Chow King Lun, Vincent Final Major Project Logbook

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Final Major Project

and

Self Reflection

Chow King Lun, Vincent

SID: 11886231

Introduction

In 2019, Hong Kong underwent an unprecedented upheaval. No matter what, the environment, the atmosphere, and the relationship all changed, and I tasted the price of freedom.

Now, I am 29. I experienced a full time working job after my higher diploma. I learned the skills and cooperating with the company over these few years. When I go back to the school and meet this final major project is a rare opportunity to create a project that I want to and under my vision.

After these few years, I wonder what film or movie is? In this degree, I learned about storytelling, and the film will tell a story to the others, but we also need to consider our audience. In this Hero's age, the multiverse movie is shaking the world, and everyone enjoys seeing it develop, and they dream of working with it. In 2019, There are too many hero stories that happened in Hong Kong and are unforgettable and historical even though it has passed a few years already.

In this final major project, I will try my best to write a story that I want to, and try to create them to face the audience.

Project Description - Video

In the Shape of Rest Project, I am going create a docudrama video, information from my early thought construction, mid-term ideological construction, thought establishment, industry engagement and theoretical engagement made me very aware of my subject, immigration and identity.

Due to the severe epidemic, the COVID-19 outbreak forced many of our shooting directions to change. Fortunately, we were able to find a suitable production direction at the end, which also made our work full of characteristics under the epidemic.

Docudrama

Between storytelling and the filmming, docudrama is the great method to produce the video base on the strong research and the director experience(Paget, 2016), which is easy to control the storyline and the actor.

Docudrama is seoarate from documentaries and drama, this word is also descripte the artefact stucture(Why Docudrama?, 1999), which is nice way to art something what documentaries cannot be filmed.

Inspiration | Searching

"Searching" is a set of movies that I watched a long time ago. He used the computer screen and the Internet as a medium to start a horror movie about a father searching for his daughter. I think this direction is very suitable for this design because using the computer screen as the main screen can create the mainline and provide a lot of information. But what about using a picture as the main screen?

Searching production team and sharing

The above video is the production team of Searching, and it also gave me a boost, because the creators behind the scenes were mainly completed by the two of them. Their application is familiar to me, and the principle is the same as I imagined. Now it is only the last problem, how to make these window pictures.

Easter Egg

Easter egg is the best method to tell the extra message to the audience(The “Easter Egg” Syllabus: Using Hidden Content to Engage Online and Blended Classroom Learners*, 2018), and I would like to use this skills, to hide and let the auidence to search the element which is discover by themself inside the video. The answer will show in the Project Website.

https://sites.google.com/view/theshapeoftherest/about/easter-egg

Easter Egg Inspiration | Cloverfield

Cloverfield is a set of films shot in the first person. It also uses this technique to film the world's end to add horror elements. His feature in the easter egg part is that sometimes you have to stop the film from being able to watch the easter egg part. The easter eggs are all related to other media.

Easter Egg Inspiration | READY PLAYER ONE

Player Number One should be the best example of using Easter eggs to illustrate movies in recent years. At that time, some audience members even collected Easter eggs and entered the cinema to watch this film set(Pao, 2020), so using him as one of the sources of inspiration for this project was very important.

Theme Description

Base on the inspiration and my research, I balanced my workload and decided to create a fake screen-capture video with the easter egg storyline. The fake screen-capture can hide some easter egg and tell much more story to audience and create the transmedia environment around this project.

The audience can search the message on the web, the Cloverfield shows the fast pacing easter egg movie rhythm will not let the movie feel very odd.

Project Goal

Understand the identity of Hong Kong people
Reasons for Hong Kongers to emigrate under this immigration wave
Feasibility of docudrama
Allocate work with team members to complete Transmedia projects.

The story of the Shape of Rest

The story is talk about a character-Vincent Fu is a reporter, who is hard-working person and he is working under extremely high pressure senior colleague-Edmond Lee.

One day, Vincent notice his best friend Leo, who is decided to move to Canada, Vincent grad this chance to interview him, but Vincent was awakened by Leo's conversation and wondered whether he should continue working on his dream or follow Leo's footsteps and go to another country.

