The culmination of work into one edit.
Ultimately I had to choose something else instead of Smart draw because it just did what most programs do to me eventually (crash). Anyway I chose what I thought was going to be better I run an open source equivilent to microsoft office called open office. It runs a similar program to excel and so I have been using this as my timeline program. It produced a nice spreadsheet of all the things that I wanted to achieve and how the film was going to be run. I think it is often more effective than that of a microsoft program (it actually runs).
Itemising things has helped in who is responsible for certain things within the project. It also helps with the main issues of when things should be due and how they fit into things within the project.
Smart draw is a timeline software which I find a little childish and not as professional as I was lead to believe. However the software itself is ok it is just that it is not as apt at what I thought it would do it does produce timelines as the software. It also currupted and crashing giving me different error messages as it died. So I would not recommend this particular software package to anyone. However it was a different look. The only good thing about is that you can give yourself specific amounts of time to do certain things and plan them. However do not get it. It is not worth the hassle where as open mind was beautiful to run.
Film editing is also known as montage and is the connecting of shots and sequences together to form a seemless whole project and film. When I started researching for my project because I have many different roles including being the editor. I found these rules from the web which quoted them from On film editing by Edward Dmytryk. He discuses these priciples which he says are some of the more common problems:
“Rule 1. Never make a cut without a positive reason.
Rule 2. When undecided about the exact frame to cut on, cut long rather than short” (Dmytryk, 23).
Rule 3: Whenever possible cut ‘in movement’” (Dmytryk, 27).
Rule 4: The ‘fresh’ is preferable to the ‘stale’” (Dmytryk, 37).
Rule 5: All scenes should begin and end with continuing action” (Dmytryk, 38).
Rule 6: Cut for proper values rather than proper ‘matches’” (Dmytryk, 44).
Rule 7: Substance first—then form” (Dmytryk, 145). “
The first rule talks about never make a cut without a good reason, the reasons one can deduct from this is that it is often not necessary unless you want to show the action from a different point of view or the current action is blocking something else you want to show.
The second rule I have experienced and find very hard to dictate because there is a certain point when you have cut too long into a scene and then have to pull it back. But that is the point also if you dont have that extra you cant. It is much easier in a computer with digitised footage.
Rule 3 is difficult too but you do realise when you edit within a movement it seems a lot cleaner to express that kind of motion rather than when someone is simply just standing there or there is a sudden lack of momentum in the film.
Rule 4 makes sense because the eye wants to see more than just the stale image but sometimes it is necessary in a long scene where the emphasis is a particular tragic one. But if you drag even those out too long the film can be ruined by one scene which is not a good thing.
Rule 5 I tried to achieve this and it is easier than it sounds the movement carries one scene to another and fixes any loss of time or even loss of space. The motion should continue also to make sure the audience knows what is going on.
Rule 6 I actually dont know what this is about. I dont really understand the factors behind this and this is a problem with this kind of methodology.
Rule 7 is very straight forward make sure that the substance of the film is not cut so then you are still following some kind of story within a scene and ultimately the film I understand this. The main problem I have had with this is that it is very hard to get across the meaning when something in the story goes a little astray and you never know until you watch the entirety of the film back as to whether it makes sense or not.
However Walter Murch said when it comes to editing that there are six main criteria that the editor has to take into account to make a good film or for the film to flow right. They are emotion, story, rythym, eye trace, two dimensional place of the screen and three dimensional space of action.
I love this software probably because it is easy to forget how far you have to go or how far you have come with a project I started making one for my project and got this far before being cut off with the limitations of the demo.
I think these types of drop down sheets show you how far you can go I think it would also be effective to use them as a form of timlines. Where each week has a drop down menu of what you would like to achieve within that week. I do think that it is very easy to forget how much previs and pre-production you should do. But essentially the program provides you with the easy ability to create a flow chart as large as you would like. 
I like it also because it is easy to use you simply start with a subject and double click to create endless sub drop down charts. The other good thing is that you can attach files to the folders such as video, text, sound, picture, hyperlink, flash file and button. You can also export it in a range of mediums I founf that exporting it as a jpeg one of the more effective but you can also export as a rtf, html, powerpoint just to name a few. The main limitations of the demo are that you can only have 25 drop down subjects. Limits me a bit but in the full version it is totally different. Still I think it is great I have organised my study weeks using this piece of software and put them as my desktop.
I make myself available online to a few people through msn. I have found this form of communication very effective because it is quick you get straight to the point and you can send one another files instantaneously. I think the only problem with msn as a form of serious communication is that if the discussion loses its momentum in the direction of the outcome you want to achieve by going into chat mode which is what this form of comunication was intended for the work gets lost within it. It is an obvious thing, you get sidetracked. Other than this it is a very effective form of communication.
