Week 5 - Day One

It was a bank holiday yesterday so I only have 4days (3 now considering the time I am writing this at) before a week off due to the TT races. I was actually able to use the laser cutter today, no mishaps either, so that's a bonus. The only thing that went wrong when I was using the cutter was when I resized my trees, I made them way too big! luckily I only cut out two layers in this large size so I didn't waste too much paper, they will probably go in my sketch book now (we will see though).

Talking about sketch books, I need to get mine updated, currently looking like that will be over the TT race week though (but I seriously hope not!) I haven't updated my sketchbook for about half a week and I've missed out bits so in total about a week and counting needs to be put it. I don't like drawing in sketchbooks, I find it messy and wastes lots of pages, its cheaper to use larger loose sheets. Either way, I need to stick in my drawings of my animals before I loose them all.

So back to today. I used the laser cutter. Got about 10 trees cut I think, so thats 20 layers that now need a yellow layer glued onto them. When I use the cutter I placed a thin yellow sheet of paper below the thicker paper because there wasn't any yellow card about in the art department (that I knew of anyway) so I now need to glue each yellow and corresponding white piece of paper together. Thankfully I still have some liquid glue.

After being shown how to do the greenscreen effect on sony vegas I have now realised I cant use pink. It has to be green as the pink ends up making everything else rather transparent, which is no good at all. My new plan for filming is to have my creatures lying flat on the table, on the green paper and to make them walk. I will then put the video into sony vegas and remove the green so allow the placement of the background mountains/hills. I will photograph the trees too against the green background screen so I can simply pop them in beside the creatures and infront of the mountains (I still need to make them...) This idea came from Andy who is also helping me out in sony vegas as he knows how to use it. The video below is my first attempt at using sony vegas and I feel I can get the greenscreen to work well, its just everything else.

The idea to photograph the creatures, background and trees separately was thought of as my creatures are very small and as I was explaining to another student how I was going to make them stand up Andy mentioned how they make south park. Since I have to return all the equipment this week friday morning it will probably be easier and quicker to film the creatures separately because then I don't have to worry about the background not moving ect. I need to get my next lot of morphing creatures photoshopped so I can print them off, otherwise a very early morning for me. (eek!)