Personality types... INFJ

In my first week of DFGA we had a PPP session where we looked into our personal lives a little more, where we ranked different aspects of our life out of 100% in a spider web, and then did a quiz to see which personality type we were.

I found that mine was INFJ 'The Protector'. Which I instantly found very fitting. I always put people before myself, and get very protective about my family, my relationships and my closest friends.

Since that day I have found this website http://www.personalitypage.com/INFJ.html where it goes into each personality type in more depth. After reading the description I could not find one section that I disagree with. What did surprise me though is that 'Only one percent of the population has an INFJ Personality Type, making it the most rare of all the types' as I would expect more people to have the same mind set as me, but this is probably me being my stereotypical INFJ personality type thinking so!

There are a lot of quotes on this website which I found really interesting, and explain myself in ways I would never be able to put into words. There is also a section about how my personality type works and the careers which suit them best, along with how they cope with relationships.

'Artistic and creative, they live in a world of hidden meanings and possibilities'

'They put a lot of energy into identifying the best system for getting things done, and constantly define and re-define the priorities in their lives.'

'Consequently, INFJs put a tremendous amount of faith into their instincts and intuitions. This is something of a conflict between the inner and outer worlds, and may result in the INFJ not being as organized as other Judging types tend to be.'

'They are deep, complex individuals, who are quite private and typically difficult to understand.'

'INFJs hold back part of themselves, and can be secretive.'

'INFJs are concerned for people's feelings, and try to be gentle to avoid hurting anyone. They are very sensitive to conflict, and cannot tolerate it very well.'

'Because the INFJ has such strong intuitive capabilities, they trust their own instincts above all else. This may result in an INFJ stubborness and tendency to ignore other people's opinions.' 

 'INFJ is a perfectionist who doubts that they are living up to their full potential.'

'They believe in constant growth, and don't often take time to revel in their accomplishments.'

'In the workplace, the INFJ usually shows up in areas where they can be creative and somewhat independent.'

'They are not good at dealing with minutia or very detailed tasks. The INFJ will either avoid such things, or else go to the other extreme and become enveloped in the details to the extent that they can no longer see the big picture'

http://www.personalitypage.com/html/INFJ_car.html


'INFJs generally have the following traits:

• Intuitively understand people and situations
• Idealistic
• Highly principled
• Complex and deep
• Natural leaders
• Sensitive and compassionate towards people
• Service-oriented
• Future-oriented
• Value deep, authentic relationships
• Reserved about expressing their true selves
• Dislike dealing with details unless they enhance or promote their vision
• Constantly seeking meaning and purpose in everything
• Creative and visionary
• Intense and tightly-wound
• Can work logically and rationally - use their intuition to understand the goal and work backwards towards it'

'The INFJ is a special individual who needs more out of a career than a job.'

http://www.personalitypage.com/html/INFJ_per.html

'An INFJ's feeling of success is centered around their own level of understanding and accomplishment, their usefulness or service to others, and the condition of their personal relationships.' 


'Ten Rules to Live By to Achieve INFJ Success

1. Feed Your Strengths! Do things that allow your brilliant intuition and service-oriented manner to flourish.
2. Face Your Weaknesses! See your weaknesses for what they are, and seek to overcome them. Especially, strive to use your judgment against your internal ideas and intuitions, rather than as a means of disregarding other people's ideas!
3. Talk Through Your Thoughts. You need to step through your intuitions in order to put them into perspective. Give yourself time to do this, and take advantage of discussing ideas with others. You'll find externalizing your internal intuitions to be a valuable exercise.
4. Take in Everything. Don't dismiss ideas prematurely because you don't respect the person generating the ideas, or because you think you already know it all. After all, everybody has something to offer, and nobody knows everything. Steven Covey says it so well when he says: "Seek first to understand, and then to be understood."
5. When You Get Angry, You Lose. Your passion and intensity are strong assets, but can be very harmful if you allow yourself to fall into the "Anger Trap". Remember that Anger is destructive to your personal relationships. Work through your anger before you impress it upon others, or you will likely find yourself alone. Disagreements and disappointments can only be handled effectively in a non-personal and dispassionate manner.
6. Keep Your Eye on the Big Picture. Watch out for your tendency to become obsessed with details. If you find yourself feeling very, very strongly about a small detail, take a big step back and make sure that you can still see the goal. You're not going to get there if you get mired in the details.
7. Be Accountable for Yourself. Don't blame the problems in your life on other people. Look inwardly for solutions. No one has more control over your life than you have.
8. Be Humble. Judge yourself at least as harshly as you judge others.
9. Assume the Best. Don't distress yourself and others by dwelling on the dark side of everything. Just as there is a positive charge for every negative charge, there is a light side to every dark side. Remember that positive situations are created by positive attitudes. Expect the best, and the best will come forward.
10. Relax! Do yourself a favor and learn how to effectively unwind. Get exercise and restful sleep. Take vacations. Engage in relaxing activities. Take care of yourself and your loved ones by learning to let go of your passion and intensity for a respite.'

