Optimisation

Today we were given a task to optimise a 1000 x 1000 px image into a 500 x 500 px image, of course this was going to severely reduce the images quality anyway, bigger images of course being a higher quality.

I saved the image 5 times into jpg, gif, png, bmp, and finally tiff formats, the task was to try all these different file extentions and pick out which one would be the best for our websites.
Out of the 5 there were 3 clear winners on image file size, these were;
JPG - 308 kb
GIF - 202 kb
PNG - 491 kb (I think under 500 kb is just fine!)

Tiff & BMP were just too big in my personal opinion.

So now that I have my 3 low file sizes, I now needed to pick which one I think was the best quality for using on a website, my image wasn't a great choice for this task, but I was able to see some differences.
JPG and PNG were roughly the same with very minor detail, but GIF in my opinion had some issues with colours, if you take a look at the biggest building with a red side on it, the whitish shading on it is clear in a JPG and blocky on the GIF format.
Example:

Gif Image

JPG image

This only left me between JPG image and PNG images, although there is a slight difference in quality between them, I don't think the quality is high enough from a PNG to make up for the file size saving from the JPG.

This would make JPG the winner for most standard image files used on my website.

Design for web

Moodboard

Last week we created a moodboard and started creating basic HTML scripts, which I think most of us knew about, but it was still fun to do xD

Self Evaluation for Film project DP2

Overall I think this project was far more successful than my previous film production, appointing someone to lead organisation is something we missed out last time, and although we are all capable of organising ourselves, I really feel  that it was useful to allow someone to organise the timetables so that the crew could use their full potential creating the actual film. Being the producer was quite tough during the first 2 weeks, there was a lot of pressure on me to make sure everyone was keeping with the schedule and then changing plans according to peoples different stages.

I think when we came to the production week, my job was slightly more relaxed, my only roles were to create a schedule and make sure there were no risks on set (Using pillows for fights etc.), I really don’t forgive myself for not creating a schedule for the second day which caused us to run through to a third day. However we did get some clips of sound effects and close ups that we probably wouldn’t have gotten if we shoved everything into the second day.

To keep morale up, we made sure that people had things they needed or wanted, this included food, drink, even something basic like different hour schedules. However if they weren’t needed for such days we would carry on as planned and fill them in with the information at a later date.

I had a few issues during the editing phase, some of the clips I had were completely corrupted and had no sound to them, thus limiting me to using only certain clips, I did however manage to get something that I feel is presentable, which I would probably edit again in the future just so if I ever wanted to use it for say a show reel then it’s at the best it can possibly be.

I think if I was going to attempt this project again as a producer, I’d spend a lot more time in the first week planning rather than leaving it until the second week when things are a bit more chaotic with planning, I’d also try and create a basic schedule template for each filming day which we could fill in over time, along with a register of people who can be there or not and why. I’d also try and spend more time learning more about the equipment, when it came to filming days I felt a little bit more useless than the others because I wasn’t going to have been much help with setting things up like the lighting or camera equipment, I am fine with Sound however due to doing it in the first term.

I would like to try to do this project again but using the full extent of the script, including flashbacks for the party scene, this script really reminded me of Shameless which is quite funny because it just so happens that Phil wrote a few of the Shameless episodes.

First Final Edit of film

Vimeo wouldn't allow me to upload something this big, so I'm using Youtube instead.
500 words will be delivered later on.

Apologies for one lip sync fail, I can't seem to work out why it renders a failed lip sync but in the editable files it's completely fine.

Some tiny things I created over the holiday! [WIP]

Of course all of this stuff isn't near complete, but just to show you what kind of things I do when I'm seriously bored!
Sorry for quality loss. (Click to view a bigger size)

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Tekken styled animation!

This idea was inspired by fighting games such as Tekken, after I found out that my original idea wasn't going to work due to me needing to use the images from the first day(All planning for my original idea is in the last blog post). I wanted to create quite a cartoony feel to the background and text images, I also used this project as way for me to test my 2D skills, because I normally prefer to do 3D animation.

I planned this by creating a basic image of the background using squares/rectangles and cutting out all the images of my fellow classmates. I then started by pretending to do the animation on photoshop by hiding and showing layers at intervals to test if it looked nice enough, however it must be said it looked nicer in practice than it did with the end result.
After testing, I went and created the 2D background with the main theme idea to suit the street-like music we were asked to use.
To add to the effect I made little pixel are with a nice blocky shadow just to make that retro kind of feel to it and added little clouds to act as a hit effect.

Overall I'm happy-ish with the final result, however I didn't find using the images of people as a very practical way to animate, if I was to do this again I would definitely try and get more related pictures to the animation. However I am willing to give this style another try some time.

A huge thank you to Jack and Charley for the photos for my animation.
Thanks for reading.
Video below: