Another day, another dollar.

An unlikely office team reflect on their rise to fame after posting videos of their workplace woes on an online video site.

3D Animation: Maria Tan
Voices: Steven McKenzie
Music: InternetFilm Record Studio™

More details on this project can be found here.

Please feel free to embed this video onto your own site or use it for your own purposes under the Creative Commons license CC-BY-ND.

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Download video: Another day, another dollar.mp4 (4mb)




Attribution:
Another day, another dollar.
Copyright © Maria Tan | http://mariatan.net

New 3D animation in the works

Another day, another dollar.
Genre: Comedy/Direct Cinema
Style: Creature comforts meets Direct Cinema in a 3D animated world
Runtime: 60-65secs

An unlikely office team reflect on their rise to fame after posting videos of their workplace woes on an online video site.


Details

This 3D animation will be created in C4D, AE and probably Premiere Pro CS5. I was originally thinking about doing this in FCP, but I really want to try the new Premiere out to see if it's improved since CS3-CS4 so this is what I'll be using to edit with.

My friend Steven McKenzie will be helping out with the VOs for the characters, which I'm looking forward to doing because I know it'll be an interesting day.


Motivations & Future plans

I'm hoping that I'll actually like this animation as opposed to my last one, and if it works out well then I will get sponsorship for it and chuck it on YouTube.

I'll try to use Kashi Kollective's stuff again, I feel kinda bad because the last animation wasn't very good. I didn't want to their music being associated with bad visuals so I didn't spread the word on those vids at all. Hopefully this next one will be great, so that Kashi's work can get the recognition it deserves.

District 9 - You are not welcome here.

There's a reason why this movie was nominated for an Oscar this year: because it's bloody monumental. Peter Jackson from Lord of the Rings knew it, my friend Dan Moller told me about it and now I know it, and now here's your chance to get in on the action. I kid you not, District 9 happens to be one of the best movies I have ever seen.

When Dan told me it was sci-fi flick, I put off watching it. I thought this was gonna be yet another try-hard film trying to make money off of my nostalgia, like that time I boycotted the X-Men and Transformers movies because they massacred the cartoons (and their respective franchises) which I idolized when I was a kid. Of course, I couldn't have been more wrong, because District 9 is nothing like a conventional sci-fi movie. In fact, it's nothing like a typical movie at all, which it what makes it so damn good.

Without going into the details to spoil it all for you I can only gush about the director Neill Blomkamp, of Halo fame, who I'm totally crushin on right about now. He's taken the art of observational mockumentary to a whole new level.

This movie kept me hooked from start to finish, while it crammed a multitude of issues into 112 minutes of action packed, attention grabbing goodness. There is not a dull moment in this film, and that's exactly why I'm giving it 5 stars!

Excalibur (1981)

Talk about a god awful movie! As a fan of Arthurian legend I was excited when Excalibur was recommended to me, only to find that the movie was overly dramatic and highly theatrical.

Even though this movie had a lot of recognisable faces (Helen Mirren, Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne and Patrick Stewart from Star Trek), I was just stumped as to why so many of the characters felt the need to shout their lines.

A lot of the costuming and weird use of green spotlights also failed to set the scene. What kind of self respecting knight would wear shiny tin armour with a mirror finish anyway? I bet it wouldn't even protect a knight from the blade of a kitchen knife let alone a sword.

Anyway I don't have very many positive things to say about this movie so I'll leave it at that.

I'm giving this rubbish movie half a star.

August Rush movie review (no spoilers)

This movie was recommended by my UoN friend Karen Pouye of Animal Logic, creative genius extraodinaire. It's a great movie to watch with the family that has uplifting messages of hope, faith, and a bit of music appreciation thrown in the mix, wrapping up with a predictable (but nonetheless enjoyable) hollywood styled happy ending.

During most of the intro I spent my time trying to figure out whether the Irish rock band's lead singer, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, who plays Louis Connelly in the movie, was actually DiNozzo or related to Michael Weatherly from NCIS in any way.

Once I had gotten that out of my system I was able to enjoy Keri Russell's brand of muted emotional delivery that we've all come to know and love from her Felicity days. Freddie Highmore, the kid (Evan Taylor) who the movie centres around, also has the same quiet confidence about him.

