Tuesday 28 October 2008

flashing around


obviously, i figured out how preloaders work in flash. andree told me it wasn't too difficult, and he was right. i thought it wasn't such a bad idea to make a higher-quality-flash-version of my showreel with a fancy preloader and stuff. the showreel below, small as it is in that blogger-quality, looked really poor if you ask me.
so now the showreel is not totally up to date anymore, but at least quality and preloader are. enjoy.
(only thing that is still bothering me are these upper and lower field stripes. must have done something wrong while importing some of the footage. again. next time i'll get it. - for everyone who doesn't know what i'm talking about: not so important...)

Sunday 26 October 2008

week nine

FashionFlash

low contrast due to compression...

Music Video Shooting







this week was great! really much nice things to work on. first of all this week, we filmed the bijenkorf oktober fashion flash was. every month the bijenkorf has somthing like that. it's a presentation of upcoming fashion for in-store tv's, you could call it some sort of moving catalogue. so on monday a model was there that we filemd wearing dfferent sets of clothes, in different poses. we did that in the office of holland centraal, they have everything necessary there to do so. light, camera, a treadmill... yeah right, a treadmill. they have that for these "catwalk-shots", like the model walking towards you and stuff. nice effect.
ok, so we filmed everthing on monday and i had time till thursday to make a montage of that. i tried to pretty much use the same style as in the catalogue itself. afterwards michiel added the text. the bijenkorf liked it and so did i.
and then came friday. after having done two music videos for that girl-band "lisa, amy and shelly" their managers (EMI, music label of sony), asked holland centraal to make a music video for "KUS", a somewhat more popular and further grown up group, and today was the shooting of their clip. and even better, i was asked to come and help! awesome!
the group consists of four nice girls from the age of about 24 (i guess), and the clip was shot in a big gym in amersfoort. that was one really great experience.
ok, most of the time i was busy carrying around lights and camera equipment, but having participated at all was and really good and informative for me. and one other task of me was to film the making of! so cool!
all the time i wasn't busy with carrying stuff around i filmed what was goining on, and if i wasn't filming, i was taking photos (brought my camera, naturally). i will also be the one mounting the making of, so the clip will follow as soon as it's done.
is also was one long day. a lot of work such a video shooting, that's for sure.

Sunday 19 October 2008

week eight


click it!

above you can clearly see what kept me busy this week. our account executive at the bijenkorf liked the countenance-clips i made for the three crazy days so much, that he offered me the job to make animations for the upcoming month theme. the bijenkorf has a certain theme every month, and for oktober it's "boys will be boys". i was given some illustrator files with graphics of cars, motors and other cool stuff that i shoud make some nice animations from. nice assignment i'd say.
i picked the three best of those files and started working on that. the problem with those vector artworks was, that they weren't made for being animted, they were only made for looking good printed. so i had to split them into groups layers and clipping masks in illustrator before being able to animate them. took a while, detailed as they are. and that created the next problem. i had only three days for all three of the animations. so i had to work the evenings aswell. but that's not that bad, if you work over regular time, you can eat on costs of holland centraal, and they make a good pizza on the opponent site of the street :P
my colleague auke also liked the graphics of the clip in the middle so much, that he wanted to participate in creating that clip aswell. so he made the intro where everything pops up and i made the sequence where the camera dives into the artwork.
it was really fun to do, and i am as happy with the results as the bijenkorf-people.
the rest of the wek wasn't too interesting, bijenkorf pages mostly.

