End of Year Show

So the End of Year Show has now been on for a few days. The build up to it was very stress full as there was a lot to get done in a very short time this in turn led to a few tecnical hic-ups.

i took my family around on the first day of the show to showof what i had been doing through out the year. my sister was espesialy pleased with the amount of work i had done so much so that she whent out and purchased me a new game for my Xbox 360.

Today we have been working hard on making subtitles for one part of the interview i also helped Luke work on the presentation for our video i put together a small photomontarge of some of the locations we visited during our location scouting

many of the locations we visited were not used in the final video due to time restraints in both the filming and editing side of the project.

all editing should be done by tonight by both myself and Paul.

Today we went paint balling (the idea being a team building activity) this was fun i had a camera attached to my gun but the footage didn't come out as well as i had hoped (a lot of shots of the floor and the trees that i hid behind.
all in all this was a fun morning and we all seemed to enjoy ourselves.

after returning to college we viewed the footage of that myself and john had captured on cameras this was entertaining. we also had a look at how our evaluation should look

Luke and Liam finished taking the footage for the documentary of the camera and put it on to the computer me and Paul will get some of this edited tomorrow ready for Luke and Liam to finish of on Wednesday.

Today we got stuck in to editing our documentary while Paul started on piecing some of the video clips together i started cleaning up some of the audio in the interviews that we had done. i also started working on a rough version of the voice over script.
after lunch we went through some techniques of adding special effects to videos most of witch i had discovered on Monday.
Its a bit early to tell but i think this project is going to go well as long as every one pulls there weight.

Today after a lot of messing around we maneged to start transferring the video from the camars to the computers.
This was something we should have been prepared for because no one in my team had any experience in using Adobe Premier and none of us knew that the video transfer would take up so much hard drive space luckily the tutor had an external hard disc with a terabyte (1024Gig) of space on it this was extremely helpful as it meant we could transfer all of the video footage to the computers ready for editing together.

Today we learnt about using Adobe Premier Pro i found this a bit overwealming at first but after 5 minutes of playing with it i quickly realised how simple it can be to use
the thing to remember about Premier is its all about the set up, if this is done incorectly then nothing will work properly.
After learning the basics i started looking in to special effects and how to work with them this lead on to finding how to add subtitels.

For the start of the day we traveled around Brighton filming scenes for our video documentary. After gathering a few shots of empty buildings ready for parts of the voice over we moved on to interviewing a friend named Sid and altho he was a bit tired from where we had woken him up for the interview. However the interview went extremely well we even gathered some shots of his dogs.
After this we headed to st James street to try to get some shots of a Big Issue seller but on the way we stoped to take some shots of the police station this was funny as the police (who still haven't contacted us to give us there official stance on squatting) were very quick to come out of the station to check what we were up to. After showing them our IDs to prove that we were not terrorists we continued to st James street only to have the one Big Issue seller refuse to be on film but we did find a busker that was happy to be filmed as we dropped some change guitar case this was a very good shot in my opinion.
We then continued to travel Brighton looking for Big issue sellers and empty buildings. we found a homeless person near the train station that was willing to be filmed as we handed him some lose change this again was a good shot in my opinion.
after we returned to college we had a quick review of what we had filmed before going on to the roof of the Pelham tower to get a nice high shot of Brighton.
the plan is that tomorrow we will gather a few more shots of homeless and squatters to fill up the video and we will also have a panning shot of some information on a table this will be done in the library.
just before the end of the day we had a bit of a panic as we thought that we had filmed over the interview luckily for us this was not the case we just didn't know how to operate the cameras replay function.

Today my group and i whent out location scouting useing a digital camra i maneged to start geting a feel for the scenes and the camra angels that we would use

i was amazed at how the same scene from a difrent angel can give the vewer a diffrent perspective on things

later on in the day i scaned in some of the notes that had been taken throughout the day. While they are basic they are still useful for the group to base some of our ideas of.

Now while these may look like scribels on a bit of scrap paper they are actualy important notes and plans that i have been making based on the group discusions between our group.

Video Production
for this unit we will be creating a short film
things seemed to have changed for this unit as we don't have to do a mass of research which is sort of strange as i had become used to doing research.
we have all been put in to groups and i am in a group that I'm happy with(Me, Luke, Paul and Liam)
today we started on the pre-production part here is my proposal sheet

With a bit more planing we should be able to create a good documentary.