Lord Whitney

Lord Whitney, as mentioned in my last post, are a Leeds based art company, who specialise in sculptural pieces. Which in my opinion often look very theatrical and could possibly be used as sets or props in stop-motion animation. I was heavily influenced by their aesthetic when creating my collaborative animation last year, and would love to work with them in the future, possibly on one of their work placement schemes.

This piece I saw when I first moved to Leeds, not realising that Lord Whitney had created it until after the talk with them. I adore this window display, and have since had the urge to create my own shop displays and contacted both Nation of Shopkeepers (where this one was displayed) and the Travelling Man requesting if I could do one.

These other images are my favourite pieces created by them, and I find really lovely! I adore how you can very clearly tell that they have been handmade, every crinkle and crease just makes it more and more perfect in my mind. 

For more of their work and inspirations visit http://www.lordwhitney.co.uk/

Talk of Pictures

The illustration lecture, ‘Talk of pictures’, which I attended last year was one of the most inspiring and helpful sessions I have attended during my time at university so far. The four illustrators Matt Sewell, Rebekah Whitney, Holly Wales and Jay Cover all had completely different illustration styles and different methods to gain motivation to produce work. 

During the session they covered so many different and helpful topics that I thought I would make an extra long post to include everything I took away from the session.

Don’t stop

Be enthusiastic and friendly

Be honest with yourself, and maintain a high expectation on what you can achieve. 

It is important to meet up with other people, as it can be lonely being a freelance artist. It may be a good idea to collaborate, you have nothing to loose by getting in touch with people and suggesting doing projects together. If you prefer working alone then try to maintain getting feedback from friends you have that are artists, especially when you leave University. Make a good first impression to create a long lasting relationship, as those people may give you more ideas and opportunities in the future. Work breeds more work.

Use the Internet as a tool to build relationships, with other people, who’s work you like and that inspires you, and go out of your way to tell them.

Make physical work not just digital, people will keep it.

Make sure you have an online presence, but remember that getting blogged about is not work. Stop looking at Tumblr and look at your sketchbook.Abuse the Internet; everyone is nosey.

Apply to competitions, find free live work, and always look out for opportunities.

Do work that has a personal value to you, don’t just choose work that has a higher monetary value that you are uninterested in; know what work you are interested in and want to do. Don’t say no, have a yes year.You need to experience the real world to realise how much you want it, and to give you an end goal to work towards. But in the meantime you have to be realistic and honest with yourself; You will need a part time job when you leave university, prepare yourself for council tax, but still allow yourself time to make work. When you get to the moment where you feel that you can live off just your artwork alone, make the plunge, and adapt your lifestyle to fit. Have a goal and set yourself milestones that you want to achieve within a time frame to keep yourself producing work.

Keep a record of what went well and what didn’t, and don’t try and do everything. Learn what you enjoy and what you don’t, try it out and see and go at your own pace to find your feet and your ‘niche’. Be comfortable with your work and don’t be downhearted if other people get to where you want to be quicker than you do, you will do it your own way. You will never be happy with your success, you will always want to push yourself more to be bigger and better; don’t forget that this is a good thing. Be determined and learn to pick yourself back up when something goes wrong, and never take criticism personally.

Give your work a personal focus point in a subject that interests you, and keep your other interests going, as people can tell when you love the work that you are making. If you have more knowledge on other subject matters, you should draw inspiration from it, not just other artist’s work, this will give your work a genuine authenticity. By having a constant theme, it allows people to contact you specifically to do work you will have knowledge and interest in. We live in a trend loved world, try and make work that is timeless.

Aim your personal work at an audience; always have a client in mind. Sometimes it is helpful to step back from your work to give yourself a broader audience. Be inclusive not exclusive. Surround yourself with good stuff, positive people and never stop persevering.

Personally I found all of their work to my artistic taste, especially that of the company Lord Whitney, and after visiting their website I have found that they have two opportunities that I will definitely apply for. Their work is very sculptural and handmade, which I feel is the direction that I can see my own personal work going in at the moment. It was really interesting to hear Rebekah’s story of how she is making a living out of producing her artwork, and I have been greatly inspired and influenced by her.

Building the 'NEST'

As some may know, I am part of the Student's Union, under the role of joint Editorial Officer with my co and good friend Kai West. As this position has been filled before but the members have never managed to start up a University publication, it was an exciting and potentially fulfilling opportunity for us to embark and hopefully succeed on.

We have been through two elections and managed to hold our place in the Union, and are currently up for nominations again when we get back in January so hopefully we will be able to retain our place in the Union! During the year that we have had our position, we have set up the magazine from scratch, recruiting and managing an expanding and ever changing team.


In the Student’s Union I have also had the opportunity to contribute in other ways, such as helping organizing events during RAG week and Equality and diversity awareness day, along with attending regular meetings to help create a better and more enjoyable environment for other students.

I am currently undergoing training from the NUS, to help create a better Students' Union for Leeds College of Art.

