Interesting ideas

Reading through all the post the Fd students have been doing recently. I saw particularly struck by one video on jessies blog. Stop motion animation is relatively straight forward - we did some in the induction week for fun. But they take time - and they are fairly familiar to us. Jess found one that takes the idea and technique further. Goodness know HOW long this must have taken!


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

The future shorts website and Youtube channel are great. They showed an excellent selection of short films at the Little theatre this week in Bath. One film - made in Bristol also uses stop motion. Again the idea and technique have been taken further than usual.



Lastly I have been interested in 'light writing' for a while. The technique relies on long exposures from a locked off camera with someone drawing with a bright light or touch etc. If offers an inoffensive way of adding graffiti to a building! There are plenty of great examples with this effect but this movie adds the technique of stop motion too. Stunning.



Keep blogging, Mike J

Audio processing - tips and tricks

We have been working recently with Apple's Soundtrack Pro version 2.0. I have used version 1 a lot in the past and I really liked it. The new version has more features and I have to admit that I have found it more difficult to pick my way around it. We also had quite a few crashes - I don't know if its was bad luck or bugs. But it was frustrating.

One area that is impressive with Soundtrack is the noise removal and normalising functions. These are very nicely explained by Genius DV.

This article covers normalising, this one noise removal.

A more basic option is to use the amazing 'levelator'. This free application available in Mac, PC and Linus, optimises an audio file. Once downloaded and installed files are dragged to a panel in the centre of the screen. There are no controls/prefs. It just works saving a file next to the original one with the addition of the extension.output. Very neat. It works a treat on speech based audio. Its fast too.

Short films

Virgin media have just run a short film competition. I really liked the winner - black hole and we've watched and discussed it in class. What about the shortlist? Since we are not doing animation I have spent more time looking at the live action shorts.

Since I am currently running a module called 'planning a film' with the aim of writing and preparing to film a short (5 - 8 minutes long). Its interesting to look at the winner - Black Hole and the runners up.

Black hole Competition winner as chosen by the judges



5 bricks high (Short listed)



Butterface (Short listed)



The calling (Short listed)



Elevator music (Short listed)



The hobbyist (winner of the the People's choice) (Short listed)



What do you think of these? Can we draw any conclusions from the short list?

Interestingly none were highly rated by the visitors to the Virgin Media website. Only Black hole was listed on the most viewed selection!

Lastly Virgin Media have now up some details about the filming and the filmmakers on the website. It make interesting reading too.

manipulation of provided material

All the FD students were provided with an interview, some vox pops and a poetry performance. They had to edit and create an interesting radio package with these elements. The edit had to be completed in 3 hours.

Sean's edit



James's edit



Jessie's



Laura's



Megan's



Chris's



Hannah's



Richard' s



Fiona's



Ciaran's



Nathan's



Matt's