LAST DAY.........

COUNT how many times i say "you know" and "uh" and "like" :)
the video actually says it all, but here's what i wrote down while watching other people's videos:

GROUP 1:

• the guy sounds like Matthew Yung (probably is)
• cool sound effects for the voices
• the rain sounds vary, which is good, but some parts don't really fit the comic but they say the comic "clips" shifted so i guess they could be "excused"
• the documentary had a great structure and looked really professional...

GROUP 2:

• the thing sounds trailer-like
• really epic
• music: requiem of a dream?
• the transition for EVERYTHING is like the additive dissolve/cross blur thing that's like the "signature Logan transition"

GROUP 3:

• OURS: the timing of the music is quite off for the comic sequence somehow and the sound is kind of strange
• the documentary had this part where the wind sound is REALLY LOUD and i'm like :S

GROUP 4:

• some parts were like REALLY LOUD and kind of like BOOM BOOM THOUGH ME...=.="
• the documentary was very informative and quite funny

GROUP 5:

• the music was quite nice
  
• the documentary is very "formal"
• it's kind of funny how they were all holding boom mics and stuff when they were talking...

okay...i'm not entirely sure how to "reflect" and stuff...so uh...yeah. i really liked doing film and i'm going to really miss this class (nooooo...)...yeeeeah...
XOXO
peace out :)
Y. Kwong

REFLECTION: January 2010 + rambling

TWENTY TEN.
so today we FINALLY finished everything that we needed to finish, after worrying about it for AGES. when we got back to school, we were kinda worried about the documentary because we focused on the comic and the sounds so much that we didn't get to do much for the documentary at all because we had SO MUCH footage for the documentary that we needed to capture and it would take so long to get everything captured. so on thursday i stayed after school with Vikki to basically capture everything we filmed before onto the computer and we finished off the music and everything so we would be all set for Friday when everyone else would be coming in and finishing everything off.
so friday was supposed to be like the last class that we had to work on our projects and everything was due by monday, so we were really panicked and everything and all these problems started coming out because, well problems always come out when you do things at the last minute.
PROBLEMS...FIRSTLY, everything was captured onto my account, and therefore we could not work on them at the same time, which is BAD because well, we could have been working on both things simultaneously instead of waiting for one to finish. that's bad judgment on my part because i was the one who did the capturing, i should have asked Vikki to log in to her account to let us capture onto there.
SECONDLY, we changed computers and therefore nothing is synced right and because I haven't synced for so long there is SO MUCH to sync and it'll take probably an hour at that rate and therefore we gave up syncing and we couldn't find any of the documentary clips on the computer...which leads to
THE THIRD PROBLEM: we decided to capture everything again onto Vikki's account so we could work from there while Nadia and Lea finish off the comic editing (which they have been doing for ages), but when we tried capturing, the tape was BLANK...so we were all pretty much SCREWED...and we decided to stay after school to film it again...

so we all stayed after school and we split into two groups: Vikki and Nadia films the parts for the documentary while Lea and I edited the comic. so Lea and Nadia were talking about the music not showing up properly on Final Cut and at first we thought it was the file's problem, but when i saw the timeline i figured out that it was because it wasn't rendered properly, therefore the music only shows up as a beeping noise...so Lea and i tried to render the music, except that there wasn't enough disk space, even after i deleted all the clips from the CAN project...so we had to ask Mr Chiang to help us and it took up some time...but after Mr Chiang helped us sort of the things, we found the clips that i have previously captured onto the computer, which is good because then we went on to edit it on monday...