In the first issue of the magazine we initially struggled with having enough content, so Kai and I helped by creating our own content. I collaborated with Jessie Leong (a photography student) who wrote a few recipes which I then fully illustrated, which can be seen below here. I really enjoyed creating content to a deadline with specific requirements, and I feel I learnt a lot doing it, especially using photoshop and my tablet (which were both new skills for me at the time) mixing that with my more comfortable medium of water colour painting.

Another piece I did for the content of the magazine was the header image for the 'From Anonymoose' section of the magazine which this time was draw in ink and digitally composited together.

Once we had completed our very first issue of 'NEST', Kai and I were so proud of our hard work and thought that we needed to celebrate. So we have held a launch party, which involved event planning and strong organisational skills on my part as unfortunately Kai was extremely busy the weeks running up to the launch. So me and my strong small team got together to organise what we wanted it to be like. As I have been to The White Cloth Gallery before on a general visit, this was my first port of call to try and hire out for our event, with an extremely small budget of £60 for the event we were expecting all of the money to go on the venue. But after meeting with Annie, the events organiser for White Cloth, and discussing potential nights we could hold the event, we came up with one night, and we found out the amazing news that we were able to have the whole space for free as long as we made sure the numbers came! So that was our next task, publicising the event. In the usual Student Union style we made posters to put on all of our notice boards and encouraged word of mouth, as well as Facebook publicity and the creation of a 'Facebook event', which proved popular with the students, indicating that over 100 people were hoping to come. We also invited Leeds art based companies and galleries to attend, as well as opening it to the public and having various posters around town publicising the event. Once we had a solid number of people coming we started to seriously plan out what we were actually going to have at the event! There was one section of the gallery where we were able to have our prints, of some of the main pieces of artwork used as content for the magazine. The second section of the gallery we were able to place tables and have a small 'craft fair' style event where all the members and contributors of our magazine team had the privilege of having a stand if they so wish, and allowed visitors to meet the makers of the magazine. The last section of the gallery is a large room which already had an exhibition on which we were unable to take out, but I feel this added to the event as it looked more professional and integrated the students work with professionals. There was also a large white wall in this room with a projector, allowing us to show students showreels from both DFGA and Vis-com as well as other Leeds based artists, which was a lovely addition to the space. To watch these video's we thought we would go for a 'woodland' theme for this room and made a small cardboard sculpture of Leeds city centre around the main pillar in the room, and all around we scattered branches and picnic blankets with magazines and sweets on, which proved very popular, and at several points in the evening the room was full of viewers sat on every rug possible. Jessie who also wrote the recipes made a few of the rockyroads from her recipe and put these on the picnic rugs too, which tied in quite nicely! In this same room we were lucky enough to have two very talented DJ's performing for the whole night, which really made the whole venue have a really chilled and lovely vibe. Overall the night was a massive success and I couldn't be more proud of the magazine, and what we managed to achieve for the night in such a small space of time and such a low budget. 

We are now in the process of making our second issue and organising the launch of the second issue ready for the end of Jan/beginning of Feb which is really exciting! Long live 'NEST'!!!

Trying to love Leeds again

While I am on the subject of travel, before the Christmas break I spent one Saturday catching up with one of my closest friends on the Visual Communications course Lydia. I have really missed seeing her daily (even though we are only across the corridor our timetables clash so much, and she is just like me, a 'yes' person and is constantly busy!), and decided to kidnap her from her busy life for an afternoon.

We decided that we both needed to explore Leeds a bit more, and fall back in the city we live in, rather than longing to escape! So we went to an amazing reclamation shop called ScrapSuff which sells every crafty item you could imagine for the lowest prices you could imagine! It was absolute heaven! But unfortunately you need a membership card to even get through the door (luckily for me Lydia has one!). I had heard about the place before during my first year on the other course, but never had the opportunity to visit, and was reminded that I was still yet to go when on set with Matt Saunders, as many of the props and sets were made from materials brought from the shop. I was very well behaved and didn't madly buy everything I could set my eyes on, and decided to wait to go back again with Lydia when I have a project on which needs materials buying for.
http://www.scrapstuff.co.uk/

Next door to this glorious shop is a place called Full Circle. It is a hard place to explain really, you walk in and it is a toy shop, filled with every arty sculpture you could ever dream of, then you walk further and it is a cafe bar area, with a stage for live music to the right and a spiral stair case in the middle (which I won't talk about any more.. if you know me well you will know that this is my biggest fear..!) and an art gallery at the back. Could you combine any more of my favourite things (other than animation of course) together in one place?! It is so cosy and lovely, and I can't wait to go there when they hold events! And hopefully in the future potentially hold my own events there as it is such an amazing venue!
http://fullcircleleeds.com/

We then went on a charity shop crawl around Hyde Park, to ones I didn't even know existed (I tend not to head around that way in Leeds) and managed to snap up a few bargains, as well as finding some crazy items which would have been perfect to make props out of for stop motion animations, so I shall bare these shops in mind for future projects along with ScrapStuff!

