Packaged Stories (Moving Images)

What we have done

This week has been all about shooting the movie for our final presentation. As previously mentioned Canon, in their gracious manner, have been kind enough to lend us a professional video-camera for this week and thus we chosen to dedicate as much time as possible to get the most out of it.

Monday and Tuesday were spent picking up and preparing the equipment that we have been using and also, to some extent, going over the pre-production material. Wednesday was our first actual day of shooting, starting of early in the morning working from sunrise to sunset in the late afternoon. Although we did not manage to get all the scenes we wanted to, we are quite happy with the overall result.

Amazing view from one of our filming spots

Olof rigging up some camera equipment

Thursday was spent in the Green Screen Studio (hence; studio) of KTH Media Production, an administrative unit working with moving images to assist the school’s academics. Our hope is that this particular feature, allowing for a lot of interaction within the actual movie, will give our presentation some extra punch. Finally Friday is being spent, as we are writing this, finishing the last green-screen scenes.

Olof demonstrating how to act

Lucas rocking that microphone

As you might have guessed, our plan is to try and make the movie speak for most of our presentation, taking advantage of the visual qualities that a video provide to really show the audience how Packaged Stories is supposed to work.    

What we will do

We will continue to shoot during this weekend, aiming to be done by noon on Sunday. Hopefully we can also start the editing by the end of that same day. We plan on having loads of digital VFX (Infographics, environments, dynamics and similar not to mention all the GS-related work) to further enhance our movie.

We also plan on finishing our text for the book this weekend. As of right now, we have a draft ready but to get the final result we need to add more text. In addition to this we are going to create and/or decide upon what graphics we want and which quotes to emphasize for our chapter to be completely done.

We still haven’t got any answers from the scientists and industry RnD-personnel we contacted which is a bit worrying. However, we plan on making a last attempt on calling them so that we hopefully can get some valuable information to our report before the deadline on tuesday.

Challenges Encountered

As always, the greatest challenge is to get enough time to shoot everything we need. Although there are only four of us, finding big enough matching gaps in our individual schedules is hard. It is not impossible however, obviously we seem to have managed fine this week, and the result is usually that something we want to shoot has to be cut.

Another challenge, albeit of a more technical nature, has been to crank the most out of the camera we borrowed. We have jury-rigged an elaborate mixture of low-end budget equipment from the camera to a laptop and finally to an external hard drive. This particular solution was finally successful, although it took quite a lot of time to figure out. The result being that we have been able to record a stream of 10 bit - RAW, CDNG at 4K.

In other words, kick-ass quality!