One Minutes

Right, it's about time I put something up about the progress of the second part of the video module. Exciting brief this one, working in a team of 3 (myself, Rob and Szymon) making a 1 minute film. Started this one out spending a lot of time watching the winners and entries for various minute film festivals from the last few years (well, as much time as you can spend watching 60 second films). Standards varied considerably, there were several on The One Minutes that were really quite poor. Nearly everything on the filminute site was really good though, and it showed the variety of ways you can make something really interesting and engaging in just a minute. As we were all quite into this brief, we decided to make several films, making one each on a more individual basis, with input and help from each other as it was needed, and to make one film as a proper collaborative team effort. After getting together a few times, in various states of sobriety, we came up with a pretty big selection of ideas to work from, in terms of both content and style. Collectively we worked on a documentary (mockumentary really) about the new blood sport of slug sumo. My individual effort is a misleading, anti-climatic drama.

We made a lot of effort on this one to ensure the production quality was high, getting the lighting, white balance, exposure, focus etc as dead on as possible. The things that could have really done with improving on mine and Katherine's video for the first part of this module were the white balance being a bit off and the focus being a bit soft, so I was keen to try to improve on those areas for this part.

My ideas went through several different stages of evolution before coming to their final versions. Steven D. Katz, in his book Film Directing Shot By Shot, writes 'As I understand it, the imagination does not guide the hand, but is led by the hand when we have forgotten ourselves in the application of some craft. Once each stage of invention is committed to some substantial form, it is like a mirror revealing the imagination to itself. Suddenly, things we did not see before become clear, or new possibilities emerge, and there is new material to work with.' This is probably the truest statement I've come across personally, in terms of getting an initial idea to fruition. More often than not, my ideas remain as just that, ideas. The times I do actually get pencil to paper, ideas usually open up in completely different ways to how I first saw them, and develop into something much better than the original thought. Same goes for when you're not sure where somethings going to go after a certain point, just get it down in some form, and a solution is that much closer. Going off on one a bit there, but it's just something I'm really realising the importance of, and I'm going to try to stick to it and hopefully generally be more productive, rather than having ideas knocking around without anything to actually show for them. Deep lesson right there.

Second Life Gym Evaluation.

Our idea was to create a workout space, which would directly appeal to our target audience - people that use SL. It seemed pointless to do something that, though good in the real world wouldn't appeal to the people that use it (The government department responsible for attempting to use second life to communicate to pensioners and indeed much of the computer literate public is deluded).
So with this in mind we have worked on exercises that are important and accessible to people prone to spending many hours at a computer screen. You don't need equipment for any of the exercises in our zone, and many of them can be done without even leaving your chair.
We built the space to appear professional yet welcoming. It's strange how difficult it is to ignore conventional rules of architecture - such as gravity. We had several ideas for the space - such as floating islands held aloft by birds and giant spheres with their own gravity. Interesting as it would have been to try these ideas out, they were not suitable for the client and target audience - what any public service like this needs to be is simple, clear and accessible. We hope we've achieved this, we've tried to make navigation and immersion as intuitive and clear as possible (with large signs, easily identifiable entrances and easy to use assets.)
The project could carry on or a long time - we outlined many ideas in our presentation - live workout events, dietary advice, menus, timed reminders, more exercises, forums. We are all really excited about the film project though and are eager to finalise this, and without some serious networking and government permissions, there seems little reason in pushing this any further. it's in it's infancy, but it's got legs.
We work well in a group. We all pulled our weight in and out of the studio, with different skills and expertise brought to the group. So no complaints.

I think we all learnt a bit, even about other programs such as photoshop/illustrator/avimator. There's some coding in there too.

Tom, Rob, Szymon.

SLurl