Followed by a trip to the Reetsweet craft fair (which I have already blogged about) held in the Corn Exchange, which we then went on a mooch about the other long term shops there too, getting endless amounts of inspiration.

I can't wait to visit all of these places again in the future, and after that day I felt so much happier. Funny how much a few hours can change your mood. At the end of the day I also felt a real urge to make a stop motion animation, which comes very rarely, so you know what, I think I will!

I need a life. I need to live.

I have decided in the last few weeks that I am going to seriously start saving, and working my butt off to earn enough money to go travelling. Even if it is only the odd trip to cities in the UK, I need to escape my rut in Leeds, and further escape my rut at home in Telford. I haven't seen enough of the world, or met enough interesting and inspiring people. I am lucky to have so many lovely friends on other courses, and dotted about all over the country now from friends I made back in my hometown, who I can go to visit. But it never feels enough. To become good at anything it takes time, patience, skill and hard work, but you also need inspiration. There is only so much you can get from looking at other peoples work, but to go somewhere and taste something new, see the world from a different angle, climb up to the highest point, be with nature, and just to live a little is something completely different. It opens your eyes in ways that other peoples work will never be able to achieve. I need this in my life. And I need it soon. I feel drained from everything pure and good. I over work myself, I am a sucker for it, I never say no, I never let anyone down, but I forget what it's like to be free for a few minutes, even just one afternoon. Apologies for my mad surge of passion.

Reetsweet

When I first moved to Leeds last September, I saw a flyer advertising one of Reetsweet's craft fairs held in the Corn Exchange, and haven't missed many since (unless I am back home, in which case there has only been a couple).

Although this doesn't necessarily relate to animation as such, I can't help but feel inspired by some of the amazing talents that the sellers possess, and I love the hand made aesthetic and would love to incorporate this into my work, whether it be in my style or in the materials I use. In the past I have also asked to sell at one of the fairs, and the offer is still open for me to once I get my act together and come up with some interesting ideas!!

My favourite sellers (which may I add are all Leeds based) are Finest Imaginary (http://www.finestimaginary.com/), Foxbunting (http://www.etsy.com/shop/foxbunting) and my good friend Sophie Wilson (http://cargocollective.com/sophiewilson).

For more information on some of the sellers and future fairs visit http://www.reetsweet.com/

Katie

While I was still on the Visual Communications course, I had the chance to talk to third years on the course about their work. On the animation table was Katie Payne, a student I have worked with on a project before (The Mind’s Wood) and have spoken to a few times about animation.

However in this talk I was able to find out more specific things about her practise, and the mistakes she has made. During this, she referred back to her blog http://katiepayne123.tumblr.com/ to show us her process throughout the module.

After the talk, Katie was kind enough to send me an image of the most successful armature she has made, for me to use as a reference. She has also offered her help and assistance if I get stuck at any point during my time at university.

Since that day, I have obviously moved course, and she has wished me luck, and I have seen her various times in the AV suite with Abi Sharp (another third year animator on the Visual Communications course).

Animation Tutorials

Learning how to animate... again... it seems to be taking me a long time to learn the principles. But on one of my regular Vimeo obsession sessions, I came across this video created by the animation tutorial team ianimate, which is made up of various professionals working in major animation houses (mainly Dreamworks). Their Vimeo and their website is filled with tutorials and their students work, but what I found the most interesting though were the videos looking primarily at the basic principles, working in 2D (rather than 3D which their tutorials are mainly based in). In these 2D videos they use the free software (if you don't mind having a watermark on your work anyway, otherwise you have to pay for it) Flipbook, which has a dope sheet, allowing you to clearly lay out your work ready for properly animating in other software.
Weight Lift from iAnimate on Vimeo.

For more video's and helpful tips, or to even properly enrol to their workshops (which I think would probably be worth while in the future as a 'top up' or a 'reminder' to animation, rather than doing it alongside an animation degree, then these two websites are a good source of inspiration and knowledge.
https://vimeo.com/ianimateworkshops
http://www.ianimate.net/

One of the main animators working for ianimate also runs his own tutorials on his website here, which are also helpful!
http://www.jasonryananimation.com/tutorials.html

Wes

Most people I know like Wes and his films, for his interesting story-lines, artistic direction, and often his choice in colour. I found this lovely image of the colour pallets he uses for each film, which I love, especially that he has used similar or the same tones in each one, creating his well known 'Wes style'. I hope to do a similar thing within my work, keeping a similar palette to help retain my visual identity especially when branding myself and making my showreel.

Oh come to me Oh Comely magazine

I found Oh Comely magazine almost a year and a half ago, and have been religiously buying each issue, only missing the first three (when I hadn't heard of the publication). As a strong hater of 'trashy magazines' (sorry to all of those who love knowing where you can get 'those shoes' or which diet some celeb is on.. but that really isn't my cup of tea at all), I was over the moon to find a magazine who is just as against and just as bored of them as I am! I have learnt so much from every issue, opening my eyes to so many professions and so many artists that I may never have heard of. I have been inspired to make a list of things to do from the magazines even! Bee keeping, making a Coracle (a type of boat) and to buying a Merrimaking hood (which infact I have done... twice! Now being the proud owner of a Snow Leopard one and a City Fox!), were never things I aspired to do in my lifetime, but now they are high up on my list of things to do when I graduate!