Louis Connelly's singing was a little distracting as I felt it left a lot to be desired, but once the intro was out of the way I was able to immerse myself in the story quite comfortably.

Robin Williams comes off well as the troubled Fagin in this modernized version of Oliver Twist, portraying a vulnerability and subtextual trauma that he is rarely seen displaying in the majority of his roles. I think this was channelling a lot of the creepiness his character Walter Finch had in the movie Insomnia, with a bit more added aggression.

While the movie doesn't incorporate any cutting edge techniques in cinematography, or mind blowing concepts in its narrative that stays with you long after the movie is over, it's still one of those feel good movies that's worth watching. I'm rating this 3.5 stars out of 5.

Next up on my movies list will be the 1981 movie Excalibur, recommended by my friend Faustin Molina. Stay tuned :)

Not happy Jan

Last week I upgraded to a waterproof HD camera with a pistol grip. This was my first try at a proper HD vid:



Considering it was my first time with this camera I suppose I am being pretty hard on myself when critiquing it. However, I do truly hate this montage with a passion. The main reasons being:

1. The pistol grip cam won't mount properly - It wouldn't sit still for long on the tripod and kept coming loose every 5mins or so. I had a horrible time filming. The area I was taping was quite large and the action was fast so I didn't have time to keep adjusting it on the tripod mount. The damn thing has no hole for the tripod pin to stabilize it, only the screw. Actually, I'm still trying to figure out if I should drill one in.
   
   
2. Auto focus is awful when capturing scenes with fast action! You can clearly see that in this video. I still haven't tried playing with the shutter speed functions though, maybe that would've fixed the auto focus problems.


3. The joystick isn't ergonomic - The buttons are so fumbly that I would add to the camera shake by trying to man handle the controls to focus on the action quickly. Which added to my frustration on the day, because I had to follow high speed action over a large area with no second takes.


4. My PC is down to it's last 80gb of HDD space - Gasp :o I had Premiere (CS3) crash on me every time I worked on the vid, which is pretty uncommon. Surely that's just a CS4 trademark :) I actually had to start over again from scratch after the first project just shat itself and wouldn't render (it wouldn't even pre-render!). After that I saved multiple copies of the project as I went along under different names, and crashed maybe 5 times while exporting before I decided to clean up the project timeline a bit.
   


5. Could've done it with more style - Not only is the footage bad, but I went easy on the effects and got pissed off with the editing. If anything would've saved this project, it would've been VFX!!! I honestly just cracked it at the PC and gave up, my lack of HDD space crashing the old faithful just drove me bananas. Don't mind the new titles though, at least AE wasn't letting me down yesterday.

In my desperation I even tried using Total Media Extreme's Showbiz and Showbiz 2 to edit the footage, but that lead to more problems. Firstly, the first Showbiz is pretty damn crap, won't even let you lay down additional audio tracks (e.g. music) to go with the vision.

Secondly, Showbiz 2 won't do mp4 files. This cam saves onto SD cards in mp4 :\

I'm sick of my mediocrity right now. This vid = epic fail...

YouTube experimental encoding

I've been producing some videos for the local paper's website of late, and I've been playing around with encoding settings again for YouTube in Premiere Pro.

For the sake of meeting the recommended player size of 1280 x 720, I've gone with packaging my .mov files with the H264 codec as we did back in the CMNS6040 days. Ah CMNS6040, what awesome fun that was. And I really don't like to use the word awesome unless I feel that it's necessary.

Looks bloody horrible of course, but meh...what can you do when YouTube decides to enlarge their players, except comply.

I haven't had much luck tweaking the settings using the H.264 codec itself, although I did find this nifty website called the Streaming Learning Center which explains YouTube's "New" HD Formats quite simply.

Not that I'll need to worry about all this after next week, as I've ordered some new HD equipment. But still, it would be nice for me to finally get the hang of tweaking the settings in Premiere Pro using the H.264 codec. At least down to a 480p size anyway, hate the false advertising using the 1280 x 720 setting. Just coz it's that big, it doesn't actually make it HD!