First day back.
Today we have had our first day back after Easter (thank god my sisters kids have gone back) and i jumped straight back in to work
I am enjoying animation and have already completed my final animation it did change alot from the first few ideas i had but im much happyer with it than i was my first few atempts.

I am very happy with how it turned out even the tutor was happy with the final animation and congratulated me on how well it looked.

Lately we have been working on our animation for this task i have been putting in a 110%
my animation has come a long way since i first drew up the story boards

we were shown how to use the "classic tween" and now there is no stopping me. i already had a good idea of how key frames worked form my work with 3d animation and modeling but creating a cartoon is somewhat different and has given me a new appreciation of how frames work. after the Easter holidays i should have 2 working animations in 2 different styles using different techniques.

Thursday

Today we started on our story boards for our animations i felt this was a bit of a fun exercise as i instantly had an idea for a character.
I decided that my character would be named Stressed Dave and he will get more and more stressed until his head explodes.
This character was taken from my flip book that we all had to create at the beginning of the day.


I think that when it comes to animating it i will keep to this colour scheme because of how simple the characters are i don't want to flood the viewer with unnecessary bright colours.

Today we had Sarah Strickett to teach us about animation she started of by letting us know about her history within the animation industry for one thing she helped on the show 2DTV that was a very funny cartoon
later we went on to have a look at the persistence of motion
the persistence of motion is an optical illusion that works on the idea that things can move faster than the eye can perceive
for example on one side of a piece of card a picture of a man with his hand out like he is holding something, on the other side of the card is the item that the man is holding. When the piece of card is flipped from one side to the other and back at a fast rate then the man would appear to be holding the item.

ANIMATION

Today we started a new unit for animation as always we stared with our research that includes looking in to the history of animation and already i have learnt that animation started a long time ago back in 180AD in china but the need to animate started way before that by cave men. after having a quick class discussion about animation we all sat down to watch "Steam Boat Willy"

from my understanding of animation it is a series of images played in a sequence at a speed that the human eye cant distinguish between the changing of images

we spent the rest of the day looking in to all aspects of animation from stop frame to time lapse and all other forms in between.

on another note my tutor John surgested that i watch "Koyaanisqatsi" so i will try to get a hold of this on my day of.

Monday

Today we nearly finished our podcasts
i didnt realise just how much a script needs to be rewriten


as you can see we started with quite a strucherd script but after some time recording we notesed that we needed to anoteate the script to fit what we wanted to say and make it sound more natural

Today my team and i started the first part of our podcast recording. this was harder than it sounds as the presenter of our podcast became very nerves when we started recording so after about 7 attempts to recored the first part of our podcast.

after we returned to the class our editor started to put together the first 1 minute of our podcast

we were all feeling happy with how this went so we moved on to starting our resarch.

building our podcasts

today we got in to the groups we are working in for our podcasts
my group seems to be way ahead of the curve we have a script and a plan that we will follow so we all ran through thye script planning out who would say what and what else needs doing the worst part of our plan is that we need to wait till next week for the new UK top 10

billy is a funny tutor i like the way he uses a kazoo to get the atention of the class

thursday

today was fun Billy our tutor for this unit of studie is a fun teacher and has been trying to make the lesson more enjoyable by giving us group activity's to do.

we have grouped up for our podcast my group consists of myself, Jacob, Jamie and Aaron and we have named our podcast Mod cast and are basing it on modern music.

i will be in charge of the project and writing the script Aaron will be our main presenter Jamie will be editing the podcast and Jacob will be creating the jingle for our podcast

over the weekend i will be coming up with a script that Aaron will be reading and changing ready to be produced

wendsday

today we finished our mind maps for the different audio formats that we were assigned on Monday this is what i have
now i have to go to a student council meeting

this task promises to be more entertaining than how it started but i still prefer doing a written task but i think that is something that was programed in to me from the years that i spent in school.

monday back to lessons

to start with today we had key skills this seemed a bit un organized as the tutor for the lesson didnt know that we had already done this the week befor we left for half term.

after we had our first break we went through the assignment brief i spent a bit of time highlighting the important sections.

Thursday

Today we finished writting reviews for (1) a pice of music in the top 10 of the UK charts and (2) a game that we own or have played.