The production pipeline with more research into film vs animation pipelines has proved to be fruitless. I have found that the basis of all of the pipeline that I have found including the ones that I have mentioned in my seminar that there is always a pre-production, production and a post production. In animation it is a similar but different approach to the one that I made. The animation production pipeline can often be seen as more of a mind map kind of approach where the main aspects of the animation are going to lie. For example one of the main aspects would be the character design and modelling. Other differences between them are that the film pipeline focusses on the production where as the pipelines for animations are such that pre production and productio tend to meld into one another for example.
As animation pipelines can run on another set of three important aspects. These are pre-production, visual pipeline and audio pipeline. These are important in an animation pipeline because the working has to be different. The pre production is the same but the audio and visual pipelines are very important to how the animated film is going. They are interelated because the animation visuals and audio are not produced at the same time as a normal shot film are.
Pipelines in films are often written and details how exactly the film is going to be shot. An example of this can be seen at http://www.linuxmovies.org/software.html. However, I thought that this being a visual medium I would make my own.
This is a professional pipeline done for previsualisation be Weta.
I thought I would talk about our previs and some articles that I have been looking at. Our previs started mid semester break when the music was composed and the story invisaged. I had a design/production meeting throughout the last two weeks of the holidays. The pitch was developed and it was decided that if no one wanted to do it that it would be canned and I would just be doing something a lot more managable. So previs is very important we started off with a story board which you can view below from shot 1 to 8.
The reason why we did this was so then it would be easier to edit and shoot. it was a visual plan on how we wanted to shoot. It was based on the script and the possible angles that we might have wanted to try in a particular scene. Another thing we did in previs was to discuss with our designer what we wanted to have in the show. So how we wanted the costuming to be and the props and whether we would need special props made which mostly I did because I wanted to build things. Previs is mostly the planning and testing. Seeing what worked and what didnt. We had to cut some things because they didnt work and were not achievable.
A good previs article to have a look at is on fx guide and is on the link below they talk about the methodologies of thier own. It is a production blog that is taking a look at the film The deaths of Ian and talks about the script break down and what to look for in the first and second readings. He also talks about the studio which he works for which does both practical and digital special effects which is what drew me to the article.
The blog:
Like I was talking about before all of the mediums that I was aiming for were about making the line of communication simpler. So we made a blog which can be viewed at http://horrormusical.blogspot.com/ This was made so then everyone in the project could keep up with what was going on and the main access point to the calender. However the problem with this is that we were not sure whether anyone was using it have kept it up to date until just after the production because it served it’s purposes. It was more useful for me because it kept me within the timeline however I would not recomend this as a means of communication within a group. The main reason behind this is that if you rely on the blog or webpage too much as the main means of communication is that because not everyone checks it as regularly as you, the problems become apparent when you say well it is on the web and people go “oh”. So if you email as well as reffering to your webpage it gives you a back up. However I do hate to say it but never make your main means of communication the web unless you are sure that everyone in your team is fluent in online communication. For example one problem we encountered was that one of our actors missed that we were doing the shoot in the first and second week back. This created a problem because he would not have been in wagga at all. However the main problem was that even though we had told everyone involved that these weeks is when the shoot was on. He could not get out of it. The issue was that he had not seen the shedule online and needed a hard copy. I found it very hard to accomidate for everyone and especially difficult to communicate using one medium. In reality we used every single modern way of comunication including ringing, emailing, forums, comments, letters, txt messaging, verbal, meetings and finally webpages.
The communication hierarchy is hard to explain but using has worked in our film it has suffered a little but I think has mostly worked for the long run. The communication hierarchy is not so much based like a dictatorship as one might think. It just means that the people have needs and it about adjusting schedules to suit these needs. In my seminar I talked about Maslows Hierarchy which you can see below.
The basis of this hierarchy relies on the project serving peoples needs. If someone wants to really do something then let them have the opportunity to do it. I will be better in the long run because the person has satisfied their needs as well as yours. It does mean that you might have to let go of some of the responsibility in management however this can be a good thing it means you no longer have to worry about juggling another thing into you time and schedule. The communication in the motivation to satisfy this need is more of a pyschological methodology but I think a good working methodology if you are a manager. I have been investigating others such as team work which is almost impossible in a multimedia situation.
According to Penn state university it is: “means collaboration among students to produce a product for the quality of which team members have joint responsibility. Teamwork projects have clearly identified and separately evaluated responsibilities for each team member as well as a specified and valuable outcome. Team members are assessed on the quality of the product, the quality of their contributions to the team effort as well as the quality of the completion of their individually assigned tasks.”
I find it strange that they needed to define teamwork however I understand coming from this multimedia degree that students especially find it hard to collaborate and indeed there are always problems which stem from group work. Like the clash of strong people who like to be the boss (I am such a person so I know). Another issue that may arise from within a group is the lack of work from one particular person this can cause a multitude of problems within the group. However I think that the solution is a larger degree of teamwork previously mentioned where everything is deligated right at the begginning so then there is less chance of confusion if there is no leader then the group tends to split from the middle out.
