Reflection- A Maze of Anarchy

A Maze of Anarchy is an interactive noir drama, where a rookie detective tries to  overcome her inexperience to solve a murder and catch the killer. She is surrounded by 2 other people except the antagonist who may help her solve the mystery.

Why an Interactive Noir-Drama?

Our Director, Denis, came up with the whole idea of this movie and we just trusted him with his capabilities. We were pretty much decided with our genre on the intensive day as all of us, Denis, Quentin, Liela, Luis and I, have a keen interest in this type. Interactivity of the movie was decided after the Patrick’s tutorial where we had a practice-led-research session about different interactive projects.

Work Distribution

Believe me when I say this, I have never worked so smoothly in any other group projects because we all knew, from the beginning, that each one of us had different expertise and no one would try to distrust on capabilities and work together efficiently.

Denis agreed to be the team leader, being the director, I was the Unit production manager and the executive producer, Quentin was the cinematographer, Luis being the assistant director and DOP and Leila, our sound producer. Leila also helped us find the locations for the movie, which I think, she did a fabulous job too.

Pre-Production-

In the early April, we had our first pre-production meet with Denis, Luis, Quentin and  myself (Leila was out of town) and decided as to how are we going to start our project. Being the producer, I had a few responsibilities like, making the schedule, finalizing locations, casting, booking equipments, traveling and food requirements etc. A initial rough production schedule is below-

The digital story proposal-

We were very excited for our project and soon submitted the digital story proposal, wherein Jenny and Patrick really liked it but asked us to shorten the running time from 7 minutes to 2-3 minutes. We were a bit sad about the outcome of the proposal but Denis came up with a plan-B, of making a trailer of the movie which could show its interactivity. I guess, this is what is film making all about,. You need to be ready for all challenges.

Production-

Halfway through April, we started our production. We had our production documents in hand, scripts and almost everything else, but Time!

We all being students had many responsibilities like, studies for other classes (meanwhile we also had our Sound and Image intensives), work and classes to attend. And of course, this is why a team need a production manager. This was my responsibility to jot down all points of availability of equipments and the casts and allocating enough time to all 3 stages of production, keeping these things in mind.

Anyway, through all those thicks and thins, we started our production. Our antagonist and Protagonist were decided before hand but Luis’s housemate Erin Leach and Quentin’s friend- Henry Vu helped us play the extra roles. Thanks Guys!

Our cinematographer was very sure about what technology was to be used and I made sure, it was all available on the shooting day. We used Sony X200, Sound kit (shotgun with boom pole and mixers) and LED light panels.

Post-Production–

This was the step, I was personally very excited about. Denis and I, found the right time to start the editing and had 3 full day sitting in order to get desired results. In the middle of the process, we had our rough cut shown to our classmates and Patrick, to which we got a great response. Patrick asked us to fix a few things here and there like midtones of the lights and ending of the trailer (since a trailer should be end of the seat entertainment). We took his advice and made changes in our project.

Personally, I think that the Black and white effect, affects the quality of the footage. But this is what our director wanted and I decided to choose his wish since, it was he, who visualized the movie and he was the Boss!!! Meanwhile, Luis and Leila started working on the marketing blurb and this is what they came up with! It looks great!

You can find the Marketing Blurb here- https://amazeofanarchy.wordpress.com

and the Facebook page- https://www.facebook.com/aMazeOfAnarchy/

A Maze of Anarchy is all about a bunch of people, who decided to work together, back then, on the day of our first intensive, and came up with something which I never imagined was possible to do on a student level based project (Also because I have had terrible experiences working on a group project last semester). A Maze of Anarchy is not just a short-noir interactive movie, it’s a blend of multicultural personalities coming together to do a phenomenal job and personally be, my best known people in the university.

Hashtags!

Infographics!

Hey guys, see what I made through Piktochart… This is an infographic representation of my strengths and weaknesses. It is simple yet interesting. Have a look!

