Storyboard for 3D Animation (page 1)

WOOOOOO, page 1 of my story board for the animation pt2 brief. The 2 objects I've chosen is a cactus and a balloon. Maya is definitely hard to get used to. Expressing these characters will be a challenge T_T. hope u like my sketches.

Wong Fu Productions

Wong fu productions is a group of 3 media students (Philip Wang, Wesley Chan and Ted Fu) who started out as just playing around with cameras making amateur music videos and short story clips. Today they've created a growing independent company and continuously making new video projects for millions of fans across the globe.

Because they were students before, I find it easier to understand and relate to their efforts towards video filming.

The video here called 'Yellow Fever' is what made them branch out into the world and became more popular due to the amount of views on youtube. 

The Ugly Duckling; Disney

For my interactive media brief, the fairy tale that I decided to based it on is 'The Ugly Duckling'. I've looked at different versions such as Disney and I tried to get the idea of what this story was about. I will be doing a story book with flash and give the player a choice of questions and answers given so different outcomes will occur.

Horror: Painted Skin 2008

Besides anime, I also have an interest in horror films. So far, no horror film is able to scare me yet so if you know one thats worth watching, be sure to let me know although I might have already seen it.

Over the weekend I've watched 'Painted Skin'. I thought it might be another 'Crouching Hidden Dragon-thing' or something like House of Flying Daggers... This film was actually better than I expected. The action scenes weren't as fake and there's a good plot in story telling. The film is stated to be horror but you don't see a lot of it compare to The Ring or The Grudge. It's based on an ancient chinese fairy tail where a fox demon is disguised as a human. The story turned out to be more of a love story about jealousy and trust but I like the quality of the film and the effort of how they made the costumes and backgrounds so beautiful.

Anime: Michiko to Hatchin

Anime and manga is something that I've always been interested in because I'm just attracted to it's appearence and it's wide range of genres. Throughout the blog I might write continously about the anime that I come across or currently watching.

Michiko to Hatchin (a.k.a Michiko e Hatchin) is the series that I'm currently catching up with. New episodes are still being broadcasted in Japan. The style is so different from other animes that I've seen so far. You'll get to see the past of the main characters at the same time their characteristic development changes. Overall I like to keep on watching this anime because the story and genre just stands out from the others.

Resident Evil: Degeneration

WAH! I've played all the games in the Resident Evil series and I can't believe that they already made a feature length CG film. My brother saw the DVD in HMV and brought it straight away. It was a great treat for this weekend, I absolutely enjoyed watching all the action. Things were moving a bit too fast so I thought it could confuse people who haven't came across Resident Evil (or Biohazard) before. The film involves a story with the 2 main characters from Resident Evil 2, Leon and Claire (which are my favourite characters from all the games).

In my opinion, this film is created for fans and people who has some knowledge about the game series. The graphics were good and realistic but I kinda liked the style in Resident Evil 4 game better. I've noticed CAPCOM must of tried to put efforts in the movements of the character's hair hahaha.

What I liked about this DVD is that they did voice bloopers 0___________0. It was the most funniest thing ever!

If any of you are fans of the Resident Evil games, I recommened this film.

My Podcast Evaluation.

For the Digital Cultures brief we had to create a visual essay considering on how Leeds can be an 'Ubiquitous City'. There were many choices to choose from, I wanted to do it on futuristic cars and all sorts but I chose to do a podcast on 'The Octopus Card' which is used by the citizens of Hong Kong. I chose this because I had the oppotunity to use it when I went there and I'm quite familiar with this revolutionary technology.
This card already existed in 1997 and I was wondering why can't it be launched in more countries. It was able to make payments in transit fees more quicker therefore queues and traffic congestion might improve. Today you can even use it to pay for food in restaurants and supermarkets. I found it really fun to use in Hong Kong and it was more convenient. I wanted to compare some events in Leeds such as going on the bus with the life in Hong Kong as they use the card. I had a friend to film me getting on the bus and using the vending machine. We also tried to film in zara but got kicked out by the security guard and people delibrately got in the way of our filming when I've only got one chance to film it. Filming the vending machine was a little hard and we had to do it twice because the first packet of crisps got stuck in. I went on youtube.com and downloaded the methods of using the card to get drinks and transit as the comparison to my filmed videos. I love the speed of the card transfering wirelessly the sums of money when purchasing something. It takes about 0.03 seconds which is so much faster than credit cards. The downside of these is that it doesn't store any information of the card holder therefore when it's lost, someone else can find it and use whats left on the card.
For the podcast, I used Final Cut Pro to assemble all my research into one video. I still can't use it that well and I always had to render everything. I decide not to use a voice over and used subtitles for my video. The background music is from a korean film soundtrack and I thought it matched my podcast very well. After creating the podcast, I was able to learn alot about the idea of making travelling and everyday life more simple and functioning comfortably. I realised there were other cards similar to the Octopus card such as the Oyster card in London and the Suica card in Japan.
The podcast lasts to 2 minutes so I wished I could of done more like try to film more videos to compare it to Hong Kong. It was very time consuming when I had to try and make the timing of the film clips match the pace of the music, but I thought it flowed quite well. Overall I was quite happy with what I have done and I hope the podcast was able to convey to the viewers the idea of how the Octopus card can be used in Leeds when we approach to the future.