Feeling Like The Undead

The past week has been routinely stressful.

Early starts and late finishes, even worse than usual eating and sleeping habits, feeling the pressure more than we have all year, it must be coming up to presentation time.

After a harsh couple of days that revolved around more mind boggling problem solving than filming, we finally had our footage. Three large bottles of fake blood, ruined clothes and dedication to our idea are all we needed.

The editing phase was next. So much complexity was needed to be incorporated for us to achieve our goals of a fully working interactive movie. There wasn’t much time to enjoy the process as the workload was pretty intense. You could see that group project was coming up. The atmosphere in f036 was tense.

As I designed the audio and cleaned up recordings/foley sounds, I then passed them on to Hector and Peter who would color correct the footage, cut the clips down and cut the audio more or less if needed. They would then be passed onto Peter who would bring the clips into Flash and add the functionality for the Flash Game. Ultan worked on the website in the back ground and we checked up on his progress at different intervals.  We made sure we were all on the same page and no one strayed away from the main idea.

After a strong week of work and a few headaches we have reached the time. Tommorow is judgement day. Let’s see how it goes.  C 

Time to see if all of our hard work has paid off. It’s been an emotional rollercoaster (to put things dramatically) but we now have a movie to show and have earned 3 months of sleep.

The workload was tough towards the end and we were frantically pulling every string to make this movie possible. Long days with little time for food and some sleepless nights made this project feel all the more real. We, like anyone in a zombie situation were fighting for our lives (err…project).

Overall we are happy with our progress, and given more time in the future would be interested in making a sequel. For now though, we just have to get our presentation perfected for the big day tomorrow.

Was it tiring? Yes. Was it worth it? Definitely!

For everyone who has been following us along the way, thank you for your support!

Peter

Finally we finished the project. It took longer and it was more difficult than I thought it would be. That only proves that we were paying closer attention to details and changing little details to have a better project at the end. Feeling proud about the project that we have done. Lots of work was put into into it but at the end hard work paid off.

Héctor

I am proud of what we have created in the end. We have learned that we can create something at a high standard without having specific guidelines to abide by. We had problems to face along the way but over came them.

Ultan

Zombies need educating too!

Today was the answer to all our problems. Despite a rocky start in the morning we finally managed to get the last of our shots, even while being in a bit of a rush. We came in at 8AM to an empty college campus (a communal sigh of relief was heard for miles). We met up with security and got our access to the A block and with very limited time until Saturday students would show up, we jumped straight into it  setting up with fake blood being applied left right and center. We shot and reshot a few of the scenes as many times as possible in order to have alternatives if we noticed errors later.

Just as we pressed stop at the end of our last scene, morning students came wandering around the corner towards their lecture, pausing momentarily to look at us (four guys standing around awkwardly covered in blood tends to get the response) before hurrying on nervously.

If you were there today and are reading this, the zombie situation is under control. Continue about your activities!

We left the A block and continued to shoot the remaining scenes, pausing occasionally to let more startled bystanders walk by us or to spray each other with more blood. You can never have enough blood! Our motto while filming.

We were finished by 12:30 which suited as the campus was now buzzing with activity. Now comforted by the fact that we had all of our footage, we backed it up to our hard-drives and skipped on home.

Next stop? Editing!

Peter

Finally on set!

We arrived into college today to begin filming our footage for the movie. Unfortunately, the college campus was packed with people, eliminating nearly all possibility of filming. But we made the most of it:

 

Peter

Poster complete – Logos and videos to come!

With one poster finished and another nearly done, we are well on our way to making the project look impressive to the public. For now, the poster will act as the profile picture for the Facebook and twitter pages until the logos are complete. But this is only a small step. We aim to get photos and videos while on set to have both on our facebook page and on the actual website itself in the “Behind the Scenes” section.

Next week is the beginning of Easter Break and the following week we head into a hopefully empty campus to begin shooting. Safe to say we are all looking forward to walking around our college covered in fake blood!

Peter

Promotional Material – Making the project Pretty!

We decided to meet up today to discuss creating promotional material for our project. At the moment, our facebook page looks quite bear so we agreed that Hector and Peter would each design a poster while Chris and Ultan would each make a logo. We agreed a week is enough for this as putting it off any longer would drag into the Easter break and we know everyone will be busy enough with other assignments as it is.

We are looking forward to seeing each others work after the Web Design lecture next week!

Peter

On Our Way

Good Morning!

It’s a beautiful day in Zombie land (I.T.B) today!

We just had our first meeting with our supervisor Stephen since our nerve racking demo earlier last month.

We have gotten great feedback from the supervisors and feel confident in our ideas more than ever. Stephen also informed us today that the college possesses a Pro Cam, the solution to our main problem (attaching the camera to the main character). The camera is light weight, aero dynamic and creates less to little rattle (handy for running scenes, which there will be a lot of).

The supervisors criticism formed a top idea that we can definately try out and will be of huge benefit to our overall final production. Group testing! As a Flash film, universal accesibility is a big key in our film doing well online. Different people need to be bale to access all the features we have to offer.

Also, we were told to create a series of promotional material for our film ie. Posters, Artwork, Website, Banners and the like. This gave us even more scope to expand on our creativity and to give the project even more attention.

Stay safe peeps, and remember, don’t be a hero. {:-)

 

Chris

 

 

Round 2

Presentation day finally arrived and it was time to see if our hard work had paid off. We were very impressed with the other groups and and it has given us a clear indication of the how the level of work directly determines the quality of project.

Overall, the day was enjoyable and seemed a success. Our prototype, trailers and website all seemed to impress people and even give some a scare as we were told afterwards. We had a couple of issues pointed out to us by the lecturer panel which we’ve taken note of for the future. We are now awaiting our next meeting with Stephen so we can get full feedback and begin organizing ourselves in terms of filming.

 

Peter