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Stuff
2005-05-20 07:22:14
Yesterday was a productive day. Well, sorta. We finally finished our Cognitive Modelling project and held our presentation, which - just like the last project we made with basically the same group of people - went way better than expected, and we got some very undeserved praise. Anyway, good riddance to that project...
Watched FLCL with a friend last night. It's the first time she sees it, so I get a lot of weird "wtf" facial expressions from her. ^_^
FFT status report; Around level 53 for most characters. Mastered "Heaven Knight" and "Hell Knight" for Rafa and Malak, respectively. Got my first Calculator, and he's slower than a turtle. The "Move-Get Jp" ability seemed neat, but it only gets you 2 Jp for each square you move; kind of a rip-off there. Still, I am aiming for at least one master in each job, so...
Worked some on the video yesterday and today. Mainly on the effect for the second bar of the song, where I want a bunch of action scenes to be realistically reflected in haruko's goggles. Easier said than done; the easy part is to turn down the color saturation, and then tint the footage to make it that orange color that her goggles have. The masking goes without saying. The tricky part is to skew the footage in some way to simulate the way it would look when reflected off a bent surface. I've experimented with every "deform" kind of effect in Premiere 6.5, and the closest I've gotten is "Lens Distortion." This only works since I don't need the filtered image to be full size; with the values that make the image bulge "outwards", the processed image is smaller (and has a different shape) than the original. This works fine since I only need it to cover the size of the goggles. I got it looking pretty nifty after playing around with the values to smear the image to one side.
Going to a friend's house to watch "Lupin III: Castle of Cagliostro" tonight! Wai! We'll probably play some Munchkin as well. I missed the viewing of My Neighbor Totoro this wednesday; nobody else was free, and I didn't feel like going by myself. Aiming for Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind in two weeks instead. -
Caesars concert!
2005-05-14 17:37:57
It was worth the wait. Caesars, formerly known as Caesar's Palace, played live at this year's first outdoor student party. They kicked it off with "Over 'fore it started", and finished (not counting encores) with... you guessed it... "Jerk It Out", the very song I'm making my new amv for. Wow. Talk about inspiration. To sum up the evening; kick-ass.
I made an intro for the video the other day, which looks pretty good. It flows nicely into the beginning of the music. On the whole, I'm satisfied with the transitions between different scenes in the vid so far. Even though there's no story in it as such, it fits together to form a sort of implicit flow of events, at least in certain places. I think that will do a lot to keep up someone's interest when they watch it. When you watch a video with a very random scene selection, it makes you wonder what's so special about putting the scenes in that particular order, and it gets boring soon. If the scenes go well with the music, it can still look very good, even if they don't have much to do with each other. But when you realize there's a wordless tale being told in the vid you're watching, you start taking an interest and wonder what's going to happen next.
Still lots and lots of boring masks to do. It's gonna be worth it, though. At least I really really hope so. -
Another day
2005-05-10 10:24:28
A friend of mine is thinking of buying the Trigun DVD box. Trying to talk him into getting the american (NTSC) one instead of the australian (PAL) one, which costs about $50 more, in case I want to make a trigun amv someday. I'm a bad person. I don't even have any plans for a trigun amv. At one point, I thought about doing one to "can't touch this", which would be fun, but it's been so over-used. I'll probably wait for a more original idea before I make another amv to that song.
No more work on the video yet. They called from work and offered me some job for the day, and I took it, because I'll need money in june, before the money from summer work starts rolling in. By the end of the day, I was too tired to even play FFT. Just did some lip-synching for the vid. There'll probably only be one single instance of lip-synching in the vid, but I think it will be very effective. It's in the very beginning of the second verse, at "Shut up, hush your mouth, can't you hear you talk too loud."
Oh! And I got my Dragon Half DVD! Watched it in all its DVD quality glory. I'll probably watch the english dub soon, maybe even today. It's so sad they never made any more episodes of that show... It would have been so so so great. Does anyone know why they only made two episodes? I heard a rumour that the director went to jail for some drug crime, which, given the nature of the series, doesn't seem completely unlikely... -
Stuff
2005-05-08 17:04:16
I got a lot of work done on the video today. Worked a lot on a tricky bit at the very beginning of the second verse. Had to do a few more masks to make it look really good. It looks really nifty now, almost the way I had imagined it. I can't wait to have it finished, but alas, there's lots of work left. And FF Tactics is stealing a lot of my time. And I should be studying for exams right now. I'm so irresponsible. Anyway, there are no classes tomorrow, so I'll probably get more done on the video then. The completion seems like a distant silhouette on the horizon right now, so I'm having trouble with motivation. With other stuff, I'm usually a real quitter, but it feels different when I'm making an amv. Even if there are times when there's so much work to do I don't know where to start, and I'm not getting anywhere at all, I never consider actually quitting. I know this video in particular just has to be done, whether I like it or not, sort of. Well, not true, I'm doing it because I like it. But also because the idea in my head is so strong I think I'd go crazy if I didn't make it happen in reality. I've never experienced this before. Or rather, the last time I can remember was a long time ago; about seven years, when I first decided to go to America as an exchange student. I never had a shadow of a doubt about that idea; once I'd decided, the thought of not doing it never once entered my head. In a way it's like that with the video as well.
I know this video is going to be totally great, but the only way to tell that to someone else is to make it and show it to them. And that takes time. And time takes patience. And now I need to quit rambling and go to sleep. -
Birthday. Wai!
2005-05-07 12:13:18
I'm turning 24 today. I'm feeling all old and mature now. Not really... I've been playing Final Fantasy Tactics for three days straight, for a start...
The new project is going well. I cleaned up the ugly FLCL DVD's to a decent degree and made some lq clips to edit with. Now to replace the old downloaded clips with the new, real ones... That'll take forever. After last time, I promised myself not to start working on a new vid until I have the real source footage I'm going to use for the end product, but I was just too eager to get started... Anyway, I've also started doing some nice, creative, masking, and it's looking very good so far.
I've got the first 30 seconds done almost exactly like I want them, and a good deal of the rest of the timeline is more than halfway finished. I have plans for most of the rest. Only two short sequences remain that I don't know what to do with at all.
The intro is looking goooo-ood. Almost gives me shivers. Let's hope I can keep that up to the end, so I can do the song justice.
By this time in the project,, I feel confident that no-one's going to rip-off my video idea (that was pretty paranoid to begin with, I guess...), so here's the deal; the song is "Jerk It Out" by Caesars. I've loved it ever since my sister introduced me to it a year or so ago. It was one of the first amv ideas I got when I started watching them, and I'm really excited about making it. I love the song so much, so I really want the vid to do it justice. I've thought about it for a long time now, since I've been working on it off and on for months, and what was, in the beginning, a very hazy notion (that I believed in wholeheartedly) that the song would go perfect with FLCL, has developed into a mature video concept. I knew from the start it would involve a lot of effects, which is why I was a bit hesitant to start this project now, with only the experience of one single video behind me (with almost no effects in it), but I've learned a lot since then, and I think I'm now up to the task when it comes to creating and handling the effects. In fact, some of the stuff in there will be pretty unique. Not very difficult to do (I'm nowhere near the Euphoria level ^_^), but quite creative, I think.
Anyway, I'm almost late for my own birthday party now, so more next time.
JOURNAL: LenWidleheyt (Linus Lindholm)
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