Being the co-editor of the Universities magazine, I find their layout and content truly inspiring, and something to use as a strong visual reference, and I find myself going back to certain issues time after time.

I cannot praise this magazine enough. For £4, every month, I am fuelled with all the inspiration I need, and a good time waster when on long train journeys home to visit family. If you are even remotely interested I will happily lend you a copy! With many issues having interviews with independent directors, writers, illustrators, animators, crafty folk, musicians and the odd randomer too! Just do it, if you know what's good for you.

As an extra special bonus (if you are too scared to ask me to borrow my precious magazines (which I even dust regularly.. it is embarrassing really) they have published a few of their earlier issues, including the three I missed online http://issuu.com/ohcomely/docs/oh_comely_six

Or you can check out their blog http://www.ohcomely.co.uk/blog.php with loads of reviews and extra content well worth a weekly check!

Window Display

Like I have said before, if you never try you will never know. And this time it has paid off! I am able to do a window display for one of my favourite shops in Leeds, allowing me to practise my set building skills! I am still having a good think of what I could create for them, but I am really excited!!

Laura Manfre the water-colour god

I stumbled across Laura's work on Twitter, and had a mad few days of obsession, where I longed to be able to water colour the way she does. So I thought that I would be a little cheeky and ask if we could collaborate in the future and she said yes!!! If you never try you will never know hey!!

Check out her work here,

http://cargocollective.com/lauramanfre/

Final 2 Minute Emotive Video

Editing milkybar vid

When we got to editing, James sat and made a rough cut on the Wednesday evening, and Sara started making the end title credits, whilst I typed up our preproduction notes and helped both of them if they needed advice.

From the rough cut, we could all see that a lot more work would be needed to get it up to scratch. Here are all the major problems we had to contend with.

People in shot. Booms in shot. Weird shadows in shot. Random items in shot which shouldn't really be there. The normal really for an amateur film, but at the end of the day we are only first years, and this film definitely was a learning curve for us all. This shot (underneath) in particular was bad, as we all really liked the footage for this section, but it was too hard to cut Sara's shoes out of this shot without loosing quality, so the whole shot had to be scrapped. In some of the sections we were able to crop the footage by using the widescreen video filter, which allowed us to move the footage up and down to hide various things, as well as giving the over-the-top (mocking of a) blockbuster feel. By using this effect I could also rearrange the footage to work with the rule of thirds, making this even more cinematic, and more pleasant to view.


Mine and James' main concern was how bad the sound quality was, as there was far too much ambient sound, and the main sound effects or voices sound muffled in half the shots, as well as the levels needing changing which wasn't helped by the inconsistent use of the boom mic. After trying to edit the existing sound, and failing, James suggested that we used sound effects and repeated ambient sound that we had recorded (with the levels lowered) instead, other than the first opening scene where the speech is still needed. I was really impressed with James' work on the sound editing, even though I was only the assistant editor for the sound section, I am still proud of certain sound effects used and how well James managed to match them with the footage. Some audio is obvious that it has been added, but a lot of the subtle quiet noises fit with the video really well. One thing that was mentioned in the Critique was that the levels of sound for the whole video was far too low and to raise them all. So James selected all of the audio footage and placed it into a new sequence, which makes the audio all one strip, allowing you to change the level of everything all in one go (and potentially sound edit using the key framing tool, but we didn't need to do that).

As mentioned in the 'filming' post, the shot types were difficult to work with, such as jaunting camera moves because of not using a tripod, zooms, pans and bad tracking. However James and I managed to cut most of this awkward footage out, and make the shots flow as well as possible together. Other things I mentioned in the 'filming' post was the trouble we had with the footage of the computer screen wavering, so we cut the footage down to the section where it is least noticeable (due to a random change in natural light). We also had the task of de-interlacing the footage, which was surprisingly easy to do (it is literally the flick of a button).

One of our other major problems throughout the film was lighting, as in some shots we were able to use the artificial lights, but in most we had to make to with whatever natural light was coming through. This made the colour tones and look of each shot completely different. When talking to Matt Burton about colour correction he said to only ever change the highlight and mid tones, and avoid touching the blacks (as it darkens the footage too much), and to use a mixture of yellow and blue tones which will balance out.

Underneath you can see a 'before and after' of one still of the footage, where I had colour corrected adding slight blue tones in the whites and yellow tones into the mids. By doing this it dimmed down the brightness of the whites, allowing more detail and shadows to be revealed, as well as giving a warmer tone to the footage.

In the end critique where we showed our video's, nobody mentioned the colour, or any issues with the film regarding it being over exposed, which is great as before it was colour corrected it was one of the first things people picked up on in the film as bad. This goes to show that even unnoticeable changes to the eye when watching a piece of footage, could have made such a dramatic difference to your viewing experience.