The Creative process and adjustments

After the story structure in completed, the following will show the problems I have encountered in the process of creation, and the principle of creation.

This is a screenshot of the normal window

Zoom in screenshot of the normal window

Here is a screenshot of my design window

Zoom in screenshot of my design window

The screenshot of the normal window is enlarged 600%

The screenshot of my design window is enlarged 600%

You can see, when the standard window zooms in to 600% its quality is inferior. And the standard window version cannot change the characters in the middle. The quality is inferior because JPG or PNG images have certain limitations on magnification. The vector graphics can be enlarged infinitely without distortion.

For the above reasons, I followed the picture shown in the screenshot, and create each icon painting by myself. There is an icon of the program in it and also a page-by-page processing.

Several of them will shown below.

Facebook

Is the most difficult Vetor image I designed this time, facebook can drive so many message one pag. In the page I designed down below, there are 5 easter eggs I develop inside, can you see what is in there?

The website botton icon is one of the difficult part to deisgn, is really hard to drop the colour with gradient looks like the real facebook page.

Left Side Button

Status Bar

The Top Bar and Story

Calendar

The calendar looks very simple in this position, but if you want to match the production of animation, plus simulation, it is challenging.

Real Calendar Application

Calendar Application Under Creation

Calendar Dock Icon

Calendar Dock Icon Month

Calendar Dock Icon Day

Font

To reduce the production time, we only concentrated on one computer system platform, Apple Computer.

There is a very iconic font in Apple's computer system, the word San Francisco. In addition, Apple has specific requirements for the space in its system, and there are particular standards in symbols.

Fortunately, Apple has clear guidelines on its web pages. We can only try to imitate it because there are too many things that we cannot refer to, and errors are inevitable because manual drawing is required.

Source: https://developer.apple.com/design/human-interface-guidelines/macos/overview/whats-new-in-macos/

The Guidelines of the windows button from Apple

The Guidelines of application icon from Apple

The Guidelines of Scope Buttons from Apple

Post Production Test

This time, I chose After Effect as the central production platform. In addition to using Photoshop designed pictures to link easily, you can also use the motion blur effect. After Effect is a better choice for graphic design movies.

In the early stage of creation, I mistakenly thought that when the compositions were both 1920 X 1080, the vector graphics could be enlarged and displayed. It was only later that I found out that 4K is required in another Composition to make the function of the vector diagram is exerted. The following are the early finished products, and you can see that the quality is very uneven in the prototype.

Demo Verion

Final Version

The Slider Control to the Calendra Icon

Editing the file between the Photoshop file

The Slider Control to the top bar time

The program code to use the slider control

Video Production

Under docudrama creation, the video did not write the script in the pre-production period, but a lot of tests were carried out on the film. After the above tests were successful, we started to imagine the interview. Object, during the process, I thought of Leo, my good friend, and the video he made for his friend who left Hong Kong. I am so happy to be a part of it. The footage also moved me very much, so I took the initiative and contacted him.

Leo immediately agreed to my request and became the first interviewee for this project. The film's concept was born from this, and it just matched what I thought in Project Process, to create a movie completed by immigrating and without a meeting. However, the process is far from professional film production, which is very important, but I think this one has more of a documentary feel.

The 4K compositions to HD compositions

Presentation Platforms

If the film score is good and the school affirms it, we will consider making the film public. As a set of films in under 20 minutes, we will prioritize Vimeo and Youtube. And hope to be able to use it as our Portfolio in the future. Some people may think that the film is too long, which will reduce the audience's desire to watch it, and it is not suitable for uploading to the Internet in this form. I'm afraid I have to disagree with this. The film's length is not directly related to the audience's intention to watch it. Otherwise, the online platform will not launch a live broadcast system (Hu et al., 2017).

