I'm actually pretty much done with my DVD portfolio from burning to printing, so all that is left right now is to print my DVD menu in just a few hours time. I went to burn like 6 copies of the DVD, haha typical kiasu Singaporean! Maybe I should test them out again to make sure they work fine. Camping in school for almost one week with bare minimum sleep was a great way to end off my university life! Anyway I've got to say that Encore isn't very user friendly, it often keeps hanging and crashing. Terrible, but luckily Encore is mainly used for linking up all the videos and not editing them...otherwise I think all of us will be banging our heads against the wall already!
Like everyone else, this if my first time making a DVD! Words just cannot describe the satisfaction experienced from watching all your hard work compiled and put up on television. As I watched the DVD, images of all the good times and struggles just keep surfacing. But well, now I have 3 useful portfolios under my belt! Thank you Julian :)
Let's have a preview of my DVD contents...
I decided to name my DVD Portfolio bricolage because it describes the creation processes of my assignments perfectly. It is borrowed from a French term which means to "make creative and resourceful use of whatever materials are at hand". Many times we want to create an exact replica of what we have in mind, but often due to limited resources we just have to compromise and make good use of what we have at hand. The buildings on the DVD label represent the finished product of the building process...just like this DVD portfolio - the finished product of all my assignments :D
Backtracking a little, creating this DVD portfolio is no simple task. At first you might think it will be fairly simple and fast since it's just linking up the stuff. BUT THEN you realised that there are tons of things to clean up, and document! Many things were lacking! & it's even more terrible when you try to open your previous works just to receive prompts telling you that the files cannot be traced! YOUR WHOLE WORLD JUST COMES CRASHING DOWN! Terrible mistake I made because some of my files were in the hard disk, others were stored in various computers. LESSON LEARNT: place everything on the server and work from there! Sigh painful price I had to pay for not thinking about these things that can become really sticky problems. I ended up having to run from lab to lab finding my working files.
Initially I had no idea what to include in the documentation/learning journal because the instructions were pretty vague so I wasted quite a bit of time just thinking of what to put in. But I guess this way it allows room for us to interpret it any way we want. Hopefully I interpreted it the right way :/
Let's talk about the group project videos! I failed to blog about them the other time after we handed in, sorry!
Rendering the MTV video was insane! I believe my laptop was on the verge of getting fried. I started rendering at midnight, and at 10am it was still far from complete! The best thing is that After Effects hanged when there was 10% left to render. 10% sounds little right, but it still takes up a super looooong time! That's why I was late in handing up the MTV video sigh :( Haha, the whole comp lab was super heated up because everyone was busy rendering. It was like an oven! SUPER HOT plus hungry plus sleepy = angsty! We were all praying for 7am to come so that the air-con will start again.
After managing to render the MTV out using the school's computers in a low quality version, some portions of the video got screwed up and ended up bobbing :/ Really disappointed with the outcome of this MTV video sigh.
Okay let's take a look at the videos and initial draft before talking some more...
RUN
MTV
A quick summary for the filming and editing processes for both videos...
For the RUN video, we were fortunate to have quite a few people to film. BUT they were mainly guys! We acknowledge that there is the lack of females in this video. The tiring part was that we were travelling to so many different places to shoot different scenes. Thank goodness there were people who drove which helped greatly! We experimented with the dolly wheels borrowed from MDL, but it was only able to run smoothly on smooth surfaces. Its movement was very jerky on rough pavements and roads, so we did away with the dolly and the tripod as well. So everything was controlled by hand since it was more flexible this way, but it runs the risk of having the footages all shaky! Jolene and I even managed to squeeze into the boot of a car to shoot some scenes...check out the BEHIND THE SCENES segment of my DVD portfolio to see :D
For post-production, thank goodness I found a song that matches well with the scenes! Basically, what's needed for editing was basically to slice up the footages and match it to the song using Premiere Pro. But the tough part was looking through nearly 200 footages! I sat to watch through them until my butt almost cracked!
For the MTV video, we were in desperate need of people! Filming was on a Sunday so everyone was practically busy with church and family activities to come down to help us with filming. Left without a choice, we decided to just head down to NUS and try our luck with random people. The only non-random person in the video was the singer, the rest were all random, but thank goodness they were all so nice and friendly to let us film them in the background! :) ONE MORE PLUS POINT TO PROMOTE NUS - a place with all the nice and friendly people! Anyway this was relatively fast and easy to film since everything was happening at NUS. Compared to the RUN video, this video gives off a more chill yet sincere feel.
For post-production, well initially we were lacking the recording of our song because of some reason which was already mentioned to Julian. What will an MTV video be without the song?! So we had to make do with Garage Band, at least the quality is pretty good. The only problem I had with it was that the voice was softer than the accompanying music, but due to the lack of time there was no time to re-record it again. Editing was quite a pain in the a**, because I had to try to match the mouth movement of the singer to the song which was hard. So some parts did not seem to match the mouth movement. The other only problem I had with this video was the horrible rendering, and the screwed up bobbing portion of the video after rendering. There didn't seem to be any solution for the bobbing part, Julian didn't seem to be able to fix it either. So although that part is really quite an eyesore, I have to just close one eye since it's beyond my capabilities to solve it.
Alright, it's about time to go print my menu soon! & I still remember the very first blog post I made for this module, let me paste a portion of what I wrote then.
"No doubt these modules were hella tiring (maybe I like to torture myself haha), but seriously at the end of the day no matter how tiring the process was, it is not the pain that you will remember, but the sweet memories and satisfaction you get out of creating works that you can call your own and be proud of. I hope at the end of NM3208, I will be able to say this again (that is if I can even get registered officially into this class first), but I'm pretty sure I'm going to enjoy this module!"
Now that we're at the end of NM3208, I can only thank Julian again for giving me the opportunity to challenge myself and prove to myself that I am able do anything beyond my imagination. NM3208 is definitely MUCH more tiring than NM2208, but in the process I've made works that I am proud of, so everything is worth it. This module made me realised what a workaholic I can be when I've set my mind to finishing something...the people who stayed with me in the labs all witnessed this haha. & I've learnt some lessons from group work, which is even when group mates have left you, you cannot give up hope on yourself because at the end of the day you're still the one accountable for your own grades. Okay besides thanking Julian, I've also got to thank Luo Lan (so sorry for bugging you so much when you're busy enough), and my friends in NM3208 especially like Eng Chye because he's a super nice person to constantly help everyone out when they need it.
Okay, need to go off to print soon. Let's end this with another post-it!
Attitude can help you overcome any challenges! Hope you guys have enjoyed my works!
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