There’s a number of great projects up (check mdm.gnwc.ca for examples of some), but Team HotSpot has a strong live presentation and generally, the interactive screening of 7 Days goes over well.

With another class group project already lined up, we thank and congratulate each other and dissolve the group.

Team HotSpot had a great learning experience together, and we have a strong portfolio piece to show for it.

Hope you enjoyed watching our film as much as we enjoyed making it!

- Nick, Al, Jeff, Shahrzad, Anshul & Milim

Since we’re all busy presenting our various Building Virtual Worlds projects Tuesday morning, we don’t meet again until Tuesday afternoon, at which point we decide we need to begin voice-recording right away.

But before we do that, we need another look at the script to ensure our characters are saying what we need them to when we need them to. Meanwhile, Shahrzad gets more than 3/4 of our photos edited and rendered for final display (they look fantastic!), while Anshul reconfigures our Flash skeleton in ActionScript 2 so our photos can properly fit in them.

On Wednesday afternoon after class, we get a crash course on how to use the sound lab with Patrick Pennefather, and despite all the daunting software and hardware in the room, he shows us how to quickly and easily get the results we need via Ableton Live.

Anshul, Al, Nick and Milim all work in the sound lab Wednesday afternoon for about four-and-a-half hours, while Shahrzad works in Classroom 1 touching up our photos. Anshul sits at the mixing deck while Al (Mike), Milim (Mia) and Nick (Dave) begin recording their dialogue, moving away from the script to voice whatever sounds natural to them and their characters. It takes a while to find the right tone and volume for each soundclip, so we manage to get halfway through our checklist of scenes before we have to break away for Classic Game and Film night in Classroom 1. By the end of that night, we’re too tired to return, and we’re confident we can wrap up the next day.

Tell me we're almost done..

On Thursday – yay! – despite still feeling run-down from the flu, Jeff makes it in, and after class, comes into the sound booth and records his clip as Dave’s boss. Then from 5 to 9 p.m., Milim, Anshul, Nick and Al stay back and finish up all their dialogue, including the all-important fight scene. It’s pretty tough to keep a straight face in the midst of all this tension (especially with Mike’s screaming as he falls off the balcony), but we get what we need and call it a night. Meanwhile, Shahrzad has completed touching up all our photos for the film and moves onto the task of finding the right fonts and look for our credits and time markers for our flashback scenes.

On Friday, Nick gets the majority of the blog finished, and Al begins hosting our game on his web site. The site to visit if you’d like to view the finished product is right here

Al cleans up our PDF flow chart and hosts a better version of it here

Anshul then spends most of the evening working on the look and feel of our main web page. Al, meanwhile, splices together all our voice clips from the booth and our sound files onto FLV files, so our stack of images begins finally feeling like a photofilm. Shahrzad continues adding text to the film where needed, while Jeff “proofreads” all our clips and ensures the sounds all sync up with the images. We also take profile shots of the three main characters to use as icons in our flashbacks, and Anshul and Jeff work to resize these to use in Flash. Here’s what they look like:

Dave

Mia

Mike

We work until 8 p.m., and then all take a much-needed break after a long work week.

We meet again Saturday at noon and finish up the cosmetics of what’s needed. Our film works and fits into the framework, it’s just a matter of polishing up what we already have. Shahrzad starts Photoshopping an image of Mike and Mia’s gift for Dave for us to use as a background for our main web site (on Anshul’s site).

We work most of the day with the intent of finishing the project by the end of the day, just so everyone can enjoy their Sunday off.

We return Sunday at noon and discover Al had been working late into the night to affix our dialogue and sound to our FLVs. The photofilm project at this point is about 96 per cent done, we figure, so we spend an hour doing QA work – looking for any troubleshooting and instances that need polishing.

We discover that we need to increase the amount of ambient sound because the silence between dialogue in some scenes is deafening. We find a few more royalty free ambient sounds online and plug them in a few different places. We also decide to add a couple of shots here and there in the interest of pacing, and so Shahrzad begins touching up a few of the shots from the cutting room floor. Anshul meanwhile tries to find a way to better render our film for online play – it seems there’s a bit of lag time because of the size of the file.

And so we each take time to render our 23 .MOV files into FLV files via Adobe Media Encoder, and it’s a tedious process that keeps us here till 9:30 p.m. on Sunday, despite each of us trying to split the queue on our respective laptops.

But after it’s done, we stitch the film to our Flash frame on Anshul’s web site, and sit back and watch the movie. By this point, we’ve watched each scene so many times we’ve grown tired of it, but we do a final run-through. Everything looks good (enough!), and so we give each other a group high-five, call it a night, and go home to get some much-needed sleep.

