NEW PROJECT: 30 second TV advert - Skills Profile

I have been making film since i was 10 years old so i have become fairly experience with a camera, I own a semi-proffesional camera and have learnt many different creative camera techniques, I know how to create shallow depth of field and I am acostemed to filming rules such at the 180 degree rule. I use an external rode video- mic and i have a home made camera crane/jib to allow me to make diverse camera shots, i also have a few techniques on how to turn my tripod into a steady cam. Here is a little tutorial i made on how to do that:

I have uploaded my personal video's to Youtube.com (www.youtube.com/AmbroseProductions) and vimeo.com (www.vimeo.com/ambroseproductions).

I am literate in Final Cut Pro and Imovie, and i have experience using Adobe Premiere although at home I use Final Cut Pro, in my opinion it is a lot better and the effects and options are much more sophisticated. I edit all my work on Mac G5. I do my colour correcting, letterboxing and SFX for each shot in Adobe After Effects.

I have a friend who is at universtiy who composes the music for my work, which is brilliant because i don't have to worry about copyright, although when my work is just for personal pleasure and not for profit, i often use well known tracks. I wither make my own sound effects or I download them from a royalty free site.

I have done a few adverts for charities, unpaid, which i think has let me learn about the research that goes into a project and working as a team.

Above is a showreel montage of the work i have down over 2010, it should show my editing and cinomatography skills as best possible. I often act in my own own work because acting is something i very much enjoy, lately i have started a new project (La Cosa Nostra 2), Ben Elderfield and Stewart Souter wil be featured in that film.

My filmaking company (It isn't a real company yet unfortionetly... but that it will be in a few months) is called Ambrose Productions, and i started of when I was young with a bad camcorder and cheap tripod just making James Bond fan films, this grew into my chosen career path and occupies almost 50% of my life.

First of all:
To import a clip in imovie, you go to file - import, then you choose what clip you want to import and to which 'event' you want to import it to, then it will import and create thumbnails and then the clips will be there, ready to drop and drag into a new project. To split a clip into two parts you right click at the point in time you want the split to be then click 'Split Clip'.

DVD Menu Moodboard

A little late on the blog but here it is, the moodboard, as you can see the pictures within the moodboard are grainy and faded with a few vibrant colours, the faded colours are mostly blue and the vibrant ones are reds and oranges (the muzzle flashes and the 'misfits' orange jumpsuits for example) the genres of the film/television shown in this moodboard are a blend between cult, drama and thriller. The themes are strongly based around drug use, sex and violence. My favorite colours to use when it comes to this genre are the faded blue's, because they seem to work very well when it comes to cinematography and animation, i also use  a few vibrant colours to contrast with them such as red (often when we use fake blood) and an odd item of clothing which stands out from the rest. Sin City use this effect to the  max by making the images all in black and white apart from the colour red. The reason i made a moodboard is to creat an image of all the styles of font and colour pallettes that are currently fashionalble within the genre. I made this one differently to my previous one, this was made entirely in photoshop by taking images from the web as opposed ot tearing images from magazines etc.

Encore

I started using encore a little while before this course, but not enough to go through this task smoothly, so i researched online for some tutorials and i found this great one by Andrew Kramer on videocopilot.net

http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/dvd_authoring/

It not only tells you how to make the buttons etc, but it also tells you how to make loops for the menu and how to incorporate animation from Adobe After Effects, coincidentally, Andrew Kramer also gives many tuorials on After Effects and he has taught me nearly every thing i know on animation.

Finishing the DVD menu...

I had been working on my dvd through Adobe Effects and Photoshop, here are some screen shots of my progress:

Fig 1: (Adobe After Effects CS3) As you can see at this point there are only 4 layers in the timeline, the back ground image, the black layer with a radial ramp effect and the multiply blending mode, the title 'split' and a camera layer. The camera layer is what's used to navigate in a 3D space, all of the layers are 3D apart from the ramp effected layer which is used as a frame for the menu. The white box's on the image are title and action safe guide lines because depending on which television being used, if thhe titles are always kept withing these guidelines, they will always be visable)

Fig 2: (Edited in Adobe Photoshop CS3) I have used this programe to cut this image quicly to be able to be imported into photoshop, i had some trouble keeping the transaperency effect used in PS when i imported the saved file to AE, so i decided to use my innitiative and put a green layer behind my image so that i could later colour key it in after effects.

Fig 3: (After Effects) This screen shot simply shows that i have added the play buttons etc and a silver boarder with a heavy feather so the layers blend well together

Fig 4: (After Effects) This image shows the end of the image animation with all the buttons and the title in place, i have clicked them all so that you can see that the are 3D (The x, y and z axes's are what you use to navigate and place the objects in the 3D space, 'y' is up and down, 'x' is from side to side and 'z' is zoom)

Fig 5: (After Effects) The yellow lines around the silver background show the boarders of the masking tool i have yoused around it to cut out and feather.

Here is the Final Product of the main menu:

'Snatch'

In this mornings session, we watched a film by Guy Ritchie called Snatch, in my opinion this film is, it's also a great exemple of what i want to do for my DVD menu and it is of the same genre and follows the same same sub-genres as what my movie is. It has elements of comedy, set in a grungy Brittish atmosphere with an unusual timeline and a crime related storyline. It gave me a lot of ideas for my own menu, as the film follows the same codes and conventions as me, i saw similar colours (mostly faded bright colours with gray and white), camera angles and cutting styles (fast and choppy). Although i have seen this film before, i had never looked at it in the same educational way.

In the afternoon i finished up some paper work, some sketches etc to complete my folder, there wasn't a lot that i could do because I forgot to bring the images i had started editing at home.

Finishing up DVD Menu Research.

After being given a sheet telling me what i needed to have in my folder so far, so i have been going over these and making sure i have every thing,
I have finally done my contingency plan, which is a table weighing the option of things that might go wrong so that i am prepared when it comes to the production. I put down 3 different possible errors for each stage of productions and ways that they could be prevented.
I also continued on my pitch, I have been using prezi to make this presentation as attractive and dynamic as possible, so far I have gotton to the budget stage, and since the only costs would be paying the graphic designer (me) i need to research the rates of hiring one on the internet.

Image formatting

JPEG:
(Joint Photographic Experts Group)
This format is a way or flattening image files and compressing them, the main downside unfortionetly is the quality loss, although they can contain a very large amount of colours. The colour code is Bitmap wich is an image created with bits, the number of bits determined on the availiable colours.

PSD:
(Photoshop Document)
This is the format that  is used when you edit in photoshop, it is also the default format you would save your image in to keep the layers. It is accepted by many other programs and internet image banks. PSD's also can use any colour code (RGB, CYMK, Greyscale etc.).

BMP:
(Bitmap)
This is a format for raster images, made by Microsoft Windows. It uses colour and B&W images, another advantage is that it is supported by a very wide range of software.

TIF:
(Tagged Image File Format)
Popular with Macintosh users, it is a very flexible image format. it doesn't compress at all and looses no quality. The downside is that, because of this, the file is normally farely large.

Site:
http://www.image-formats.com/
http://www.coolutils.com/Formats/PSD