YESTERDAY (monday) was the last day and Lea wasn't here so we had to do the documentary editing "on our own". we had basically everything done for the comic, except we needed to capture around 10 minutes of footage for the sound that we need to add in and also the documentary. this time, we learned from our past mistakes and we utilized the "public" folder and captured everything onto Vikki's account first while Nadia finished off the comic and dropped the clips into the public folder so we could access it from my account. so we finished off the comic sounds and started on the documentary, which Vikki and I were supposed to edit, except Nadia started hogging the jobs and tried to do everything when we were offering to take over because she already did a lot for our project (no, this is definitely different from the time when i "hogged" the jobs for the CAN project, they didn't show up, i was RIGHT NEXT TO HER asking her if she needed help, and she clearly needed help because she was still doing some sort of assembly edit when we came back at break time...=.="). and the problem is Nadia kept TELLING ME TO HELP HER, when there was no way i could help her except for at times when she asked me how to do some kind of technical thing with Final Cut Pro, other than that, I had nothing to do except sit there and watch her edit...I got quite pissed because she wouldn't even take my suggestions, i told her to do a split screen for the beginning but she said that there wasn't enough time when in fact doing a simple split screen on FC would take less than 5 minutes.
when we came back during lunch time, I was editing and making the edit better (less plain than what she was doing, which was literally dragging all the clips onto the timeline and matching them with the music) and she kept trying to take over and complained to me that i was working "too slowly" when she had spent almost 45 minutes just doing simple trim, drag and fade stuff...Nadia also kept pointing out my "mistakes" and kept saying that "that part isn't rendered" or "that part overlapped" when I was the one who helped her render stuff in the first place...she also kept underestimating Vikki, who is actually really good and she was the only one who managed to use LiveType when Nadia and I both struggled to find the right way to do it...(Mr Chiang wouldn't help us and told us to figure it our by ourselves...)
after awhile, Nadia left to finish her art homework so Vikki and I worked together to pick out some other clips to add onto the documentary and finished it...even though we had all sorts of disagreements, i think we actually improved compared to the last project because at least we didn't have two different documentaries (like we had 2 clips last time) and we did have more team work than last time (however, we had a lot of communication problems, which needs to be improved if we ever work as a team more...)

P.S:let me clarify something. we did not leave everything to the last minute because Vikki and I were always giggling and fooling around. i agree that i was quite loud and we did talk a lot but we did finish composing the music for the comic book (even though it was mostly Vikki playing the keyboard). and i did not just sit there and watch everyone film, i held the camera for all the earlier scenes (when we filmed the sound) apart from the one where we filmed the shower, Nadia did the camera for that. and I'm not trying to show off or say anything but all i'm saying is that i guess i'm sort of the "producer/technician" of this project because i basically watch/listen to/look at everything everyone else does before they export it and adjust stuff and i did contribute to everything there is to contribute to. i may not be the person who did everything (unlike in the CAN thing when Vikki and I did everything), but that's just because my role is different and stuff...more about that later..

XXX

REFLECTION: December 7th, 2009

"today" we went to the field to film sounds for the comic book soundtrack. we actually encountered quite a lot of problems today because of the equipment and other things...

FIRSTLY, we borrowed one of the small Sony (i think it's Sony) cameras that don't have the microphone jacks, except we didn't know that at first and we went all the way back up to get the mic and the headphones only to find out that it's not supported in the camera when we went back down to start filming. without the shotgun microphone, we need to use the built-in microphone to film the sound. this is a problem because the whole purpose of filming is to get the sound and if we use the built-in mics we can't really get good sound quality and therefore it won't really help. so we had to find out ways to get the camera microphone as close to the sound as possible, which was quite hard because we want the video to be nice enough to be used for the documentary too. i was the camera person (as usual) and Nadia and Lea did the sounds (as usual) and Vikki is kind of the sound checking person who checks whether the sound is okay. in the end we got quite a lot of artistic shots that were quite pretty, however the sound kind of sucks because the microphone simply isn't as good and it captures all the useless sound surrounding us as well as the useful sound that we were creating.

SECONDLY, Nadia and Lea rewound the tape and I personally hate it when people rewind because I log everything and the time code gets messed up when you rewind and you have to press all these extra buttons when you capture. But they don't seem to know that they did something wrong and they're just like "well we're just watching the footage..." and I kind of got really annoyed but whatever because they already did it anyway so there's no use yelling at them and I don't really like being the kind of person who yells at her group members a lot (because I did that a lot for the last project...). but if you ever work with me for a film project, just remember this: NEVER. REWIND. THE. TAPE..i don't know but i just don't like people rewinding tapes...