Everything done, with 11 hours to spare! Now we just have to worry about our class presentation on Tuesday, but we’re quite confident in our product.

Wait - We have how many shots?

By the end of Wednesday, Anshul has developed the Flash skeleton into which our photos will slip into – this is a huge achievement.

Anshul explains how his Flash skeleton works

Milim and Shahrzad also do an exceptional job of whittling down our massive folder of shots into a much more manageable size. The group meets on Thursday evening and we spend a few hours finalizing which of these shots from this folder we’ll be using for the final photofilm.

The shooters become the shot

Unfortunately, Jeff gets hit hard with the flu on Thursday and has to leave home early. He’s out for about five days while a few of the group assemble over the weekend and tries to cover what needs to be done.

Nick assembles a list of sounds that will be needed for our scenes and gleans most of them from the IRC collection – which includes 10 DVDs of sound clips from 21^st Century Fox Studios, and another 10 from Universal Studios. He also grabs a few dozen clips (i.e. restaurant crowd noise, outdoor basketball noise) from royalty-free online sites.

Nick and Al get together Sunday afternoon in the project room to place these in the FLV files Al has created. Al mostly does this as he’s the more proficient one with Adobe Suite. We also practise voice recording just with the built-in mics from our laptop and AdobeSoundbooth (which sounds much better than we expected!).

Nick also begins posting the blog on Blogspot.com (which proves too frustrating), and starts the whole process on the much superior WordPress. Also on Sunday, Milim comes in and after a few hours of work manages a brilliant job of manipulating our main green screen image – that of a close-up of Dave holding Mike’s hand, as Mike continues to slip.

We break away in the evening as our Building Virtual Worlds projects are due the same week, and we each need to devote time to ours.

Another long day

Nick e-mails a copy of this to everyone in the team, and Al suggests I send George a copy. I’m really glad he does because you have some excellent suggestions – our dialogue is too short and choppy, and we fail to address our characters by their names in most of the scenes – failing to properly brand them for our audience. We also try to make the relationship between all characters a lot clearer with dialogue, without seeming forced (it’s kinda hard!).

Another brainstorming session after class

Also, this week, we plan out what establishing shots we need for Friday’s series of events. After nailing down what we need on a new roll of paper, we all make time on Thursday afternoon to do this.

Reworking our flowchart/storyboard

We shoot Dave at his office (which is really Alan’s desk at GNWC), as his boss tells him to go home early (another great suggestion from George Johnson). We then shoot a series of shots of Dave leaving in his car, driving home.

We then meet at Al’s place on Thursday at 1 p.m. and shoot our entire discovery/ fight sequence until 6:30, including final shots of Mike and Mike and Mia laying on the ground (after supposedly falling to their deaths).

It's hard not to laugh through our "intense" fight sequence

Shahrzad works hard to get the shot just right

On Friday morning we meet briefly and begin compiling shots from everyone’s camera. We already have well over 500 shots, and we’re still not done shooting!

A great shot of Milim and Al that doesn't make the final cut

We meet on Saturday of the Thanksgiving Weekend and conclude our principal photography by utilizing the green screen in the hangar. We’ve already taken a dozen or so shots off Al’s balcony, which we’re using as Dave and Mia’s balcony – we just need to take some photos against the green screen to sell the image of Mike hanging off the balcony, being supported by Dave.

2009 - The year of "going green"

Disclaimer - No GNWC students were hurt in the filming of this production

Ah, the wonders of Photoshop!

Milim crafts up a PDF flowchart for us to have a better idea of how our story will play out, incorporating elements from the two whiteboards. Though the story structure will soon change, you can get an idea of the direction we were heading in.

After another, very productive meeting with George, we decide to flesh out our flashback scenes from four days to six, making the entire chain of events culminate over a week-long period in the lives of these characters.

At this time, we decide to change the name of our photo-film from the ambiguous “Unwritten” to the somewhat-less ambiguous “7 Days” (seeing as we’re following the lives of these characters for one week).

Of course, this also means we have a lot more work on our plate, since we’ll have to set up and shoot a lot more images, while also increasing our post-production – including Photoshop manipulation, voice-acting and ambient sounds.

We meet Friday morning and since it’s a rare gorgeous fall morning, decide to shoot our outdoor basketball scene with Dave and Mike at the outdoor basketball court two blocks east of the school. This turns out to be far more fun than we anticipate, and we manage to get some great shots everyone is happy with. Al and Nick play around on the court as Shahrzad, Anshul, Jeff and Milim take turns shooting them with three cameras.

Nothing but net!

Getting the shot just right...

We have time to shoot one more scene, and we shoot Mike (Al) in the Games Room, which doubles as his apartment.

