The Meeting today
As the group manager I called a group meeting for this Friday just to see if we can get as much done together as a we possibly can for Monday.
Mainly because with work all weekend there will be little I’ll be able to get done unless working late into the night. Although I am prepared to do that if need be.
The meeting went well, we were there for four hours which I do think is a lot longer than we all hoped it would take but it was worth it.
I was able to show Claudia the DVD menu’s I’d changed (only some of them) we were also able to look through the website and make any changes to finialise the site.
The best acheievement of the afternoon was the script we wrote for the presentation on Monday.
Not only did we write it we also practised it again and again to really perfect the presentation. By timing it we were able to see if we could get everything done within the five minute time line.
Which we succesfully did, it also gave Ollie a chance to get used to navigating around the site to fit in with mine and Claudia’s speech and to see if we had time to watch the 20 second clip on the DVD.
Eventually four hours after we met up we had finished, we each had a task to do for Monday and arranged to meet after John’s before the presentation to run through everything again.
Here’s to another busy weekend!
Finally over
I sorted out the problem with the QuickTime issue, I had to import it as a movie and change the compression type to Sorenson Video 3 format.
Once I did that it worked fine, that was for the concert shoe, I did the same for the other two shoes but they kept being glitchy and that annoyed me…because it didn’t run as smoothly as I wanted it to.
This meant lowering the quality of the video, which I didn’t really want to do because I didn’t want the video quality to drop, but as it turned out by lowering it to 75% it ran a lot smooth with no glitches!
This was obviously the video that I handed in.
Rendering and QuickTime
I had to alter the projects a bit, mainly adding transitions so that everything rang in smoothly with each new clip.
When it came to exporting it to a QuickTime movie there were a few problems, mainly the first time I did export it the whole movie was fuzzy and looked terrible.
The second time when I did it slightly differently there was an error on both Windows and Mac so that didn’t work either…I was panicking a bit as it was getting later and later and I still have two more other “adverts” to edit and render, then export them as QuickTime before adding it to a CD and finishing.
Hopefully I can get to bed before 3 o’clock tonight!
Finished!
I’ve finished! I love saying that lol.
I’ve editted all the sound and video and mixed it all with the 3D models (the shoes and the logo’s) and it all runs fairly smoothly. I still have to render it and put it onto a CD to hand it but I’ll do that this evening…but for now I’m going to sit back and relax for an hour or two.
Because I managed to get the sound and video working I changed the patterns of two of the shoes, the three shoes I have are a Flower one
The original converse used for the concert
The last pattern I used, is the one for the football match
Sorting out the sound and video
The objects are all done and complete (and rendered) which is the main thing because I have something I can hand in even if it doesn’t look that great.
All I have to do now is work on the video’s I’ll be using and the sound files to get everything looking and sounding fine.
As I do not horse ride myself getting footage of a girl horse-riding is hard to come by, so I had to buy some royalty free video for that.
I found some good video herehttp://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/object/4057549_cabalgata_01.php?id=4057549 and I think the person who filmed this is http://www.istockphoto.com/user_view.php?id=1016614 as that’s the members page the film links too.
For my other two video’s I received video footage from the Sheffield United v Plymouth Argyle match which was played on Saturday 24th November, I got that from my Dad who works in the media department at Plymouth Argyle.
The last video I used, I took myself on my phone, it’s from a Brand New Concert which I attended in April this year.
I wanted to use music/songs as sound for this project, because my idea with the Converse shoes is to show how many different styles there are and what group of people they’ll attract I thought I’ll use a different song for each “advert”.
For the Girly Converse Claudia suggested I use Kate Nash, this I did, the song I used was Foundations, it’s only the chorus just like the other two but I still used it.
There was some difficulty getting this song, as I didn’t have it I had to download it from itunes, and then send it to myself to use on the computer that I’ve been working off.
This didn’t really work very well because I only got 30 seconds of a 4 minute song, and although I did only need about 30 seconds of the song it wasn’t the part I needed.
I found out why it did that (can’t explain it though) and fixed it, but in order for me to edit it to get the part of the song I needed I had to burn it onto a CD and then import it back into itunes. (this was the same for the other two songs)
Once I did that, I could edit it any way I want and use it how I wanted to in Premiere Pro.
The other two songs I used was Pain by Jimmy Eat World from their Futures Album, and Chelsea Dagger by The Fratellis from their Costello album.
Getting somewhere
With the whole Eden Project thing and the HCI Essay this assignment has been pushed aside to make time for that.
Suddenly the week of the deadline is here (it crept up far too quickly) and all I had done was one 3D shoe and one logo, when I needed three of each.
The only whole day that I had left to do it was of course today Wednesday 28th November…my plan was to have most if not all of it completed.
