Friday, May 28, 2010

Work for the next few weeks

So I've given myself a lipsync assignment for the summer, it's a bit intense but it will hopefully help out my demo reel quite a bit. It's a 30-second sound clip, so it's gonna take a good couple weeks to do. I picked it out last night, and I've already gone and thumbnailed out most of it and set up a small set to use, even lit and did some basic shading to things. I'm gonna be using the Dan model from the thesis. Here's the clip:



It's from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which is a good movie if you haven't seen it. I figured it would have a good range of big and small movements and details to work with, should be fun.

When I get some progress and access to my scanner again I'll post a video and my thumbnails.


I'd also like to get a lipsync with Harold sometime, it's harder to find parts for a really fat guy like him.

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

More Muuuuuusics

So here's a little song I recorded last night at like 3 in the morning. Just sorta playing around with delay.



Nothing too special and there's quite a few mistakes. Mostly improvised.

Monday, May 17, 2010

Oh hey, I forgot about this thing.

So much for keeping this blog-deal consistent.

DVD:

Anyway, I'm all done with my schooling aside from actually graduating, so I'll be taking the week to do some things for the thesis film so we can call it final and start submitting to festivals and such.

The big thing for me this week is going to be the DVD. Luckily, I have a good amount of the assets either in progress or done for it because I had a DVD authoring class this quarter. Here's a video to give the look of it:

Lunch Breaks DVD Menu WIP from Ryan Neff on Vimeo.



Here's a picture of what the sub-menus will look like (not with these links necessarily, the class required we had some things that we won't end up using) I have video transitions back and forth from the menus so this thing will look super sleek.

Screenings:

We had screenings yesterday, which went really really well. The theater was just packed with people; most of them left right after our screening and Q&A which caused an impromptu 5-minute break for screenings to give people time to migrate out, which was pretty amusing.

The majority of the comments were really positive, even from people like Malcolm and Howard (I think Howard, don't remember what he said). Of course, Stephanie Maxwell still didn't have anything good to say and she seemed really bitter. The only critique she could give was that she was "mislead" because she heard the boss saying "So you're gay?" instead of "So, you're Gabe?" Everyone just laughed at her and she looked really flustered by that which was fairly hilarious. The other outrageous comment we got was from Naomi (I think? I'm not sure who she is) who said she was offended by the joke of the wife yelling at the boss on the phone. Well, she didn't say offended, she was saying that it was cliche and other stuff, but it was glaringly obvious she just didn't like it. The very next comment from the crowd was a woman who said she thought it was hilarious, and other people said the same to us later.

The legitimate critiques were mostly about our dialogue. This was definitely not the fault of Kevin, as he did great work on the sound, and dealing with all of us and our vague demands. It was a result of us being up-in-the-air about the amount and extent of dialogue in our film for so long. Initially we didn't want any, but found we needed some at the end, and decided to have some at the end, we needed some at the start to establish that there is dialogue. A script was written so late in the game we had to settle for a lot of things. I think we all feel the actors were the right choices, but we just needed more time to work with them and get more takes. At least we can say we learned that we need to lock down a script way earlier in the process than we did.

We're hoping to make a few more fixes this week. We want to at the very least make a pass in after effects to tweak colors to fix inconsistencies, especially in the office scenes. We were also talking about making some clouds for outside windows so it adds to that empty blue space. We'll see.

So thanks to everyone who made it to screenings yesterday to support us, it was greatly appreciated. We're all really happy with the product we've created and we're glad that people enjoyed it so much. We hope we've also given the underclassmen something to strive for on beat in the future. Hopefully this will help break SoFA's concentration on independent films and open them up to accepting and encouraging group projects.

For those of you that missed it, we'll be in the Senior Show this weekend, or you can contact any one of the group members and we can likely show you somehow.