words. As well as relating it to Monomyth stages and talking about how we can break it up into chapters and levels to be used in a video game.


Update: The entire write up was supposed to be that long, include all the rest of the things.....sigh. Time to delete about 3000 words of work. I got it down to 1500 but lost all detail and reflection in the work. Probably cost me alot of marks but there was no way that I could have gotten that much work into so few words without doing so.


Update 2: Submitted 2 days ahead of deadline!! Woop!!

Update 3: There has been a weeks extension put on the piece.....if a dyslexic person can find the time to get it right then so can everyone else. I hate to admit I am a little disapointed after rushing to get it finished in time.

Ok so, story is all in now. And we have to make a stop frame animation, using our story, of maximum 3 mins using 24fps (frames per second).......thats an insane amount of work for a single person. 1 minute would take 1440 individual frames of work..... Worried face.....

Update: Laura (may the gods bless her!) has expressed our concern over the work load and time frame for it's achievement. It has been brought down to 10fps, on the down side there is now a 3 minute minimum.....1800 frames. If you give 20 seconds to set up each frame (thats faster than an unexperienced student could ever be expected to achieve) then it will take 10 hours of work. May not seem that bad.... but it has to be submitted in a month and we won't have the matierals for another week. Along side all the other work we have. I don't see how this can be achieved.....watch this space.


And now some video examples for your occular enjoyment!

Attempt to use Flickr

Ok so we have been given a nice list of online gizwizardry to try out and talk about. So I wanted to start taking advantage of finally having regular Internet access in my college residence. Unfortunately the lack of net access has lead to a bit of a backlog of photographs and such to upload and things to talk about.

So anyway back to Flickr, I attempted to upload some pictures the first one had a little ! in a triangle appear next to the file name. But it didn't say what it meant or what was going on, so I let it continue, an hour later there was a little !angle next to all of the file names. Again no rhyme or reason, except of course for a little line at the bottom saying they had all failed. What a waste of time that was, there was no solution or reason offered, just that it hadn't worked with any of the files.

So I tried again, BAM, denied. So then I decided to try uploading fewer at a time, once again it failed. The basic uploader is still available so I thought that I would give that a go, and guess what? It actually worked! However you can only upload six at a time in 6 different boxes, so no ctrl or shift to help. It is possible that the college filter was what was causing the issue, with Flickr giving me 0 feedback there is no way to know. So with the 111 pictures I have to upload 6 at a time, I say to Flicker farewell for now. At least until I can figure out how to get the uploader working.

Ok so that's my foray into Flickr. Bye for now!