Overall, even though I am unhappy with the finished film, I am really proud of how different the finished video is compared to the rough cut, and how many subtle changes we were able to make along with more obvious changes. Although it was personally frustrating for me to be involved in the post production work, and the very last stages were left down to solely me to do alone, as I wasn't initially down to be doing any of the editing, I did find it interesting to do, and I felt it did push me to learn skills I have previously avoided such as colour correction.

Filming

Today is the dreaded day, where we would be drowning in Milkybar wrappers and running around Uni like wild things. As my role was directing the whole video, I found it particularly stressful throughout the day to try and coordinate everybody, especially when people wouldn't listen to me and did what they wanted to do (wasting a lot of time, camera battery and my patience). It was particularly bad in the morning for our first shot. This was only supposed to take a few seconds to film, but ended up taking half an hour, as everybody kept changing the lighting and over complicating the shot. Funnily (or not so funnily, depends how you look at it) enough, the first shot that we laboured over for over half an hour wasn't actually used in any of the edit as all of the footage wasn't simply good enough, which meant that we had to start the video footage at the election which didn't give enough of an opening to the narrative.

After such a disorganised first shot, the group was starting to feel the strain, especially when the other actors for the election section started arriving and nothing was particularly organised well at all. So we quickly set up the props, briefed the actors and made do with the lighting settings we already had. Even though we had a printed version of the storyboard for everyone to refer to when taking the shots, I did have to direct them still to the right positioning. As we only had one extra arrive, we seriously needed to recruit some people for the crowd scene, and quickly, as we didn't want to mess around the other actors which had arrived and leave them waiting around. So it was James' job to try and recruit some people to help us out, and generally bribe them with free Milkybars (which surprisingly worked well, and emptied the cafe!). I was also able to get James and Kate who are employed to work for the Students' Union to stand in the crowd scene too. I found it really funny personally to have members of the current Union in our mock election, as it made the film seem more real to me, and I'm sure it would for others who knew them personally. To save time for the actors, as a lot of them had places to be, and the majority of them didn't realise that they would even be taking part in a film, we tried to hurry up with the filming of those shots, which meant that we had a really limited amount of footage to work with. Each shot was pretty much taken in one, with limited angles and perspectives.

For the shot where Stuart throws out Milkybars into the crowd, we were hoping to use the slow motion camera to emphasise the effect that they were going to have. However Matt said that it would be really difficult to light the area enough for it to pick up any lights, and if we wanted to keep the same setting and aesthetic then we may be better off shooting interlaced footage and slowing down that section. However I didn't realise that Simon shot the whole film in that setting, which lost a lot of the quality of the footage. In the end we didn't even slow down that section as the footage simply wasn't shot close enough and would look badly and unprofessionally done.

For all of this scene, the sound quality wasn't great, even though we used the boom mic, mainly as the levels weren't changed correctly. We also had difficulty with the main actors not projecting loud enough, and the extras not being enthusiastic enough in the Milkybar section. If we had more time we would have used the sound booth to rerecord and dub the sound over the footage, but unfortunately we don't.

Once we had finished that one scene it was lunch time, where we weren't able to shoot in the office as it is their busiest time. So we all went off for our breaks, but when we came back James and Kate were still in the office trying to work, which was difficult to set up around them. So when we were able to have the office free for half an hour, we all squished in. As there simply isn't enough room to have space for any added lighting we simply had to work with natural light. As director, I found it extremely difficult to control everyone (in such a small space particularly) as there was probably 'too many cooks in the kitchen', all having different ideas and opinions on how to film everything and didn't seem to want to listen to me or look at the storyboard. In these shots, very few of them used a tripod, as members of the group thought this would waste time (even though it was already set up, and all it needed was the height adjusting, which meant that most of the shots came out shaky and looked unprofessional. Another problem I had, was that even if the storyboard was being followed, the shot type would be different, for example it would be turned into either a pan shot, tracking shot, or a zoom shot, if not any of those then the camera would follow the main point of action. Even when stating firmly that these types of shots don't work well for the scenes we were doing, and editing between the shot types would be difficult, I felt ignored and disregarded as the director. Another example of me being ignored in this scene, is when we were shooting a very important shot where Stuart looks at the financing charts on the computer, where I specifically said that the settings on the camera will need to be changed to stop the wavering, but the camera man was determined that it wouldn't need to be as it was an LCD screen, but he said he would do it his way first and then change the settings and listen to me. In the end he completely ignored my advice and went straight onto a different shot. Watching this footage back the screen is unpleasant to look at, which meant we had to cut loads of that shot out so it didn't strain the viewers eyes too much, but this may have been too much as now it is a very fleeting shot which is hard to fully understand and acknowledge.