THIRDLY, a lot of sounds don't actually sound right for the comic, so we had to find different ways to do it within the field. but since we're at the field we get more "natural resources" that we could use and therefore it wasn't really much of a problem and we filmed the horse galloping and snapping twigs sounds pretty smoothly after we figured out all our problems.

i think we got pretty much everything we need today and we worked quite effectively (even though it was really cold up at the field and there were some minor arguments). i think we're ready to start capturing and editing next time so we could test out whether the sounds actually work properly or not and have time to refilm if it doesn't work...we're also going to be composing our original music and Vikki and I are doing it together and it's gonna be SO FUN but really hard because neither of us are that good at music (though Vikki's better than me)...

PEACE OUT
XXXXXXX

REFLECTION: December 4th, 2009

"today" was my first film class as a 15 year old :)
*nothing to write about because i was distracted*

"today" we got our grades back for the last project, i think i did fine except for criterion C, which i got a 4 for because apparently my blog was too personal and not reflective enough when it comes to the IB learner profile. I agree and I think I need to improve on that and I should stop putting personal stuff onto this blog until the semester ends. however, i think my hard work on that project did kind of pay off in the end because i got quite good grades for all the other criteria. enough said, onto the things we did...

so Lea and Nadia weren't here (dude, if you read Nadia's reflections, she makes it seem like it's our fault for us not having all our group members. Vikki and I never even missed a lesson...not meaning to bash her or anything...) so we were on our own and we decided to use the time to start learning garage band and researching some sounds that we wanted to do. we went on YouTube to find horse sounds and baby sounds and ended up getting really distracted by funny videos that showed up in the search results and kind of got off track. i filmed the process of the researching because it might be useful for the documentary, however we were so distracted that in the end we didn't get much useful stuff on tape except for the parts where we talked about what we were doing and the part where we discussed the plan with the camera. i think i get really distracted when i hold a camera because i kind of go crazy with the zooming and that isn't good because every single film teacher i've had told me NOT TO ZOOM. but i find zooming rather artistic and nice if you do if right, except i can't do it right so it looks really strange.
in the end we decided to try using GarageBand and see what we could do using that because we need to make our own music for the comic but we were distracted for so long that it was already time to leave when we took out the things, so we added "garage band" to the plan and we should be using it next time.
we got lots of cool stuff (that could be moderately useful) for the documentary except it's all filmed in a kind of strange way so it is unlikely to be used. next time, i think i should try to plan what i want to film before turning on the camera and i should STOP ZOOMING SO MUCH when it is an assignment i need to hand it. i thought the vlog we did about our plan is quite good though, because we actually said useful stuff, and it could be put into our documentary.

we didn't really do much today so i think we need to be more productive and work hard even if our group members aren't here because we don't have much class time before Christmas break!!
XXXX
YAY :D

REFLECTION: November 24th, 2009

guess who's back? yes, it's me, whether you like it or not. (dear Thomson Loong, my blog is not weird, it's just...too cool)

"today" Lea wasn't here so we had to do stuff by ourselves. we started filming the documentary and we decided to start off with a "vlog" about what we were going to do and what we did, we were kind of disorganized when we were filming it because Nadia insisted on just filming instead of planning out what we were going to say, but in the end we just kept it short and "sweet" so we could move on to the filming of the sounds because that's the more important part.

we went to the bathroom to continue filming the water sounds and we found out that we left the tape in the lab so i had to go up and get it while Nadia and Vikki filmed parts for the documentary. (i'm sort of in charge of all the tapes, because i have a thing for tapes. i have like 4 tapes in my bag: the sound tape, the documentary tape, the clean air network tape and the CT tape). i did all the logging and stuff so that kinda makes me "assistant camera" for this project, which is fine by me because i like doing the logging...kind of.

