The Color Of Ideas Production Notes

Being my first piece of work in donkey years, I have to admit I am rather rusty, not that I had much to lose in the first place. But I'm not going to be the same tub of lard oozing with negativity.

RIGHT!!!

I decided to take a rest today considering 4 things.

1) worked till 4.am

2) Federer and Murray

3) Manchester United and Arsenal

4) Dinner with family

So Saturday (or early Sunday morning) was day 10 of shooting and this are a few stills and notes from the project so far.

The Rig

- I decided to go with the use of a DSLR for this one, however the fact that my beloved EOS350D was in dire need of s service and optical realignment meant I had to fall back on my father's more "pricey" Nikon D80.... not that its a bad thing.... just that I always found Nikons to be a little to heavy on saturation. Anyway, I was in luck for I could do something new :)

For the first animated sequence, which is basically a shot of the camera pulling back from a tabletop of M&Ms I realized that the VR lens was out of the focus range.. I'd literally have to stake the Piglet chair from the TV room onto Tigger to get everything into focus. I was planning to shoot the entire short with the wide angle, which nestled comfortably in it's silk-ish case, waiting for someone to sit on it.. and break it. I then tried using both for one shot... zooming out till the VR hit it's max, before switching to the Wide angle to continue the shot. There was bound to be some form of image distortion but it wasn't such a bother, even after I viewed the complete shot. I will have the images up shortly.

The TOOLS

- one of the tough parts making this film was painting over the M&Ms between shots, so I fashioned a couple of "grips" from allan keys and metal wiring, accompanied with various everyday tools. I needed the "straightness-measuring-thing" for whenever I needed to readjust the camera after moving it around for different shots.

Paint was a nightmare as far as getting the right blue was concern. My mom said it was a shade of Cyan, and had me raiding the nearby stationary shops for the right color for half a day till I decided to try mixing it for myself.

Day 8 I discovered that I had made the BIGGEST MISTAKE anyone coule ever make in making a film like this. who the hell shoots for hours on end with differing color subjects without setting white balance? Yes, go ahead and laugh.... The yellows turned green at times, orange to red and so on which was testicle-tuggingly annoying when it came to viewing playback. On the bright side, the color defects of my paint colors were made less obvious by this blunder.. so YAY!

How to survive a 4 hours take...

YES...

The Rig on day 11

The Shot

Stay tuned for more! I have a wonderful 3-0 match to get back to!

Hello Hurricane!

In 2005, a curious overweight bald-ish-by-choice boy from Methodist Boy Secondary School Kuala Lumpur (MBSSKL) took it upon himself to smuggle his considerably large (by today's standards) camera into school to record what he considered a unique needle in a haystack (Hi Jon Foreman!) life; which is now stored on a 6 year-old Dell Inspron, 2 External Hard Drives, 3 DVDs and a Macbook. Aside from the clear sense of paranoia that shrouded this poor bloke, he did so intentionally not only to preserve what he regarded to as the best days of his life, but also to work his way to composing a music video, which he did eventually in November 2005.

2 years later, He decided one day to make a short stop motion animation piece after watching half of Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride... He spent 2 and a half days of his life rolling blue balls around his study, living off Twisties and ginger beer. That same year he produced a few other films and short animations, one landing him in trouble with a tall skinny dingbat from Victoria Institution (V.I) [FUN FACT: MBS and VI have been rival school for over a century!].

In 2009, things went rather quiet. He was no longer the fat bald-ish librarian who was on the prefect's wanted list anymore, nor was he the fat long-haired Mambo patron who spent most of his afternoons in college playing ping pong with a Confucius incarnate and a ninja from Singapore. After working on just one film with a budding film director who was to play his son in a play that NEVER CAME OUT AND THE ADMIN AT HELP UNIVERSITY WILL BURN IN HELL'S KITCHEN'S PROPANE-POWERED BBQ SET FROM ACE HARDWARE, everything stopped. There were ideas, but nothing... nothing was happening. His blog, lay there in cyber space as an abandoned shack, where Haloscan hackers would visit every once in awhile. Perhaps it was the loss of confidence, or the lack of direction and as Brad would say "he just needs to get some ass..." whatever the case may be. Perhaps he just got caught up with wanting to get arrested so badly he spent more time figuring out how to hide 30 tons of dynamite in Parliment (SUCK IT RAIS!)...

2010 started with a bang, literally because nothing goes bang like a good Molotov through stained glass... following the influx of political cum he found rubbed all over the newspaper and internet, he decided to give an idea, which he had in mind for more than a year a try... he also wrote the most narcissistic blog post he had ever written, referring to himself in third person and making his life sound like it was worth a rabbit's toenail. He now thinks that this is where he should stop and go back to using the blog as a space for his animations and film work to do the talking, not him. But he thinks that it feels good to vent after a long day at work, he now understands why people often blog about themselves, not only is it free advertising, but it makes them perhaps feel better about themselves, that the last 3-4 thousand words were dedicated to them, and that they have earned those kind words.... or that they just wish someone was working on a paperback book holding every account of their lives, which is why Britney Spears stopped wearing underwear and shaved bald for a bit, because, like most, she knew it all does her well in the final accounting of the 50,000 book chapters and magazines regarding her pubic region and shiny bald spot.

He paused, to realize that he in spite of making a point the world would forever curse him for, and also realize on the contrary that he was still talking in first person.... he pressed alt + left, which brought him to iTunes, where John Lennon's Intuition was playing... He frowned, and muttered...

I blame Yoko.