Unit 2

Audio Production

Research

Robert Pallier

For this task we have been given the job of writing a review on a song in the charts more specifically a song in the top 10. So for this I have chosen to review Journey – Don’t Stop Believin’

Journey is an American band that was formed in the early 70s in San Francisco, California.

Most of the band is made of former members of “Santana” a band that touched on a similar genre Santana is a band that was formed in 1964 with Carlos Santana as the lead guitarist and an array of other artists that changed over the years. The range of these artists has varied greatly. Just like Santana himself, the band is famous for helping to introduce Latin rock to the rest of the world. They have won a total of 8 Grammy Awards and 3 Latin Grammy Awards which were all awarded in 2000. Some of the songs performed by the band include “Santana” , ”Abraxas” , ”Caravanserai” and “Welcome”

The song “Don’t stop belivin” was first released in 1981 on the album Escape and is often considered the bands signature song and has been used in many TV shows and films including Family guy, King of the Hill, South Park, CSI, My Name is Earl and many more.

“Don’t Stop Belivin” is also believed to be one of the most popular rock tracks in Ireland.

The recent release of the Glee version of “don’t stop believin” has boosted sales of the original putting it back in the charts and boosting sales once again for the ageing band. Also X-Factor star Joe sang a cover of the song on the show that also helped to boost sales.

A main part of the song is the guitar with a memorable rift.

The lead vocals performed by Steve Perry have a very catchy part of the song “Don’t stop belivein” that isn’t sung until the last m inute of the song.

The backing vocals are performed by Ross Valory who also performed the bass guitar, Jonathan Cain who also used the piano and keyboard and Neal Schon that also performed on the lead and rhythm guitars

The other band member was Steve Smith who used the drums and percussion

The song its self is a love song from what I can tell.

My personal feelings on Journey are mixed whilst I like some of there songs like “Don’t stop believin” and “Any Way You Want It” there are others that I don’t for example “open arms” and “lovin touchin squeezin”

If I was to give the song a score out of ten then it would be only a 6 but when I take in to consideration how well the song has been used in other settings like films the score goes up to a respectable 8

For the second part of this task I am going to write a review on a game of my choice for this I have decided to review the game Fallout 3

Bethesda Softworks creators of the award winning game series “the elder scrolls” was founded in 1985. Bethesda Softworks or just Bethesda have had a long history in game development and publishing with the creation of the first physics based sports simulation in 1986 which soon led to the first NFL game. This game was published by EA (Electronic Arts). Bethesda used to write games for more than just PC’s and conceals in fact the first games were written for the Atari ST, the Amiga and the commodore 64 (the commodore 64 was the first computer that I owned)

Many of the early Terminator games (based on the hit films “The Terminator” and “Terminator 2 Judgment Day”) were written by Bethesda. Terminator Future Shock was one of the first games to use 3D graphics and allow the player to use the mouse to look around the game one could almost go as far to say that Bethesda were the grandparents of modern FPS (First Person Shooter) games.

Fallout 3 is a game based on a timeline that never happened in a post apocalyptic wasteland from a nuclear war that never took place. As the player you start in life in the game as a survivor that was raised in a vault (a huge underground fallout shelter). The player as has always been the case in the Fallout series will have to navigate the wasteland making choices to do good or bad weather to save characters or let them die. The story for Fallout 3 is based around Washington DC were the player has almost free roam to search the 13square kilometres for a way to bring back fresh water to the people of the wastes.

Fallout 3 plays as an FPS primarily with a strong RPG (Roll Play Game) element however it also boosts being a turn based real time hybrid but I found that the VATS (Vault Assisted Targeting System) the part of the game that is supposed to emulate a turn based combat system just allowed the player to kill their target with lethal accuracy.

Another big part of the game play is the ability to switch between first and third person gaming seamlessly however this seems to be something that was left over in the game engine from the Elder scrolls 4 Oblivion.

Although this is the third game in the Fallout the game play has changed dramatically and has more in common with Oblivion than Fallout 1, Fallout 2 or any of the other Fallout spinoffs that arose. This could be due to the fact that Fallout 3 is built on the same game engine as Oblivion but many of the Fallout modding community would go as far as to say that Fallout 3 is just a mod for Oblivion. Previous Fallout titles were 2D with a strict turn based combat system.