Monday 13 October 2008

week seven


photo(shopped) by martina

anyways, this weekend including monday i went to visit enschede, as anounced in the earlier post. i worked last saturday, so monday was spare. that was good in so far, that i could participate at one twentse welle projecten pool meeting (some sort of school assignment that is). it was good for me to see how far everything already was, not having been there before due to my work experience. additionally, i could "help" by drawing some figures for my groups illustration. not that that help was needed, my group members anika and andree left some for me so i could take part aswell. i appreciate that.
i also could help the group of the modern times (anke, martina and daniel) with their project a little. before i already ha played a little role in one of the movies they are going to present in the museum, and they needed some additional photos for that. i liked helping them, was fun. the photo above is for a part of their exhibition.
back i hilversum i had a quite untroubled week, ok except friday, later more about that. on monday i helped my boss, paul, a little with shooting a short scene for a commercial. i only did some lighting and stuff, and the scene was really short and done fastly, but i was nice to help. it was for a commercial about "mooi" (dutch for beautiful), a chain of makeup-stores.
this week i also learned how to "dump" movies onto digibeta tapes. digibeta is the most-used system for TV. might come in handy though.
and then came friday. on firday it was my job to record a digibeta tape with a short clip someone had made the day before, who i promised i would help him out with that. he wasn't there that day. i should just grab a rendered file he had started to render the day before and record it onto the tape. sounds simple.
what happened was, that his computer crashed over night. the file was gone. i didn't have his account data to log in and render it again, and some other things went wrong.
it took me the whole day trying to solute these problems. afterwards we even had to record it two more times because somthing with the sound was wrong. in the end we were half a day over the deadline. stress pure, but again i learned a lot of that: finish your stuff on time, YOURSELF.

new sound


hi. difficult story. i only used the sound in the older version of the animation below, because i hadn't found better music. i wanted someone from the conservatorium to make my sound, but time was short and they seemed quite busy, so i searched one myself and with some help from nils i found one that i liked pretty much. the one below though.
BUT BEFORE, desperate as i was, searching for someone capable of making high quality sound in a short time, i hung a paper with the text "sound needed urgently" and my email adress into the hku, the hogeschool voor de kunsten utrecht (there, because i am still doing that internship mentioned in an earlier post). luckyly, Jacob van de Water found it and made this fresh new sound especially for it. he did that in a really short time, two days i think. he did a great job, i have to admit, nice working with him. he started with that on the monday in the week before the opnening, and i, not being sure that someone would be taking care of the sound, picked the other one on sunday before. that's why there are two. pretty confusing right?
if you didn't get it just forget it it and listen to the new, better sound.

Tuesday 7 October 2008

sorry for having been absent. here's a reason.


hi. i am really sorry for not having posted anything for so long. it's not like, i didn't do anything, i just did too much. i mean doing an internship is good, but it also is like a job, and takes the same time like a job, like 9 hours a day and stuff. ok, i could have blogged, if there wasn't what i posted up there. i, still taking part in the twentse welle assignment, had only the weekends, evenings and nights to work on my precious animation, which i tried to finish as good as i could. i really didn't sleep much the last weeks, and only concentrated on my two "jobs". i really didn't like the thought of doing ANYTHING ELSE in the mean time. japp. that's it. hope you like it at last.

Sunday 5 October 2008

week six


the time for the "twentse welle" assignment is running out! now, so short before the museums opening, i have even less time, due to the "three crazy days", that caused hell of a crazy week for me. "three crazy days" is the name of the bijenkorf's year's biggest sales-promotion, what obviously causes a lot work for holland cantraal aswell, being it's main client. and so a lot to do for me to do aswell, but not that it bothers me or something, on the contrary, some of the assignments were really fun to do. i have made a flash-compilation of some of the clips i made while the three crazy days (my favorites you could say).
the upper three are a sort of trailers, that were played during the three crazy days. the one in the lower left corner aswell, but that one was played before, including the text. the one on the upper right wasn't made by me, but i thought they belonged together somehow. what i consider special about them, is that the only given content for creating them were three photos. unlayered. just flat tiff pictures. so, they had to be cut apart before, layered, and then in such a way, that you had to add some background, that wasn't there, to make it look 3D. sounds complicating, and that's what it was. took a while. then it was animted with some camera movement in after effects.
the row in the middle was fun to do aswell. the assignment for me was to do something nice for the bijenkorf's employees, that would be shown in the cafeterias and stuff. no matter what. just some ideas of nice countenance-slogans. so that's what i did, something nice for them.
because these days also found place on saturday, i had to work that day exeptionally, too. me and collegue ha to prepare some scedules and "last-minute-pages" the whole time during these days. crazy week though.
good about that is, that therefore i have a free day on monday, and i'm planning to visit enschede to see i if can help at the twentse welle someway. looking forward to it.