Programming concepts: Creating snowflakes

Okay! So now.. I can’t believe myself when I say this, but programming is really interesting. First, when I saw all the task, I pretty much knew, this is something I am not sure how to crack! But there you go, the 12 lessons made it simple. It’s amazing to learn how codes change everything we write and make a whole website. Jenny rightly says, why should media practitioners leave their projects on web developers? We should have the ability to do it all ourselves.

After an hour of using the 12 lessons, what we finally made was astonishing. The design made by coding is below.

The whole point of the 1 hour lesson was that we just give commands like Move forward by 100 pixels, turn left by 45 degrees etc and below, they have already generated codes for html which will work as we ask them to. There were many other interesting functions like- Repeat. The explanation of this function was provided by an stunning video. It says, we can only manually perform functions, 1, 2, 3, 7, 10 times. But computers can do it millions times, only by 1 command. That is the Repeat function. I was watching a video of Mark Zuckerberg, where he gave the same example, when you have to send a birthday text, ‘Happy Birthday’ to 10 people on facebook, you can do that manually. But at the same time if you  have to send to 1000 people, you can’t sit and do it manually. It needs a code, and computer can easily read the code can send the text to 1000 people in a matter of seconds. There is another great function which is- Loop. This makes sure that all the commands that you gave can be looped in 1 can be played as many times as you want.

All in all, I think it’s a great exercise. It make programming and understanding its concept way too easier and simpler. And i wish i could have started learning this in my earlier school and universities. I would be going places till now. But anyway, better late than Never.

Digital drawing techniques

Digital drawings are digital illustrations to produce images under the direct manipulation of the artist usually through a pointing device such as tablet. It is a method of creating an art object which adapts traditional painting mediums such as oils, ink, water colors, etc. Digital drawings have proven to be a revolutionary breakthrough in animation films starting from the first Walt disney Snow White.

Jenny’s lecture shows closely how to create different types of digital images in different formats. The two formats are Bitmap (Raster) and Vector. Bitmaps can be created in photoshop whereas Vectors can be created in illustrators. An artist chooses the format according to the project needs but personally I will always choose an vector image since it is crisp, sharp and it never loses quality.

In the lecture, Jenny has creatively shown how to start making digital images and how simple can it be for a non artist to enter into this field. Here is another video for the beginners of Digital Art-

Traditional Drawings

I was watching a video of Walt Disney of how they created Snow White. They used thousands of artists and made about a million images so as to create their first  feature length film, Snow White. It is matter of ultimate brilliance how in those days to show movements of the characters they had to create flip books and then digitalize them.

New Techniques: Thanks to the technology now so as to make animated movie they do not have to go through rigorous process. All you need is a tablet, stylus and most importantly your imagination and then you are ready to go!!

A few notable digital artists are-

Alberto Seveso

Evgeny Parfenov

Natalie Shau  

Anton Semenov

The link to all other artists is here-

http://www.creativebloq.com/art/digital-artists-behance-12121570

In our digital story project, A Maze of Anarchy, we have not incorporated any digital drawing techniques, since none of us was an artist, although it would have been a cool thing to do so. We could have created some outstanding Noir themed images and used in our marketing blurb. But we honestly chose to go the simpler way and used images clicked while on shoots.

Doubting castles 3- Social media Analysis

Social media is a tool where you can communicate with people miles away maybe with your family, on professional grounds etc. Currently there are about thousand types of social media platforms which can help you promote your work and showcase to the entire world. It is rightly said that social media makes you have the world on your palms. Jenny in her lectures explains triple aspects of social media being;

1. Professional networking tool
2. Marketing media projects
3. Emerging platform where your media project resides

Now let us talk about social media being your key networking tool. I can relate to  what jenny has been trying to explain us about the importance of LinkedIn for our future opportunities to help us in expanding our professional networks. When i completed my cv on LinkedIn and connected to few networks, I actually received many contacts related to my professional field.

