Fully Focused and Fully Cold

So normally I enjoy doing work with the TV on because the silence of my house creeps me out. But today I decided to make an exception after taking notice of how long it took me to finish a few simple tasks last night.
And wasting time is a huge thing with me, so once I saw that I didn't want it to happen again. And the results so far have been great. Everything's nice and quiet and I'm fully focused with what I'm workin on: FamBiz's next photo/video shoot; along with a few other things.

I'm jumping between After Effects and Photoshop this time around putting together FamBiz's photoshoot and video shoot together. I figure storyboards helped the Janet Jackson montage go a lot faster last time, I figure why it wouldn't now. As much as I hate doing storyboards because I sometimes get picky in how I want the shot.

I'm finally learning the importance of pre-production and the whole concept of "When You Fail to Plan, You Plan to Fail." I used to go head first into projects and tend to just go with the flow, I still got the results I wanted for the most part, but I always felt like I could've done MORE.
After reading John Wooden's book, I've really started to embrace the art of preparation and having a plan and going with the flow when things don't always follow through.

I love the concept that we have for both our routine and the video and whatever the outcome, I wanna be able to walk away know I did everything humanly possible to put together a great product.

Well, my short mini break is over. Time to get back on that grind.

Falalala-Tired

So FamBiz has a photo/video shoot coming up soon. And in attempts to put that together, instead, I ended up mixing the music for our Christmas set. I thought that this wouldn't take long at all since most of the songs would be coming from the previous mixes already. Man, was I wrong. I spent parts of the night trying to study the music so it makes sense when I put it together. Along with that, I was also in need of more of a angry christmas song as the break down section; THAT took awhile to find. There were plenty of candidates, but if it didn't strike me with what I was looking for, I didn't want to use it.

I hate how nit-picky I can be sometimes, I was only making a rough cut of the music, but I was editing it like I was making it for final use. I figure that if I do the work early, I wouldn't have to do TOO much when notes to fix it come after. I just didn't want to too much where it feels like I wasted my time.



After all that hoopla, at around 5:30 in the morning. I finally got to starting on the storyboards for our video shoot. I've gotta crank these out as quick as I can so I can send them out to our director. They're really rough, but once I put them together in After Effects in syncopation with the music, it should make more sense. I'm just debating whether or not to shorten the music due to the amount of time it may demand of us if I keep it at the full length of 2:30. I think I might go nuts listening to the video shoot song a million times though... we'll see.

Either way, I think another all nighter (or late nighter) maybe called for. I want the director to see what I see so when the day to film comes. It should be a bit less stressful. =]

Anyways, I've gotta get ready to teach class. Keep an eye out for the Janet Jackson video! It's done and ready for upload!

After Effects Crash #2

After many crashes, and many attempts of trying to figure out a work around in rendering the Icon video. I've resorted to hopefully using one of the machines over here at work later on after I get everything done, OR go to Santa Monica and use the computers from Art Institute.

Either way, this video needs to be rendered with the quickness. Maxt Out is this Saturday and I would much rather have it sent out by tonight or tomorrow at the latest.

And THANK GOD for story boarding. As much as I'm not the hugest fan of story boarding my work, thank God I decided to take the time to. It seriously saved me at least 2 days worth of work.

Here's some images from what I've been workin on so far. It's not much, but hopefully you guys get the idea. =]

Staring At The Screen Too Long

Adobe After Effects just crashed, so I'm currently taking a break working on a motion graphics video montage for Maxt Out's Icon performance. It's an introduction to the icon of this year before the icon performance. 

The process has been pretty fun, it was a bit of a drag in the beginning because I had no idea how I was going to approach it. But once I had planned and story boarded everything out, it's been going fairly smooth. The only real drag about it is how long it takes to render off my laptop. It's not exactly a rendering machine, but it does the job for the most part. I'm actually thinking about stopping by my old college so I can just render it. It would probably only take 20 minutes over there compared to the 3 grueling hours my laptop takes (and that's only about 1 min 30 secs worth, the whole video is about 3 minutes).

Looks like After Effects is back up. Time to get back to work.