A New Beginning

Well aren’t I on a roll. I now have internet in my room so I can actually check emails and write blogs regularly.  It is strange, I turned my laptop on and I was able to wirelessly connect to the internet somehow, (it will forever puzzle me). So I am trying to make the most of it while it lasts.

So my holidays are now coming to a close so I had to finally give some considerable thought to what I wanted to do this year. Originally I intended to further my undergraduate degree into an honours year, however I have decided to change from this into a Masters Postgraduate degree. If you look at it like this, both are one year courses however through Masters you can get a second degree. BONUS! Also it sounded like I would be able to learn some interesting things. Masters of Visual Effects, which basically covers, compositing, animation and film, allowing we to once again create some additional works for my portfolio and further my understanding in this field. Ultimately I plan to travel to the US and this maybe a chance to get some work.

Well I will keep you posted on the things I will be doing.

New Year…New Inspiration

Whoa….time flies when you do nothing, and have nothing to show for it. Like a friend of mine said, “Where has 2007 gone?”

2008 is here and now and I am still trying to cope with what I want to do. Yes I needed a break after graduating from university, but that was 3 months ago and I have nothing to show except maybe a slightly darker hue in my skin colour. As Vicky said there is just so much to do in 24 hours and quite frankly I am getting a little frazzled. With work, friends, meals and a healthy lifestyle there isn’t anything left in my day.

Typical holiday day in the life of Mathew:

6:30 Breakfast

7:30  Gym

9:oo Home do some cooking for family (usually 150 cookie, 2 cheese cakes was the usual weeks worth)

10:30 Second breakfast (cooked and family time)

11:00 Beach (with family or friends)

1:00 Lunch

2:00 Movie, book (too hot to do anything else)

4:00 Start thinking about work

4:30 Get ready for work

5:00 Go to work

10:30 Home, dinner

11:00 Sleep

Where do my days go?

Alice…Possible Honours Piece

I have finished my first degree. Whoa what a feeling. Short lived though. I have decided to continue on with studies and wrap up my degree with a nice honours certificate. This leads me to my latest project, well the planning for it anyway. For my practical component I want to explore reality and how this is explored through cinema.

There are many great films out there including Matrix, Alice in Wonderland, Fight Club, all of which involve reality and the human state of mind.

I want to create a piece that has influences from some of these great films with particular focus on Alice in Wonderland. My piece is basically going to be the warped  imagination of a girl who is critically ill (though we don’t know this at the start), where she travels through strange and crazy worlds meeting fantastical and mysterious characters along the way. I am going to try and incorporate elements of both film and animation making the piece look really bizarre.

I haven’t actually got the film scripted yet though. It is only a hundred and one ideas that need to be put into word. So if there are any good script writers out there, who want to do a collaborative piece, get in touch as I am looking for someone who doesn’t write cheesy script like myself.

Canberra Film Festival Results

Well I went to the Canberra Short Film Festival the other week as I was nominated in the regional category. Though the majority of the competition was rather poor, there were a few good ones towards the end. As disappointing as it was to find myself once again not listed into the finals I wasn’t as disappointed when I found out which ones got through. There was an amazing short japanese style film about a young samuri who seeks revenge. As visually amazing as it was the story was….ummm not very strong. This was the piece that took out the forst prize. Maybe next year will be my year.

Chardon Fragrances

Well the Chardon fragrance commercials have been finished. At first I thought they were going no where, but after the music was applied and the voice overs they appeared to be improving some what. However this still didn’t improve the over all quality of the image. I tried to enhance the ads, by using soft focuses and other filters but there was only so much I could do.

At first I was a little disappointed about Retro and how it didn’t seem to fit in with the others, aesthetically and acting wise, however, this turned out to be rather interesting to edit. Fast paced music makes it alot easier to edit as you have a beat to cut to. In doing this I was able to hide some of the moments where the actress wasn’t looking her best. Also the over saturated colour works well in relation to the other two, it brings something different.

Vintage was hard to edit as I had an hour of footage to cut down into 30sec. There was so much I didn’t include that I wish I could, so I may do a longer promotional commercial that will allow me to include some of these shots.

I have uploaded the commercials to youtube, haven’t had the time to put them on my website, so have a look and leave some feedback.

Tip of Week… Ahhh gain!

My tip of the week is gain. Never use it. I had to find out the hard way with my commercials I am doing at the moment. At first, they looked pretty good on my little laptop screen but on a big projector….ummm, one word comes to mind, ewww!

The problem with gain is that once you film with it there is no really way of getting it off unless you heavily treat it, which takes lots of time and effort.

What gain does, is supply additional light that isn’t really in the scene. Well this is my interpretation of it. Basically gain equals distortion. Gain should never be used as a substitute for poor lighting. Think of gain as a life preserver that you only use to save a shot from certain death. What happens is, through the camera eye piece or LCD your shot looks lovely as it is such a small area, but take that image to a large area, e.g. projector and you get this:

See how the image looks blotchy? Well this does not look good, especially for the type of commercials I am trying to create. Fortunately, lots of soft focuses and colour treatments were able to subdue this problem so they don’t look to bad. I will post them up here and youtube in the coming days.

Website

Well the day has come, my website is finished. I am happy with how it looks though there are some little things I would do differently if I knew Dreamweaver and Javascript. Originally I wanted it to look similar to the Pans Labyrinth website but I couldn’t work the javascript, so over the summer I am going to look into that. However for my first website attempt I think it looks ok.

Two things to remember, make sure your images that you are uploading are saved as web pictures as this makes them smaller and quicker to load. Also get someone to look over your site as they are more likely to find broken links and problems with your site than you would.

So now that it is done the address is http://www.chardonodea.com. I found the easy part was making the website. God only knows how to get it on to the web. Web uploading is a lesson in itself. Fortunately Vicky (friend), is a website whiz and saved me on several occasions during the designing of my website, not only when it came to uploading it. Thank you.

There will be a few problems when viewing my site. Since my computer only had Safari as a browser, I could only preview with it. It was designer for that application, so my apologies if it doesn’t look good on your browser I am going to tackle that aspect soon.