I agree to Jenny, that social Media is a great platform to market our media projects on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr. We made a Facebook page called A Maze of Anarchy and put up all details of our upcoming projects and invited all possible contacts to like share and comment on the page. This in turn resulted in people talking about projects which gives us a great marketing uplift. When it comes to uploading a media projects on internet we have two best platforms called Youtube and Vimeo. Vimeo being specially for media practitioners and Youtube for the whole world and of course we use this platform to portray our talent by uploading our new digital story – A Maze of Anarchy.

And it is not just us as a student, but also the humongous movie industries, use the same platform to showcase and market their projects. A good example is given in the lecture of one of the most successful animated movies Toy Story 3 and how social media help them to win at Box Office. Their campaigns,, marketing strategies clearly targeted not just their specific audiences of kids and parents but also youngsters in early and mid twenties. Directed by Chris Cantwell, this movie was premiered in colleges and universities to target the above mentioned audience, resulting in earning gross over 1 billion USD$  worldwide. Another example i would like to consider of a Bollywood movie called Ra-One.It’s brilliant marketing strategies- top notch branding and merchandising made the movie one of the most successful Bollywood movies of all time (in terms of money). I would like to put a light upon a few strategies and campaign they used which made it a big success.

1. Advertising, Marketing, Branding and Production- This movie casted India’s most famous Bollywood actor like Shah Rukh Khan and Kareena Kapoor which are a brand in themselves. Not just that, it also featured Akon, so as to catch attention of the overseas audiences.
2. Selling movie rights- Before this movie could release it had already made 1.32 billion USD$ by selling its movie rights to different channels and production houses
3. Merchandising- It was the first movie of India to release its merchandises to  the public in form of tshirts, lunchboxes, mugs, stationery etc.
4. Release and premiere- It was released in over 3000 screens in India and about 1000 screens overseas. They also made videogames and comic books for the same
5. Tie-ups- Few of their 26 official partners were Youtube, Google’s G+, Facebook, Twitter, Nerolac, HCL, McDonalds, Nokia, Force India etc.

I have extracted few anonymous images which were taken during the marketing of the movie:

Jenny provides us with many techniques of brilliant marketing according to our lifestyle choice, story world and community.

Peer feedback!

 

Reviewing other’s work not just gives them a handy feedback, but also helps you, hone your own talents as you critique them. In this process, you get to see media projects with a different eye and come to aid of improving your own projects as well. As our CMWP class is multicultural, I was excited to see what others come up with.

A real day dream: This project by Karina and Emma,  is a really interesting one. They have created series of episodes of a person in dream, and what really happens which makes them take their future life decisions. The most interesting part is, it comes with a handful of surprises and since it’s a dream you can modify it the way you want to, even though in real world it might not be possible.

Some positives were-

1. The content involved multidiversity which shows how RMIT is multicultural and has space for everyone to collaborate. They joined their projects with Kim and Brian which had an interesting turn to it.
2. It is simple, interesting, purposeful, full of humour and filled out every aspect of the project. Aesthetically simple, good camera techniques, adaptation of background sound are a few thing which electrified me much.

Some negatives were-

1. Technically speaking, there were some sound issues. I think, they did not use proper mics or even though they did, it did not came out well. There were times when the frames were over exposed, and there wasn’t proper sound sink. This resulted in a heavy downside of the project allowing audience to distract.
2. There were a few continuity mistakes. For example, you could see extra props popping out in the scene from nowhere. The character was seen at the back (who wasn’t supposed to be) and a few things, here and there!

Over all I think, what we saw during the tutorial was a real rough cut. There were a few things that Patrick suggested them and hopefully they will amend them in their final project.

 

Other media projects-

There were 2, barely even rough, media projects, which were untitled. One was just interviewing quite a few people in the victoria market and the other was about Melbourne. The one about the city, looked very impressive with all those stats, pictures and what not. But the major issue was, copyrights!!!!!!

