Draft Animation

I'll be updating this one with new shots. I also don't understand why it's changing the size of the video :s It's supposed to be 16:9 instead of 4:3.

[update April 8th] I've added some new drafts to the video. I'm doing the difficult important shots first and they have been really a pain in the @*$&%.

Shooting

The week before shooting
The shoot was planned in the weekend and I had one week to get all the props for my animation. I was concerned about the cake I needed for episode one. Tuesday I looked on the internet for cake shops in Edinburgh and all the prices online were super expensive! They easily asked 90 pound for a cake. I printed out some addresses and went out to find them.
I had to wait at the first shop because the cake lady was talking about a wedding cake with some costumers. I looked around and they had some nice examples. When it was my turn I asked her if she could do something like my sketch and how much it was. It was expensive to make it and when I told her it needed to be done by Friday she told me she couldn’t help me with the cake. But she knew another shop that might be able to make it for me. When I went there they were closed…
I had one address left and it was a long walk. I almost wanted to try it and make it myself but decided to go anyway. The shop was called “Have your cake & eat it” and I thought well that’s a good start. Inside I showed my sketches, my project and they were quite happy to do it! That it had to be finished by Friday wasn’t even a problem. I managed to make a deal with them; they gave me a discount on the cake and I put their contact details in my credits and they get a DVD. In the shop they have a screen where they can show the animation to the customers and at the same time it’s good advertisement for the both of us.
I got the cake on Friday and it looks really wonderful!

I also got a message late at night from Patricia. The apartment was double booked! We tried to sort it out with the other person and we finally came to the deal that he has the apartment for Friday and Saturday to shoot and we use it Sunday. But in the end the other guy said suddenly that he needed it Sunday too and went offline.
The next day Patricia tried to book the equipment for a longer period but everything was booked till the end of May! (School has not enough equipment obviously). In the end she managed to make some arrangement and now we could have the equipment Monday and Tuesday too. So we booked the apartment for those days instead of the weekend. Later I heard that guy didn’t book the apartment in advance at all. He just said he wanted it that weekend while we had it booked two weeks in advance so he was horribly rude by saying we needed to change our plans.

First Filming Day (Sunday)
I went to Patricia’s to pick up the equipment. Turned out that it was 3 suitcases (one of them big enough to hide a person in it!) and a huge bag. The two of us had to carry it to the flat and I thought we would could do it easy. But everything was so extremely heavy lol. We were lucky it was sunny that day. When we finally got to my flat we saw it started to rain! O_o We had to shoot outside in a car during the daylight so it sucked. After a while it stopped and we went down to clean the car. Julia, my flat mate and owner of the car, helped us. We were almost ready to shoot and it started to hail! We needed to put the camera back in the case quick and hurry to keep everything safe. The next try it stayed dry.
We also did 3 more scenes in the flat and we finished late that night. I was so tired!


Second Filming Day (Monday)
This was just one scene in the apartment we booked. Julia brought the equipment in her car to the apartment. This time Patricia and I filmed the kitchen and the shooting went quick. We were finished in 3 hours and managed to do everything in daylight.
Patricia already digitalized the footage from episode 2 and Wednesday we shoot episode 1 (the one with the cake). At first we had the equipment till Tuesday but Patricia couldn’t film that day so we changed it to Wednesday.

Third Filming Day (Wednesday)
We started very early with shooting because we had to do it all in one day. That morning there was some ice and while I was walking to the apartment to shoot I almost slipped a few times with the cake holding in my hand 0_0 I had only bought one but I arrived safe.
We changed the room into a living room and started our final shooting day. Everything went smooth. The tripod was a bit lame but that was it. Used a lot of fish lines and in the end I had to destroy the cake which was very difficult for me to do. I loved it so much!
Suddenly we were done and after doing our victory dance we packed everything and changed the room back into the way it was. During the packing I got injured, something with a bamboo stick and a finger that kept bleeding haha.
We called Julia and she came to pick us up with all the equipment. I walked home with the remains of the cake. I’ve tried some of the cake and it was so sweet, almost too sweet :p

Patricia digitalized the footage and she discovered there was dirt on the lense while we were shooting. It’s weird because we both checked every shot before shooting it and the whole day we didn’t see anything. I watched the footage myself and you can see it really good. There was also too much light, everything was too bright. Also a thing we both hadn’t see while shooting. Now we have to shoot the entire episode all over! That means I also have to buy another cake :(

At least I can work at the second episode because that footage is ok. The next shooting we’re going to fix all the problems and even do it better than last time!