After a stressful few scenes, I was hoping it would get easier when we were working in the drawing room upstairs, as there is more natural light, it is a bigger space to work with, and we were all determined to get at least one decent scene. However motivation started to drain, and again we were starting to face some difficulties. For this scene me and James really pushed for everyone to act as a team and communicate more, as well as taking a wide variety of shots, so we ran through the same action 3/4 times but had the camera in different places each time, meaning when it came to edit we would be able to cut smoothly from one shot to another. To record sound in this section Sara and James took it in turn to sit under the table with the boom mic to follow the footsteps around the room. All the sound effects in this scene was recorded perfectly, but because at the beginning of the day the sound levels hadn't been properly adjusted when we got to edit there was far too much ambient noise.

We then had the difficult task of shooting the chase scene, where again no one arrived to be an extra after having a promising interest. So James took it into his hands to try and recruit people from the cafe or corridor areas who were free to help us for twenty minutes; luckily one of the extras for this scene had been in the Milkybar section of the film earlier, which gave the footage more fluidity. Once we had a handful of helpful actors, we were able to start filming this scene. We started with the camera on the second floor and the actors on the ground floor, where the camera was looking through the gap above the lift area down at the action. I feel this shot worked really well, and gave the comic effect we wanted perfectly. We then took the camera down to the ground floor, where we filmed the same shot but looking directly at the lift where the angry crowd runs out of towards the Milkybar kid, who in turn runs towards the stairs. The next shot was from the bottom of the stairs looking upwards, then the one after the camera is moved to the middle of the stair case where you can see people running up towards the camera and then running away from the camera up the next flight. From this we cut to a shot of them running past the camera in a corridor. By using these clever shots, it looks as if they've only gone up one floor, which gives the illusion that there was less of a chase scene, and flows better into the next scene. We were extremely lucky that all of our actors were able and happy enough to do this chase scene for us! The last thing we asked from them was for Stuart to look out through the window, of the drawing room into the corridor they were running through, in a panic watching them run past, which will be used at the end of our film to show that he is still being chased.

After we had shot the chase scene, we went back to the drawing room to film our last bit of footage, where Stuart is walking from the sink to the chair to sit down and drink his cup of tea and sits down to eat his last Milkybar. Again we made sure we used a wide variety of takes from different angles with this shot.

At the very end of the filming day, I started messing around filming a 'behind the scenes section' of everyone excited to be finished, where I put the wig on the top of the camera with the fringe falling down into frame. This piece of silly messing about, ended up being used in the film where I ran to the door window, and then watched James run past pretending to be part of the screaming mob. As badly filmed and improvised this scene was, I feel it highlights the fact that this story is so ridiculous and is supposed to be humorous.

Overall the whole day was frustrating from start to end, and I really struggled to control everyone to stick to the storyboard. By the end of the filming session when we said 'It's a wrap', instead of feeling relieved that the best part of it was over, I was concerned by how much post work would need to be done to get the footage up to scratch, little did I know that the footage would be a lot worse than expected.

Revise of concept- concept two

The second concept I came up with, and wrote a rough version here...  The camera follows the protagonist on their every day uni life, walking around casually working alone. Slowly you see people standing in the distance pointing and whispering about him. The viewer is confused as to why (and if he is being bullied as he looks quite nerdy), but it turns out he is a local celebrity. He avoids eye contact from anyone when leaving the library and walks out, starts quickening his speed as small clusters of people start forming around him in the corridor (no one is aggressive). He runs into a quiet room where he sits in the corner and opens his bag with his back to the camera, he takes out something (a milkybar) and is there for a moment before putting something (rubbish) back in his bag, before running out the room. he is chased by screaming fan girls. where we see him run home from uni. he goes to his bedroom, and the viewer clicks that he is the grown up milky bar kid (from his decor). he takes hat off and lies on his bed, and has a flash back of his first day at uni saying "the milky bars are on me," then showing his slow addiction and the breaking of that promise which he hasnt been able to live up to. it then cuts back to him in his room holding a milky bar.




From this very basic concept, Sara and I were able to start rewriting the concept and wrote the script/shot list here:
The day and life of the Milky Bar Kid. (Guilt) - Extended Concept/Script/Shot list
1.1 First opening shot – University elections are taking place and we see two candidates battling out on their podiums (wide shot from the other side of the room)
1.2 Two candidates side-by-side glancing at each other trying to out do one and other (mid shot)
1.3 Milkybars are on me (side shot)
1.4 Throwing Milkybars (wide shot)
2.1 Walking proudly staring at posters (low angle shot)
2.2 Camera pans past the posters
3.1 Sat alone in the drawing room working alone (pans across face)
3.2 Walk out of room and goes down lift (camera follows him)
3.3 In the Students’ Union area he is looking at the finance charts where they have completely ran out of money and all the expenditures have been on Milkybars. (over the shoulder shot)
3.4 Face stressed (extreme close up)
4.1 People point towards him at the end of the lift (wide shot)
4.2 Scared face (close up)
4.3 He runs towards the stairs (wide shot)
4.4 Angry mob chases after him (back wide shot)
4.5 He gets to the top of the stairs (back shot to front view of the Milkybar kid)
4.6 Gets into the drawing room (the camera is already in the room and he walks towards it)
4.7 Sits in the corner scared (mid shot to close up of face)
4.8 Cup (close up)
4.9 Makes himself a cup of tea to calm himself down (mid shot view of him sitting on the chair)
4.10 Eats the milky bar (wide shot)