Al trying hard not to laugh

We meet again on Sunday morning and set up and shoot the majority of our flashback scenes at the school, using the Faculty Lounge as a double for Dave and Mia’s living room (after a little rearranging), the school gym as a double for Mike and Dave’s gym, and the Faculty kitchen as Dave and Mia’s kitchen. This takes most of the morning, but it puts us out ahead of where we hoped to be at this point.

Setting up our gym shoot

"I like it. Do you like it?"

The group brainstorming

We decide to pursue the idea of a perceived love triangle – that of a story of two best friends and the wife/girlfriend of one of them.

Al whiteboards some ideas

The story involves Dave returning home early from work to find his wife/girlfriend Mia in a compromising position with his best friend Mike. We will learn later (through a set of flashbacks) that a series of events have led Dave to become suspicious about their relationship. And so Dave lurching at Mike in a fit of rage leads to a struggle that ends with Mike crashing through a balcony, with Dave holding onto the hand of his best friend – this will be our central image.

Anshul and Nick trying to get an idea what our shot will look like

We determine our roles right away – Al will be our project manager and audio director, Shahrzad will take care of photography and post-production, Anshul will be our technical director and take care of Flash programming, Milim will be our creative director, working with Photoshop to manipulate our green screen images, Jeff will be our producer, helping Anshul with programming, and Nick will be the writer, fleshing out the story, script and writing the blog. We also determine the actors playing the roles – Nick will play Dave, Al will play Mike, and Milim will play Mia.

Someone didn't get enough sleep!

We still have no idea how we’re going to arrive at our main tense image, though, and we bandy about a number of different ideas and possible tangents our characters can take.

We also determine a group name, after much deliberation. We settle on Team Hotspot (one of the many names we gleaned from random things we saw on our laptops…

Before our third meeting this week, we have a class with our instructor George Johnson that totally changes the way we’re going about our story. We learn about crafting plots and stories by first forming the end (d’oh!), and it suddenly seems so obvious! Our vision becomes a lot clearer from this point, and even if we still haven’t cemented much, we know what clutter to discard.

Visual Story instructor George Johnson offers great advice

We knew we want three possible endings for this photo-film (which we have now dubbed “Unwritten”) – one where the best friend, who we name Mike, falls to his presumed death, one where he is pulled up by his best friend, Dave, and one where Mia, the wife/girlfriend of Dave, accidentally falls after attempting to assist the two.

An early look at our storyboarding

Our final shot for all three endings, we decide, will have the credits running as Dave & Mia’s answering machine plays – it will be a cheery message from a party guest coming to Dave’s surprise birthday party – which Mia and Mike have been secretly meeting for to plan.

White boards are completely erased and started over, the setups for each flashback is discussed at length, and later in the week, we run through our skeleton of an idea with George. He gives us the go-ahead, while also suggesting some great additions.

He suggests beginning our story with Dave and Mike’s fight and coming back to the setup afterward. We all love this idea and adopt it immediately.

Anshul and Jeff devise a mathematical formula around the flashbacks we present, which will give the user an ending depending on which of these three characters they would like to know more about. The way this works has to do with numerical values we assign each flashback – from +2 to -2, and so the sum total of each series of flashback will lead to an ending.

Anshul maps out a formula for our three endings

i.e. If the sum total is greater than or equal to +2, Mike falls, if it’s less than or equal to -2, Mike is saved, and if it is -1, 0 or +1, both Mike and Mia fall.

In this interactive photo-film, a suspected love triangle throws a close friendship into violent turmoil. A tormented husband is pushed to the brink of destruction when he suspects his best friend is having an affair with his wife. Perceptions of past events determine how the plot unfolds in this tense melodrama.

(Front L-R) Al Sinoy, Milim Kim, Shahrzad Aghasharifianeshfahani (Back L-R) Nick Lewis, Anshul Goyal, Jeffrey Lane

Cast:

Al Sinoy as Mike (The best friend)

Milim Kim as Mia (The wife)

Nick Lewis as Dave (The husband)

Jeff Lane as Dave’s Boss

Anshul Goyal as Bob (Phone message)

Khadija Ghazi as Terry (Phone message)

Crew:

Al Sinoy – Project Leader (Director, Director of Audio, Lead Editor)

Shahrzad A. – Director of Photography (Cinematography, Art Direction, Post-production supervisor)

Anshul Goyal – Technical Director (Flash Engineer, Web Master, Audio Engineer, Assistant Photographer)

Jeffrey Lane – Producer (Editor, Assistant Photographer)

Milim Kim – Creative Director (Visual Effects Supervisor, Editor)

Nick Lewis – Head Writer (Sound Effects Editor, Assistant Editor, Blogger)