Week 3 | Day 1

Firstly, we wanted something like this as the alien robot was supposed to come from the ground itself. But since we changed to the wall, this was not used. 

I was in charge of the whole editing process and i also did a simple credits shot. Not too fancy though as it not that important. I just did this in after effects. 

There is one part where it is actress' POV of her waking up and I did try using premier pro but it I think it is not that successful and it does not look real. I tried asking my friend whether she noticed that it is a POV scene but she said she didn't noticed. When I told her that it's POV, then she noticed it. So I thought of using after effects using mask and feather it. 

Week 2 | Day 4

reference pictures on concretes

There will be a scene where the robot will come out from the ground and there is definitely going to be debris. So I did debris in maya. I just tested it out first on the random sizes and how fast the debris going to be. I followed one of the tutorial that our lecturer gave us and it really helped a lot. Some things that I need to work on is the textures and also to make it more explosive. 

I also did rotopaint on one the shots but I had some problem along the way and Yanjia helped me. I had problem rotopainting some of the trackers as some of them appeared and disappeared in the scene. So she helped me solved the problem and also an easier method to do. I am really thankful that she helped me. 

Week 2 | Day 2

We went to re-shoot some scenes. But only Kalyn, Zuraidi and I went to the shooting place while the rest of our members went to the lab and do their own work so as to not waste any precious times. We shoot as fast as possible and made sure that there were no mistakes.

Week 2 | Day 1

We were stressing out as the actual footage which was shot on Friday cannot be used as it is hard for us to track. We were panicking as we had to go back to the location and re-shoot. The problem was, if we re-shoot some of the footage, the lighting will not be the same as the previous footage. We discussed and talked about what needs to be re-shoot and how we can improve on it.

Week 1 | Day 5

IT'S THE SHOOTING DAY!

We went to the location which is an old car park at Outram Park. We met at 1030 am but as usual, some of us were late. I was one of them. Anyway, we then planned what to shoot first. We planned to shoot the important scenes first which is the effects shots. Then shooting the other scenes. It was much more easier shooting the scenes on the real shooting day as we are familiar with what to do. 

What I did?

I acted out as the girl in the film and also helped them with cinematography. How the angle and the perspective is in the scene. It was very tiring as I had to run a couple of times as the girl in the film was chased by the tentacle robot. It was so much fun acting and helping during the shooting.

Problems?

Some of the problems were the lighting. The light was too harsh that day and we had to wait for it to dim it down a bit. That caused us to delay a little bit as we had to wait for a few minutes. Besides that, the trackers that we printed out could not be seen on the wall as it was too small. So we decided to combine the trackers to make it look bigger but because of that, we did not have enough trackers. So we used the tape as the trackers. 

Week 1 | Day 4

What I did?

I edited the test shots into premiere pro to see whether the shots are clear and to finalize the angles. I also went to to research on how to do my own perspective from waking up. As seen in the above video, it has this blurry effect and also they blinked. I tried doing this by using fade to black and it looks a bit fake but I will try to improve on it.

This is the test shots that I edited in premiere pro. 

Problems?

One of the problems that I faced was making the 'waking up' effect looked real. I tried lens blur but it still looked weird. I tried doing different effects but to no avail. I will try to improve on it and make it look realistic as possible. 

Plans for the next day?

We will be having the real shooting the next day which is on the Friday. I think it will be easier this time to shoot as we all are familiar to the place and we know what angles to shoot on which scenes so as to save time. We hope it will be a success and we can't wait!

Week 1 | Day 3

For Day 3, we went to our shooting location which is at Outram Park. It is an old shopping mall with a car park on top of it. We went to the old car park to shoot our video. It looked abandoned and creepy just like how we wanted it to be. It was really fun yet tiring shooting. All of my teammates wanted me to be the actress. I had to run here and there but it was a great experience for me. There were some problems that we faced during the shooting.

• We bought tapes for the tracking but it was not that useful as it is quite reflective and we were scared that it will not work. So we decided to color the paper with black ourselves.
• We had an incident. We lost something and ended up not using the the thing that we borrowed. But we tried our best to make full use of what we had.

Overall, even though it was just test shots, we definitely know what to do on the real shooting day as we know what perspective and angles we will be using. We also handle the problems before hand so that it will be easier on the real shooting day. We now know what to bring and what to do on the day itself. Things went smoothly on the test shooting day and hopefully it will also run smoothly on the day itself. Besides doing test shots on that day, I also searched materials and textures for our tentacles robot. 

However, it is not finalized yet. I still have to do some more researching on the textures.