From having the initial plan sorted out I was able to start organising our time with Sara, where we came up with this plan for the week, which we then revised once we knew which day we were able to film. We then broke down the Wednesday where we would be filming down, so we knew what we were doing throughout the day and what time we were able to shoot in the certain locations.Plan for this week:
Monday- Planning, scripting and storyboarding
Tuesday- Organise props, location, timings, actors and finishing off Monday's work
Wednesday- Hire out the equipment needed and finish off anything from Monday or Tuesday that has yet to be completed
Thursday- Set up the equipment and film all day
Friday- Finish off any research and start editingSaturday- Finish editing and any other post production work
Monday- Show video in film showing crit

Revised Plan:
Monday- Planning, scripting, organise props, location, actors, timings, risk assessment, reserve equipment, location photographs ready for storyboarding 
Tuesday- Storyboarding, opening and end credit sequences, make props
Wednesday- Set up the equipment and film all day
Thursday- Post production work
Friday- Post production work
Weekend- Finish off any blogging which hasn't been done.

Break down of Wednesday
9.00-9.30 collect equipment 
9.30-10.30 set up and test lighting, adjust camera settings, clear set and place props
10.30-12 filming in the Students' Union area 
12.30-1.30 filming in the Students' Union office
1.30-Onwards filming by the lift, on the stairs, inside the drawing room




We also assigned our roles at the beginning of the process, which you can see has changed naturally, as well as having an extra member of the team being added the day before we started shooting.Planned roles:
Sacha- Concept, script, shot list, storyboarding, animatic and directing.
Sara- Editing, lighting, sound, costume and makeup.
Simon- Original concept, script, shot list, sound concept. Filming, post production.
All- On sight research, organisation, art department work

Actual roles:
Sacha- Director, producer, script writer, pre production, assistant editor (colour correction)
Sara- Organising costume, assistant producer, end credits
Simon- Camera man, prop buying, initial concept work
James- Sound recording, sound editing and general editing, on site health and safety, prop buying, casting director, assistant director



The next thing we needed to start doing was to look into who would be acting for us. Sara managed to convince Stuart Brown to be our lead of the Milkybar Kid, and I asked the current president of the Students' Union Tom Hoare to be a candidate running head to head with Stuart (which he found hilarious and said yes to straight away!). The only actors which needed sorting out was the extras, which I posted out messages to people I knew in the University to ask to come if possible, but most of the extra's will be chosen on the day.

As we revised the concept, and there were various issues with the whole group coming in at one time to work together at once, the whole preproduction side of the project slipped a bit.

The next process was to storyboard, as it was my role to do this, I did some research into how others do it. This photograph was taken from the book 'The Storyboard Design Course: The Ultimate Guide for Artists, Directors, Producers and Scriptwriters' by Guiseppe Cristiano. I found this page the most helpful of all, as it reminded me that I didn't need to worry about the stylistic qualities as such, as long as the narrative is well told and understandable.

The main research I did into how to storyboard was through the book previously mentioned, but also this gem of an article, where fifteen of the greatest known films of all time's storyboards are shown. I adore all of the different approaches to how to create a storyboard, yet at the same time all of them are fully understandable and could easily be worked from. I particularly like the one used for the zero gravity fight seen in Inception, as it is cleverly planned out showing the movement of the people within the space, rather than drawing out the environment for every frame. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/12/sketching-out-psycho-production-storyboards-from-15-beloved-films/265785/

Like the Gerbil video, I started off storyboarding with the environment drawings (drawn overlaid onto location photographs), and then drew the action on a layer over the top. Due to the problems with timing as mentioned before, I was given a very limited time to actually storyboard, and never managed to properly add the action layers into all of the frames, and it is mainly just the environments shown. I think that when filming, the lack of a fully complete storyboard (although it clearly shows the distance of the environment from the camera), people started to get confused with how to film the scenes.

Before filming, the health and safety side of everything needed to be sorted out. Especially in the Students' Union area and office. So Sara and I went to discuss the problems we may come across when filming, and wrote a risk assessment together. Here is the general email James Murphy (who is the Student Liaison for the Union) sent to Andrew the Health and Safety Officer.

Students filming in the Students’ Union area and the Students’ Union office.

Sacha  Frampton, Sara Gowthorpe & Simon Sturgeon

Duration:

Set up: 30 minutes

Filming: 1.5 hours

Equipment

Dado lights [with lead]

Slow Motion camera [with lead]

Tripod + XD Camera [no leads]

Information

The students will be filming scenes in the Students’ Union area and the office.

No other specific equipment is needed and there will be minimal risks associated with the scenes.

The students have asked if staff and students could be asked to use an alternative route to the smoking area for 5 minute intervals while they film. They will have 2 students to stand at each end of the area to speak to students.

Is this possible to do – as I have suggested they don’t ‘prevent’ students?

Risk Assessment attached

Once all of this was finally completed, we were ready to start filming!