Tuesday, 20 October 2015

Horse Master Suits Advert-Evaluation

Horse Master suits Advert

Evaluation

As a whole I really enjoyed this project, this was surprising however, as I'm not that into filming, I still enjoyed myself nonetheless. Furthermore I got to know 3 new students during our time in the video production group that I wouldn't have meet otherwise. As a group we had to face several obstacles in our progression, one of which was the awkwardness regarding each other. Our idea was out of the ordinary and this didn't help with the awkwardness, it was like having two left feet. Once we started to contribute more with our ideas it became easily manageable, especially when filming came around. There were more difficulties we had to overcome, naming a few; the vision inside the mask was obstructive which made it hard to see, another one was with the camera placement and the shot variety we had used.

Or time management wasn't that bad, we actually finished all of our written work before most of the groups. The storyboard took us the longest however, as it was sheet based material. We had two options regarding the storyboard, one was this one and the other one was by using a Internet website. We chose this alternative option rather than using the Internet, as we thought that it would be a lot easier to explain our ideas as a group by using hand drawn pictures instead. I was the artist so I tried to do my best without taking up too much of our time. When it came to filming, our first attempt was a failure, maybe because we tried to use a different location, that we hadn't completed a risk assessment sheet on. Mainly however, it was the background we tried using; it was a dark blue wall which hadn't covered the entire shot, It just didn't have it's place in our advert, it didn't suit an advert in the first place. We then decided to go with the locations we went with previously.

As a result of this project I've learnt the basics regarding Adobe Premiere which we used for the editing part of things. To name a few: I learnt how to apply the white and black effect,"tint" effect, how to slow and fast forward clips using percentages, for instance 100% was the default setting, it would have to be increased to speed up and decreased to slow it down. I have also used several transition effects, such as the "Cross dissolve", "Dip to white" and lastly "Dip to black". I used these effects in most of the shots, I missed a few here and there deliberately for a special effect.

If I was to do something different it would have to be converting our idea into an informal one with a comedic feel to it. This would have been harder to accomplish but I could see it happening, the horse head mask is just a hilarious concept in which it would only help this idea.

Friday, 16 October 2015

Week 4 Filming

Today was the big filming day where we had to capture all of our footage. I had to bring in all of our props, including the suit and the horse mask. Our first attempt at filming wasn't so great: we tried finding an isolated area. Until we found that the cafeteria was almost empty . We tried to film our opening shots in front of a big blue wall. After coming back to the class room, we realised it was a poor choice of scenery,it just isn't something you'd see in a advert.
This is an example of where we went wrong.










After brake we attempted filming in the outside, we went down to a small park called "Narnia", it was just down the road from our campus. This was one of our 3 locations which we decided on last week.
There wasn't any disturbance, as we were only interested on a small part of the park. We tried taking a whole different spin on our idea we decided on using mother nature, which would be appealing for a horse. We filmed in front of a massive tree with grass all around. We tried to follow our storyboard as much as possible here, as it was the opening after all. After that we made our way to the second location: in front of the lace market car park. This was were we started getting very creative as a group. Someone, i can't remember who though; made a suggestion that i should do the moon walk while facing the camera. We composed several creative as well as hilarious shots, we all planned on making the advert go in the comedic direction rather than the serious formal style.

For the ending shot i suggested we should reproduce the dramatic chipmunk, with a horse instead, with the sound effects and everything. We thought this would be really good as our product was the most unique out of the class in my opinion and this would've made it even more unique.

Overall as a group we thought that these shots turned out pretty well, since most of the shots were only improvisations.

This is one of attempts at trying to recreate the dramatic chipmunk.We tried to use darker lighting for a greater effect in the end.
This is the original:Dramatic chipmunk

Photography week 4

Todays lesson

9pm  - 9.10         Memory check

9.15 – 10.30       Produce final images using lighting setup (last weeks task - six photographs of each one of your objects from three different angles – x4 edited and annotated
                               
Produce/finish your photographic proposal (not to be confused with your video proposal) – 400words

10.30 – 10.45    Break

10.45 – 12.00    Produce your freak or unique advert using the photography you have produced during last two weeks




Memory check

Q1. Would we use a large or a small apature to achieve a shallow depth of field?
Ans. Large

Q2. When would we use the ‘S’ control setting one the camera mode dial.
Ans. You would use the s control setting when photographing sport or a race etc.

Q3. What do we do to make the camera achieve focus?
Ans. Use the shutter function and hold it half way without letting go to achieve focus.

Q4. Name three items needed when producing a seamless background lighting set-up
Ans. Set up a redhead, a white background for staging and lastly a camera attached to a tripod for the shooting.

Q5. When focusing the camera, what do we place on the object/subject to ensure it is the center of focus?
Ans. The green square is the point of focus.

Q6. What must we do when we finish using the light to ensure it doesn't get broken?
Turn the light off so that it doesn't overheat, as this will cause the light bulb to break




Proposal
For this assignment, I essentially have to produce a seamless background for my freaky photography in one final montage, that is the overall goal. I was thinking I would do something similar to what I'm doing in my video production groups which is a suit advert based around a horse mask in for the twist. I could take several shots of  me posing in a suit and tie with the addition of a horse mask in 4 or more different poses; front face, back. sides and a seated angle. Referring back to my week 2 research I was inspired by these images in particular. The one with the man and the dog is the one I'm most keen on recreating. Ironically enough I have my own dog so this is something I can recreate exactly or more or less similar. This is mostly depending on how much my dog would be willing to co-operate. The man in the gas mask is what i would do for the front face, instead of the gas mask however i would have a horse head. It would actually look pretty funny come to think of it: a horse starring directly at the camera would be priceless. Lastly the nebula image, I want to do something similar to the whole galaxy aspect with the seamless background, it adds a taste of mysteriousness. 








All of the props I' will be bringing in is a horse mask, suit blazer , white shirt, charcoal black trousers as well as the formal leather laced up brogue shoes; these are the props I will be bringing in. I don't have a specific time period I'd like to shoot these images at, If I had to choose however, it would have to be a sunny day, so that the lighting reflects off of my black suit and the horse mask. For the seamless background i was thinking I would use the logo which I'm using for my filming project and make a pattern with it. I already looked up a tutorial on how to produce this type of pattern. For the actual shooting I believe I'll be needing a partner to compose these shots for me. I would consider asking Scottie from our class if he would be willing enough to help me out. I'll be taking these photos in the courtyard at the campus, some place that is not too crowded or busy with decent lighting. 




  




These are just some of he example of what the lighting was like at first, and quite freckly it was absolutely awful. We learned from our mistakes and turned on flash, this immediately improved the lighting.







 Another problem occurred only after I got home to work on these images in Photoshop, when i tried to zoom on them it would go all pixelated due to the resolution. The following day i got one of my family members to take some of the same images in my back garden, I was surprised at how good some of the shots were actually amazing





Most of these images if not all are altered using the curves and level functions. I picked out 39 images out of all of the 72 of them I believe. The dog photographs are some of my favourites especially the one where I'm having a stare down with my dog.













I used this one as one of my images for the seamless background.










   This one is another one of my favourites, i used this one for the seamless background as well. 















This is the seamless background i created using the logo from my filming project. I used it to produce a pattern, which i would use for my freaky/ unique photography.





This was the photograph after I successful  used the pen tool to cut around the image. I also used the brush tool to fade in some of the horse mask hair which some of it had merged with the background.