basically what we filmed today was the raining sound and the wading water sound and also the running water sound. we used the showers for the raining sound and we kind of wasted a lot of water because we turned on quite a lot of showerheads to create a "surrounding" sound of the rain and we filmed for quite long because the sounds didn't really sound right when we first did it, but in the end we decided that we could slow the audio down a little during the editing process to make it fit the comic a bit more (yes, editing again, it's always editing...)
for the wading through water and running water scenes, we had to find a way to clog the sinks because there weren't any of the things they use to plug in to the draining thing in the bathrooms. in the end we had to hold our hand over the drain to keep the water from going out so fast, and i could tell that Nadia was kinda annoyed because she had to do it...i did the role of the camera operator for those scenes and i really liked doing it because i got to do whatever i want with the video shot as long as i got the sound, so i could kind of play around with zooming and stuff while Vikki did the sound operating and Nadia did the actual sound making and it wouldn't affect anything.

i think we messed around less today and we were more organized because we already kind of know what we need and therefore we could work more effectively. it's also probably because Lea's not here so Nadia doesn't have her best friend around her so we couldn't split into 2 groups and worked as a big group instead, which is, of course, better than splitting up. so i think we actually did quite a lot and we got almost all of the water sounds we need and we only need to do the horse scenes, which we'll do when Lea's here because she's the expert on horses.

short reflection..
XXXXXX

REFLECTION: November 23rd, 2009

note: i know that it's like a really late reflection, but i wrote everything i did down on paper, and i could have always changed the date so it looks like i'm on time, but i didn't, so points for honesty, k? so here goes...(be excited)*

november 23rd:
today we did our first filming session for this project, there weren't enough cameras so we had to use this "vintage" camera that had to be plugged into a power source in order to work so we had to do everything indoors where there are power sockets. Luckily most of the scenes we had to film were indoors scenes so we could do those first and we went to the cafeteria to film. We used the cafeteria things as props to film the "bubbling water" sounds and the sound of patting horses. Here are the things that we used:

• straws
• plastic cups
• rain stick
• Nadia's back

we filmed three takes for the bubbling water scenes (though we tried off camera a few times before we filmed) because the sounds didn't come out right at first and the speed of the bubbling is all wrong so we had to try it over and over again. i don't think it turned out exactly right in the end because it doesn't really fit the frame in the comic but we decided that if we slowed it down a little while editing it would be fine. we spilled a lot of water and made quite a mess on the cafeteria table...LUCKILY we didn't mess up the camera because we have to keep it safe ESPECIALLY since it's vintage! after that we tried using the rain stick that we borrowed from the music department to try to imitate the rain sound, but somehow the sound doesn't sound like the kind of "shower" sound that we want, so we decided to ditch the idea and do something else.
something really funny that happened today was when Vikki and I went to ask the secondary music department to borrow a rainstick and we asked Ms Neil and we had a conversation that sort of went like this:

• Us: Uh, excuse me Ms Neil, can we please borrow a rainstick?
• Ms Neil: A what?
• Us: A rain stick?
• Ms Neil: What's that?
• Us: Like one of those sticks that kind of make a rain sound when you turn them over?
• Ms Neil: What?
• Students: Like one of those bamboo sticks with beans or rice in it and you turn them over and they make this "sssh" sound that sounds kinda like rain.
• Ms Neil: I have no idea what that is...
• Us: Uh..okay..
• Ms Neil: I seriously have no idea what a rainstick is, if you find one can you show it to me please?
• Us: uh...okay. Thank you...

so we went all the way across the school to the primary section and borrowed a rain stick (yes they do exist) and we brought it all the way back to the secondary music room to show it to Ms Neil the rain stick and she was like "oooh! this is so cool!" or something. i'm just kind of surprised that a music teacher doesn't know about rain sticks, because they're really cool things!
i think we actually messed around a lot today so we didn't get as much done as we wanted to AND we wasted a lot of water, but we had a lot of fun and laughed a lot so i guess it's better than SCREAMING at each other on the first day (which we kinda sort of not really but still did last time). however Nadia and Lea kept getting distracted and they filmed a whole part where they were singing random stuff and we had to hold the camera for them...so that kinda annoyed me but it was the first day so i guess it's okay to have some fun...
very short reflection......