One of the biggest aspects of the game that I like is the massive open story that allows the player to shrug off the main quest and go in search of fame and wealth. The main quest can be completed in less than 3 hours but the amount of locations the player can visit and mini side quests that the player can take on will lead to over 100 hours of game play. This coupled with the stunning Graphics and engrossing sounds lead to Fallout 3 being one of my all time favourite games.

Despite all this Fallout 3 is not without its draw backs for one it is only a single player game not that this is new in a Fallout title but for modern computer games multiplayer tends to be a big part of choosing weather to purchase a title or not. Another of the Problems with Fallout 3 is the amount bugs whilst not an over abundance considering the size of the game the ones that are there can be a hindrance especially if you spent a long time getting somewhere only for a door to not work or an item that needs to be picked up going missing .

If I was to rate the game I would give it an 8 out of 10 but with the extra downloaded missions and the large amount of user made content that can be acquired I will have to give this game a massive 9.5 out of 10

Monday

Today we started with a keyskills exame for comunication (English) I think I did well but there were some questions that i strugeled with. for the rest of today we have to update our blogs and review the blogs of other members of the class. this should be fun reading how others have been doing and how well they think they have done.

later on in the day i downloaded a new template for for my blogger. this was easy i think i will change it every week.



over the weekend i finished playing Mass Effect 2. i had played mass effect some years ago and had been waiting for the second game for so long and felt that it was a fitting continuation to the first game.

Monday

after spending the morning in keyskills learning the correct use of apostrophe's we started by listening to each others recording projects. as expected mine wasn't the best but i still liked it.
by far the best was Paul's track that he made mostly from a Prodigy track.

this afternoon John (our main tutor) came round and had a small one on one with each of the class to discuss how well we had been doing on the latest assighnment he comented that i seem to be doing as well as always (dispite that i dont think i have done aswell as other units)

over the weekend i spent a lot of time making prototypes in Unity. Unity is a Game Engine made to be used by want to be game designer's like myself. to aid myself in the ceration of my game i have been building 3d models using 3dsMax.

i plan to spend my tuesday of to start implementing some of my prototypes in to a small working game.(i hope)

Thursday

Today was a rush because we didnt have the space on our harddrives to save our sound booth files. some of us got around this by using the desktop as a tempory storage space this helped but i used my laptop that helped because i now how to use my laptop and have higher admin rights on it (something that i like is to be in control of my computer)
by the afternoon i had finished the project and taken all the screenshots and done a wright up for them.
now im looking forward to the weekend as i have had a long and frustrating week.

Monday

I have been a bit bad and haven't updated my blog since December so i decided that as we have just started another unit of study i should post about what has been going on.

during the MIDI sequencing project i ran in to a few problems to start with i only have 1GB of hard drive space on my college home drive this is a real problem because when using Cubase after editing an audio track that track is saved with the edits as a .WAV this became problematic extremely quick as the project folder would grow to extremely large sizes.
another problem with using Cubase was that any MIDI drum beats that i created myself would not be converted during the mixdown proses. There was a work around for this problem but the resulting sound after this was not as good as before.

After the snow had stoped and we all got back to classes we were given a new task to remix a MIDI track of our choice. This task was meet with the same storage space problems as the last task. (i need to invest in a new USB memory stick (thanks to who ever found mine and didn't turn it in))
we also ran in to a host of new problems regarding the Cubase software the most annoying of these were that any MIDI tracks that i made would not mixdown and i ended up having to hand in my whole project folder.another problem that the class ran into was that after choosing a MIDI track and changing the instrument and then selecting a new MIDI track would reset the last track making it impossible to remix the project the way we wanted.

all in all i think that this project could have gone better despite how well it started and given the choice i would have chosen to use a different software package

this morning during Key Skills we were studying the use of capital letters in sentences this sort of thing is helpful for me because its the sort of thing that i do tend to over look when writing.

after break we had a look at adobe sound booth and how it worked it reminded me of how cool edit worked and so i felt comfortable with it straight away. i would have liked to have spent more time looking at this software and I'm hoping to be able to use it again in the future.

after lunch and for the rest of the day we started on our latest unit "Recording"
our goal is to buy a dream recording studio with an imaginary £10,000. this started with john giving us a rough guide as to the sort of items we should get for our studios including hardware and software. i spent the rest of the day looking at the difference's in microphones and amps to give myself a better understanding of where my money would be going tonight i will put together a spreed sheet to help balancing the spending that should be fun relearning excel functions (i wounder if excel still has a hidden Easter Egg.