Finalized Mascara

OMG, this is great Jason! The brush is perfect! Now I gotta hand this off to Monique to get animated =P

New Recruits

Alright! Two new recruits to the Industrial Dawn army/family. Welcome Jason and Monique.

Concepts and Modeler

Alright, here are the rough concepts for the interior and exterior of the space loft. Jason Bakutis will be taking care of this.

Space COUCH is in!!!

Dave's amaZing. Wow. Check it out, I am inlove with my space couch that dave modeled. He's shooting to get the texturing done by the end of the winter break which is perfect. This couch is perfect. Thank you so much Dave!

logo template for Jason

Wouldn't usually bother to post this little concept draft, tho I feel like I've done a million of these (for all different things, not just the mascara!), but yeah, it's just that much faster and easier to send this as a link to Jason rather than an attachment. So here...I made it look kind of like an American Apparel ad.

Rough Test

Test from Lindsey on Vimeo.

UPdate!

Jason's the man. He's all on top of keeping me up to date on his model and it looks great.

Mascara 2 from Jason Hata on Vimeo.

Mascara

Alright, Jason's working well with me and updating me as he goes along. He is modeling, texturing AND lighting my mascara bottle that will appear in the quick commercial my alien chick will be watching before the tv breaks. Here's his rough model:

I would just like to say that I kick ass at recoding this blog. Look at the size of this movie, I totally had to go change the dimensions in the embedded code that vimeo automated. It's twice as big now. Boo-ya!

Mascara Model from Jason Hata on Vimeo.

Assembling the ARMY

I made a fun little design to organize my work team (aka My Army)


So I did this mostly b/c I need to keep track of everybody, and to remember the people I still need to find....also cause it's 4:30 in the morning, heh heh.

See, after making this, I realized I totally forgot to add my sound design people. That'll come into play more so next semester though, because the dj I've had working with me might not work out.

Shoot #2

I had another green screen shoot. Hopefully this will be the last one with my actress - hard to get everyone's schedules to match up. This shoot went much faster. I only had to do some 'filler' shots so I think we filmed about half of what we did the last time. They had just installed all the new green screen equipment too so Tom was in there helping out, which made things happen alot faster. So this one was completely wrapped in 3 hours while the other one really made the full 6 hours.
There will be at least one more shoot because I need to finish my miniature model and then shoot it on the green screen. I'm thinking of just doing a simple zoom in towards the model, so Bonnie and I should be done with that shoot in like, 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes at the most if we run into technical problems.
I need to start cutting these clips together. I'm also realizing that I wasn't working in 16 bits when I did the 3:2 pulldown on my other shots so now I need to redo all the work I did. BLARG. Well, at least there have been so many exterior elements that I've had to work on that I didnt get too in depth with the actual finalized footage.

The Turkey Plan

Alright, so, as in any other year at SVA, a long weekend from thurday-sun off doesn't give me enough time to go home for the holiday so I will not be going to New Mexico. However, this means I can do more work (yay...). Because the schools will be closed and I don't have a functioning computer at home that is powerful enough to do "real work", the plan will be to watch all of the matte painting tutorials the school has up on the server on my laptop *remember to put them on your drive sometime this week*. And I will also to continue to work on my miniature model of my space loft.

MONEY SHOT

Listening to our speaker in Thesis Topics today, I'm thinking of changing up my boards a bit. He suggested to really make this all the best shots together, but I mean, there has to be a little bit of story, come on. But this guy had a point though - Either make the entire thing really short, spectacular and flawless or have at least 2 "money shots." I did not think about an individual shot as a selling point, just the production in it's entirety. I know at the end of the school year too we need to submit our 'money shots.' So yeah....I should really think this through before I can't make changes to the story anymore.
Also, I've started to collect the physical materials I'm going to use to make my 'space loft.' I want to model some of it in real life and shoot it on green screen to hopefully reduce render time. Also, it's just fun working with your hands man, I want to do this because I miss fine arts too.

NEW TITLE

Oh baby, I've officially changed my thesis title from "Space Fabulous" to "Industrial Dawn." Much more appealing to the masses I believe...

space couch for dave

Dave Chen is AMAZIN'. He's going to make these sketchy instructions into an awesome space couch. Here I've given him a reference shot, the measurements of what my actress was sitting on in real life, and the rough concept.
I still gotta make up a ton of sketches for the rest of the room so that bryan can pressure a junior into making it, and jason's making me a mascara bottle. Everyone is awesome.
Oh 3d...

Meeting

Had my individual consultation with my teacher tonight. Went to Framestore for the meeting, which was awesome.
I think the meeting went well. We covered the green screen shoot I did last week, my backgrounds and the story. I need to work on alot, obviously, but I need to think of a better title than 'Space Fabulous' (wtf?). Also, I need to start rounding 3d kids together b/c I guess they are the hardest to get on board.

Night time?

Now I feel like I'm in a ghost movie. Or no, splash some red corn syrup on there and we have another vampire film...I dunno. Whatever, I can color correct at the end.

Dawn: warm

Now I don't know if I want this to be "Industrial Dawn" anymore. This is so brown, and a little too grungy I feel for beauty shots. Arg...maybe the more traditional blue/cool scheme would be best? Color correction is also kind of washing out the composites I made to her face, so I need to keep in mind to exaggerate the hizzle out of everything I guess.

Edit in progress

The first semi-final edit. Not color corrected yet. Bla, hard to make her look like a pretty alien, the smallest changes keep turning her into the spawn of Satan.
I've tried 'reptilian eyes, 'cat eyes,' adding beveled holes in her skin...but it's making her ugly and scary. her face is too bare, so i can't stop here. I kind of like the extended tear duct tho. Times when taking a photoshop class would have come in handy.

Screen Shot 1 (Unedited)

Unedited still from thesis.

1st Shoot

I had my first shoot today in the green screen room for thesis. Went ok. Had a late start because there were alot of technical difficulties and a necessarily panicked call to Jerome to make sure everything was set up properly. I came in prepared, knowing what I was supposed to do, but having never actually practiced using the equipment (always had a lab assistant), it showed in my lack of efficiency.
My actress, DP, and AD were all great though. Really held together positive energy during the entire shoot.
Now I need to spend the next few days doing 3:2 pulldown on all footage (*remember to work in 16 bits).
Some of these shots are just gorgeous though. Not used to having such good lighting (and such a pretty actress!!).

Getting stuff together for shoot

So I've been running around the city trying to get all my costume elements and props before the shoot this weekend.
List:
-Hairspray
-Bobby pins
-Wig?
-Wedged shoes
-Knee highs
-Scarves (I dunno if i'll do anything with them yet)
-Rest of outfit I'm thinking this layered under a shirt I already have:

BOARDING

I've been working on my storyboards and turning them into a previs. I don't think I'll post them on this blog tho, just cause u know, that stuff normally looks pretty chicken scratchy.

Thesis Refs

CHANGING THESIS IDEA

Today was the first day of the semester and I am officially changing my idea. No more "Loser," - high school themed story from last semester. I want to shoot on green screen because, to be honest, I want to show as many detectable visual effects as possible. I know most composting is meant to fool the eye so you don't even realize that there were any changes made to the film, but no one's going to get it if I do something subtle. If I take something unrealistic and put it all together though, then everyone will know exactly how much work I put in (which is a scary thought I guess, but man, it's what I'm at school for).
So I'm going to go crazy with this. Outerspace. Fashion. I know I'm not a story teller, I just want to make sure I have an attractive girl and awesome elements to make this eye candy. This should give me an opportunity to tackle matte painting too, which I've always wanted to do.