Have the three shoes with three logos, all different and the animation working fine. Creating the shoes and the logo’s didn’t take too much time, trying to figure out which design I should have for each shoe took the longest to do.
I did get fed up with it though, I found a really cool design and wanted to go with that, but with the model I chose it wasn’t possible for me to change it the way I wanted to.
I’ve been a bit boring at the moment with the design of the shoe, one being a pink flower one for a girl an all black one and just the downloaded model red.
I thought I want to get it all done and finished first just so I have something instead of stressing out over the style of the shoe and come Thursday night have nothing to show for it and rush to make 3 shoes.
Once I had settled for those designs I had to sort out the lighting, and shadows to see what looks right and what doesn’t, after searching tutorials to find out how to do shading as unlike 3Ds Max it doesn’t do it automatically.
When I was happy with that I searched for my video, which I did have to buy
but it was worth it as I know have video that I want and fits in with my message…kinda.
The next challenge was putting the 3D models into Premiere, and sorting out the timing of it to fit the 30 second slot (3 30 second adverts) and getting the spinning logo’s working (so that with each spin the back of the logo will change).
Didn’t take me too long to do that (but that was just for one of the video’s still got 2 more to do) next task is adding the sound, however the song I want I can’t seem to get.
I’ve found it and have downloaded it from two music shops (legally) yet because they are legal I can’t edit it, even though all I want to do is cut it down to 30 seconds and play the chorus of it or something.
So now I’m in search of the same song one wich I can edit.
Looks like another late night for me lol
Practical Today
We had a practical on a Tuesday for Joasia today (instead of the dome sessions we’ve had previously)
She wanted to know what our idea was for our essay, and see if we could possibly use that for our negotiated project next term…and honestly I haven’t thought that far yet (since Chris Speed did say not to worry about that too yet).
My first idea for the essay was to do it on Magazine adverts and how they’ve changed when what is socially acceptable has changed and the way everything is portrayed now, as well as how everything is represented…but during the practical when she said about using it for our project I was a bit ![]()
So I changed it…probably do something along the lines of Sound Production because I’m interested in it and it’s something I’ll like to look into further.
However she would like me expand on it further which is what I’ll need to do before Tuesday, although at the moment I have no idea which field of sound I’ll want to write about.
Have to do some research on different styles of music production and see if I can get any inspiration from it.
As well as write an abstract of my essay between 300 and 500 words
Essay Part One Finished
After much hard work over the past few days the essay is finally complete!
I had finished writing it on Sunday at around 10pm but I was up until 3 in the morning sorting it all out! The reason it took so long was because I was working out the Appendixes.
These included the questionnaire I used to get knowledge of what the customers and the employees think about Self-Scan, and the editing of the photo’s taken on my phone on Saturday after work of the self-scan unit/remote access.
I also had to amend them to show what they went to if there was a problem, as well as adding notes to point to which area and what it does.
By the time I had finished I had 20 pages, and was 3,779 words a bit over the limit…I just hope I haven’t gone into the second part of the essay, and I also hope that I’ll find more things to put in the second essay
Adverts
Since I’m definately going with the Converse Advert idea, I thought I’ll do a google search on other converse adverts to see if I can get any ideas.
Here are a list of some of the adverts I found
Taking longer than expected
There was another meeting for The Edge project today, I was pretty hopeful with it as it appeared to be that we had finished it all off yesterday and all that we had to do today was link it with the A.I and run it past Mike Phillips.
But 5 hours later we still haven’t finished, we have met every day this week and only seem to be slightly closer to the finishing it than we were on Wednesday.
The flash file was working all fine just had to tweak some of the design and add links and our names (which took a lot longer than we all thought it would) which is annoying and stressful as it is.
The worst thing which is really delaying it is the A.I bit, at the beginning of the project we were told we’ll have nothing to do with the A.I and Chris Saunders and Justin (who did the Noogy thing) were doing it.
Yet the day before the deadline (well when we’re all available) we’re still here waiting to sort it out before we launch the flash site which HAS to be ready on Monday.
None of us know anything about A.I or how it works and all we’ve been given is a URL to write the question to and then the XML file that should give you a response…but the XML file is empty and doesn’t respond anything…so basically it doesn’t work.
The guy who does know about it all is Chris Saunders and he’s not in so we can’t talk to him directly about it to sore it all out, he’s out moving house so we’re trying to talk to him on the phone while he’s busy.
I’m really fed up with this because I could and should be at home working on the essay now I have to go home and fit it all in with a full house trying to cook dinner and go to work all weekend….the way I see it I’ve lost 5 hours worth of work on this where we’re not going anywhere and seem to be hitting our head against a brick wall.