When it comes to the audience, of course, I want the message I bring out to be able to spread to my gatherings. Still, this time the video is positioned at the beginning of the project "Recess". The message is delivered on other Transmedia platforms, Instagram, Podcasts, and Websites. We have all set a specific positioning for them, and we will mention them in the details on the "Stop" webpage. We all want to win on the screen as this graduation work to attract the audience. And then, go to other platforms to learn more information and play the functions of Transmedia.

Video Trailer

Transmedia

As we said on the presentation, there are three other artefact will generate from video storytelling, which is the Podcast and the instagram.

The website is the part of our artefact as well, But it will appear in the form of an easter egg, and link to this logbook, Perry's logbook and the project information (Presentation content).

Podcast

Podcast is a great platform to announce the radio artefact by episode, the podcast is our new attempt. To be honest, we are still trying to catch the rhythm to handle the radio programme, we have tried a talk show form this time, maybe someday we can try a solo radio programme in the future. Like Perry said, we hope this is sustainable project.

Last but not least, the podcast app allow keep listening under your iPhone lock-screen, we think this a good feature for the audience listen the episode on street. This is the reason why we think Podcast is a great radio artefact platform.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tiffany-huddersfield/id1622059376?i=1000559358498

Instagram Post Design Inspiration

Instagram

For the instagram content, we will post the 5 minutes of each interviewee of their content which is about Why they were going to immigrated, how they think about Hong Kong now and their memories about Hong Kong.

https://www.instagram.com/semirest519/

Conclusion

The topic of immigration may be a proposition that appears in every region(Li, 2005). The exciting thing about immigration is that it does not have an inevitable answer. After anyone or any family decides to immigrate, they will write their way.

After the transfer of sovereignty to China, Hong Kong people have another wave of immigration. The reasons for the immigration are very similar to the ones that appeared this time. They are all unbelieving and lazy of the same sovereignty. Interestingly, Hong Kong can be able to like in 1997, returning to its former glory? This one is unknown.

However, the immigration wave has emerged. Some people leave, some still cannot decide, and those who have not left are eager to go among the factors that make such a decision. We all love Hong Kong very much, but helplessly. The transfer of sovereignty, the confrontation between communism and capitalism under one country's two systems, is a panic. Leo's interview mentioned that "the response in 2019 is the answer", and then the textbook's falsification of history, the unreasonable verdict on the demonstrations, the political decision-making overriding the rule of law, etc., all made everyone's heartbreak for this place.

I am very fortunate to study this distance course in Hong Kong. I also hope that through this opportunity, the United Kingdom, a country loyal to Hong Kong's colonial period, can know what is happening in Hong Kong now, and I hope that the British can understand our feelings. I wholeheartedly think so.

I don't know how far Hong Kong will develop in the coming days, but I hope to express this matter to the British. It seems complicated, but I am also one of the people who love Hong Kong. If I can, through the method I am best at, convey to the hearts of every Hong Konger, that is the ideal of my graduation project.

Reflection

This project is regarded as one of the works that I find difficult. Animation production has never been my most vital area, so I thought for a long time before deciding to make this direction because I considered a doing the test is already doing the project. At last, the test was successful, and the project also began. On the other hand, I also consider the ability of my team members. If I want to do a comprehensive project about Transmedia, I need to think carefully about how to assign everyone's responsibilities. In the first semester, other team members and I had a pleasant experience. We also wanted to create another film this semester, but as I said in Project Process, in the beginning, we all wanted to develop and shoot movies. Still, the epidemic has affected us too much. Now I had to give up the division of labour from the last semester, and the division of labour fell into my hands. I hoped to give full play to my talents. I was mainly responsible for the film, and Perry became my helper; Gail had confidence in his web design, and Rachel assisted. Although there was a disappointing ending, I learned teamwork and communication are essential parts.

However, this time is elusive in terms of time allocation because the school did not make the recent decision until the end of March (I also mentioned it in thought establishment). If there is more time, every interviewee can make a similar style of film, it will be more immersive, and the expression on the screen will be more than the current one.

Looking back at the whole learning process, what made me realize the importance of Transmedia in life, and I also learned how to use it in this project. On the other hand, there is the method of thinking, which is very important for food creators, but I think I will be able to use this course's thinking and creation unit in the future.

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