I think, the students had no idea of how copyrights are important and they had taken pictures, stats, sound all known to the public which I am sure is a copyright infringement.

Patrick had wonderfully asked them not to use anything which will get them into plagiarism cases. I just hope they taken his advice and made huge amount of changes in their projects.

 

Elsa’s snowflake

Hello everyone! see what i created through coding! 🙂

Eat with your friends!

Applications have become a daily need for our human kind. From daily grocery shopping apps like Woolworths and Coles apps, to social networking apps like Whatsapp, Hike, etc where you can talk to people miles away from you, technology brings everything on our finger tips through a similar type of platform like mobile phones, tablets, computers etc. These are the apps which deliver a personal objective and then there are apps which control numerous apps on a single application, like Hoot suite, RSS etc.

While researching for different types of apps, I found out that marvelous companies like samsung, are trying to form a new generation smart house app, on which you can control all home appliances on your palms. How I personally understand the idea of applications is that, it is anything which can make life simple yet interesting.

My idea of App is inspired from my personal experience. Considering there are many international students like me, who after getting back home from all mind thrashing studies and workload, sit alone on their dining tables and have food alone. The idea is to build an app where you can meet random people on your device and have food with them on a video call.This serves two purposes-

1. You never eat alone.
2. You simultaneously make new friends.

There are a few apps online which share the same phenomenon like  Feastly, EatWith, and Cookapp, on which you decide what to eat and then meet random people to share the meal.

My app is different from these in many ways-

1. You don’t have to invest money or go places to eat.
2. An individual can prepare their own meal, sit on their own dining table, with all comfort.
3. You don’t have to adjust your meal timing with others.
4. If you are not comfortable with a person, you can switch them.
5. There is a sense of security.
6. You choose your friends and then share contact detail if you want to.

No app is perfect. There are downsides of this app as well. There are no less number of people who will try to misuse this app for nudity, pornography and unhealthy flirting. This drawback can make the genuine users go away from the app. Now the question arises, how can I cope up with this stumbling block? I think the only way out will be to create another software which could track computer id’s of the people who misuse it, and block them on the app. This may also reduce the frequency of people using it. But I guess this is only way out!

 

Prompt 4, Readings

Sight and hearing:

This article had the least to say but the most to understand. And the reason I chose to write about this topic is because I am heavily inspired by 2 Bollywood movies, called Sairat and A Wednesday. In a nutshell, the final scenes of both movies were similar yet poles apart, in the sense that, one used only narration (sound) with a static picture  and the other only used video with no sound. Its interesting how both convey the same feeling in totally opposite way. It’s the director’s and cinematographer’s skills that just by 1 element, they put such deep effect on audience’s mind.

It is truly presented in the article that both- sound and Image can side by side but for improvisation, when sound can do the job, there is no need of the video to be played. It stills works the best if we pause the video on a certain symbolic point and let the audio do the magic and vice-versa.

The most interesting guidelines given in the article are-

When the eye is entirely won, giving nothing or almost nothing to the ear. And when a sound can replace an image, cut the image or neutralize it.

In my personal opinion, sound can do the wonders that probably an image can never do. It’s all because ears go more inwards while eyes are always the surface or just outwards. This phenomenon leaves in deep thoughts and makes me be more creative while directing a media.

If you see the history, there are great examples of both elements in their own worlds and eras. Earlier, we used to have either newspapers or magazines which used only eyes to express thoughts or radios where, only ears do the job. Both had brilliant ways to educate the audience. For example, when reporting an accident, the audience understands the whole scenario only by looking at the image shown on the papers and reading the news. It is as good as witnessing what happened on-spot. Similarly, during football or cricket commentary, radio provides the best service for people to listen to whatever is happening in the field by just listening to radio.

It’s amazing how hearing and sight play an important role and how they are never dependent on each other. It is hence correctly said that, Image and sound must not support each other, but must work each in turn through ‘a sort of relay’.