Greengrass Camera Style

Phone Camera Abuse Recordings

These are some of the Youtube Videos I found in my study of the issue.

Kiamu!!! Website

I always knew what I wanted to make of Kiamu!!! once it's ready:

1. Enter festivals

2. Make it Viral - See: 'Gadoh' (2009)

Since Malaysia have this ridiculously strict censorship system, Malaysian's grew an affinity towards radical films. Despite being banned by the censorship board (LPF), 'Gadoh' gained viral success through Youtube. Receiving an average of about 30,000 views.

For a low budget film, it achieves what most low-budget filmmakers wants to achieve most - a massive audience.

How did they do it?

Well, obviously...the internet. That's why I've forked out another RM240 (£50) for website datahosting:

www.kiamu.my

My aim is to use this website as means of promoting the film prior to it's release, and ultimately (once the film is no longer entering festivals); to enable people of downloading the film directly from the website. I have enough storage space on the server to upload a few formats of decent quality copies. I'll also be uploading it on youtube (since Malaysians are [as of the rest of the world] really fond of it :P).

So will it get the 30,000 hits then? Well I definitely hope so.

PreProduction Materials, Finally Scanned

I've recently bought a 3 in 1 (Printer, Scanner & Photocopier) Canon Pixma. And immediately started scanning my PreProduction materials.

Character Sketch:

Storyboard:

Location Release:

Scene Summaries:

Shooting Schedules:

Floorplans:

Montage Animation Style & Look

The above is the basic design for the animated bits in Kiamu!!!, excerpted from the Njet-Steng explanation & demonstration scene. The basic design is...well..basic. The character is casted against a white background.

Looking at how dull and flat it is, I've decided to add a bit of texture into the design. And what other texture would be better to represent school students other than paper? So I applied a recycled paper look to it:

I think it looks fine but still plain somehow. So I revisit the schoolboy-paper concept and applied a lined school exercise/notebook look to it:
I think this looks better in some sense, but i still somehow preferred the wrinkles that I get from the other version, as it gives a somewhat grittier look. So i added the two elements up:

I'm liking this one, especially the depths I'm getting from it. So i took this design and played around with the colours and ended up with the one below:

I'm liking the reddish tint that somehow shows as if the material has worn out due to it's age. Which is cohesive with the concept that the narrator is describing events from his past. It also goes well with the colour theme of the whole production - Red, White & Black.

Problems Editing

A problem, caused by an apparent capturing issue has made editing "Kiamu!!!" a lot harder than supposed. When dragging captured footage onto the timeline, the video and the two audio tracks seems unified. However when I start editing (trimming/cutting/dragging) the video, the audio tracks doesn't seem to be affected. Vice-versa if I edit the sound, and if I for example apply a cross dissolve to audio track A1, audio track A2 is not the mirroring the action like it's supposed to. No tracks are locked, hidden or protected for this to normally happen.

Update: Looks like I've found the solution to this issue. Apparently I've miraculously clicked on an icon I've never had any knowledge of what it does:

The button is called the "Link Selection", in which we can choose to edit video & audio simultaneously or separately. This may come in handy, but I'll stick to locking & unlocking the tracks when I want edit separately.

Cant believe it took me a week to figure this out.

Powerpoint Slides

Just here to upload the slides (in jpegs) from my recent presentation: