Tuesday, October 30, 2012

We'll Fix It In Post!

Today we got started on editing the videos we shot last week.  We blazed through making our movies using improvised shot lists and storyboards.  Hopefully, we won't require any reshoots but today was all about assembling a rough cut.

We've got a lot of bloopers and outtakes, and hopefully there's some decent footage in there as well. 


Don't worry, he was just fine.



Thursday, October 25, 2012

Shooting Up The Place

Today was pretty much dedicated to shooting video here in the PNG Lab at Elmwood Park Public Library.  We had two separate teams shooting two separate movies, so not stepping on each other's toes was a bit of a challenge.

We also had our noisy 3D printer going on in the background so hopefully that won't show through on the final footage.

We're still printing off busts of our students. These are about 6 inches tall!


I hope these kids are as pumped for learning to use Adobe Premiere Elements as I am because next class is going to be all about non-linear video editing!  Yeah!

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

What's Film?

Today the kids are continuing with project they started at the end of last class.  The challenge is to create a movie 2-5 minutes in length that isn't terrible.  Sounds like a tough assignment, huh?

Other requirements are that the movie should have a script, a storyboard and the final project should include multiple camera angles and cuts in editing.

Can't wait to see what they come up with!

Thursday, October 18, 2012

3-D Wrap Up & Video Genesis

Today we sealed up the open spaces left in the rest of the 3-D models that were near completion. We will print them in the next few days.




We also introduced our next project which will be a video scene that will be entirely scripted, storyboarded, filmed and acted by the students. Creative juices are flowing and the everyone is jotting down ideas for what will eventually become their film!

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

First Print!

The models are coming along and we've even begun to print out one student's 3-D bust of their head, face and upper torso. Some more re-shoots were done but we're making progress. More models should be printable in another one or two sessions.


Thursday, October 11, 2012

Re-Photo

So we ended up retaking most of the student's photos today and the result have been good but the manual stitching tends to further distort the portions that were already near perfect on the first processing.


Examples to come:

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Re-Stitch

Today we tried to re-shoot and restitch the photos for our 3-D models with varying results.

Here is one initial photo submission that came out great to begin with:


Thursday, October 4, 2012

Re-3D-Animated!!

Make no mistake, making 3D models is super difficult.  Autodesk recently released a bunch of free apps under the name 123D and have made a lot of the work easy.  Our students have had mixed results, but the models Nick and Mateo made are rather encouraging.

We'll keep plugging away and maybe in a few days we'll have workable, printable 3D models!



Tuesday, October 2, 2012

3-D Animated!

Today was the classes first foray into the world of 3D modeling.  We're using an interesting technique developed by AutoDesk and utilizing a piece of software called 123D Catch.  This software works similarly to taking a panorama on a digital camera.  It stitches a series of photos together to make a 3D model.  It's not easy to get the photos stitched together, but it can yield some pretty cool, and interesting results.