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All my other blogs for 2nd semester are on a different blog including my Film Review

Final Presentation

The final presentation was horrible for me. i messed up so badly, when the first person from our group was doing his i started to memorize what i was going to talk about, i then started getting nervous about mine and if what i wrote was good enough for one of the longest speeches i have done.

When it was my turn to do my presentation the second year was doing their critique, and they were playing music, that loosen me up a bit. So i was talking for around thirty seconds then Charles asked if the music was bothering me, which actually didn't, it was actually helping my nerves to calm down, he then asked if the last person would do her presentation first, it was OK with me but then something happened, i forgot all my speech, all that hype for my presentation and got interrupted. I realised i had nothing to say when we went back to my presentation. I panicked a lot after that, i couldn't remember everything that i was planning to say, but i just went along with my presentation and tried to piece it all together in my mind, after the presentation we had a talk with the tutors and how this course is throughout the whole three years and i must say i was thrilled about the things we get to do after this year.

Can't wait for the next semester!

Event Blog Summary

To Summarize all my events up, there was some good events that i have been to, the birthdays are all great because you get to enjoy time with the family, eat food, and even sometimes makes you reminisce about when you were younger; bouncy castles, playing with friends and getting told off by parents about doing the wrong things. I guess while looking at the younger generation, these things will tend to go through our mind and make us go 'Ah. The good old days!' (like what our parents use to say!). The movie that I watched (Ip Man 2) was the only movie that I have watched in a while, so to me its memorable.

I think that the most interesting event was the Japanese art gallery down in Crowne Plaza. When we saw the art work, gawked at the price thinking that its daylight robbery. But after walking around the exhibition twice, we started noticing all the little details we missed and started realizing the effort and time was invested in it. The details on the hand drawn piece was really magnificent; the tiniest details, even ones that one would not expect to be in a hand drawn piece was there, and it was perfect in an un-perfect way, which I guess, in a way makes it even more perfect. There was no mistakes at all, and if there was it was covered up really well. I wonder if they did a rough sketch in pencil first and the filled it in with ink pens? When being studied up close, one can see the use of different thickness of art pens that are being used. It was just magnificent and totally worth the price tag of 14 thousand dollars.

Filming day

We met up at uni at around 11.30 which i came to find the team just finishing putting red glitter on the shoes, it looked pretty awesome and looks nice when the sun shines on it. After that we got in my car and drove to Auckland Domain to film our fantasy world . As we walked through the area we started looking at the scenery and look for areas we would use for our film.

Once we got the areas ready we started to film the first scenes and other scenes we might use, while we were walking to the Winter Garden we found geese's and ducks which we tried to round up and get Dorothy-Charlotte to go in and kind of flow with them or maybe stand in the middle of all of them(which is quite hard to do! they kept running away). So while we were chasing the geese's and ducks we found this really nice area for Dorothy to skip along, it had most of the leaves turned orange and it was mostly all on the ground and the leaves that were on the trees were falling off as the wind blew on it. After filming the parts we want we then decided to go back and wait for it to go dark so that we could do the night scenes. We decided to have some team bonding, we first headed out to Mission Bay to play around for a bit then decided to go Museum. After wasting 3 hours we filmed the last bit and decided to call it a night.

Event- Auckland Museum

While waiting for the sun to go down we decided to go to the Museum. When we got there we first looked if we had to pay because we are students we also did not have money to waste for a visit to the museum, So their was a entrance fee? ten dollars for adults. We decided to just walk around to the back of the museum, We saw a cafe at the back and our coffee addict in our group got excited ha ha, while she was buying her coffee Tyrone went over to ask if it was free or do we have to pay, i don't remember what he said but i think he said we had to pay ten dollars for all of us to get in. So while we got our stickers Charlotte went over to get her sticker and when we were about to go in she got told that you can't drink inside so she sneakily went back to the cafe and put it in her bag. Time to go into the Museum.

When we got in we first looked at the old school kids area then to the Maori area which i found out what tribe Tyrone is in. As we strolled along the museum we got to the weird and the wonderful area which was full of things that can be interacted with, heaps of creepy crawlies and full scale animals which you could see the actual cuts when they ripped out everything to stuff them. We then saw creepy crawlies, Weta's, cockroaches, bugs, maggots and other random bugs, Daniel and Charlotte are pretty scared of them. After looking at all that we got to the War room, it was a good experience reading at all the things that's happened in war like when the Americans dropped two Atom bombs in Japan and how there was a South African War? i did not know about that war at all. After going through everything inside the museum we went outside to get fresh air and to start filming our art film.

Event- Niece's 2nd Birthday

1pm 30th May 2010

So on Sunday it was my niece's birthday which i forgot(what a bad uncle)after rushing to get ready me and Audrey realised we had no present, and at that time we were five minutes away from our destination. So we went back to the mall and looked for clothes for her, we couldn't decide whether to get her something for later on when she grows up or clothes that she would use now, after deciding on clothes she would use now we hit another problem which is Dora the explorer or barney. After all the deciding we picked barney and leggings and skirt which looked really cute. When we got to my sister's place we forgot to put our names on the present.

While at the birthday i was looking at the bouncy castle and realised that it was kind of sinking after seeing it sink a bit it fully caved in while the kids were inside, there was too many kids on the slide, i later found out there was only one air compressor on it, so they had to switch from the bouncy floor to the slide. After we fixed the bouncy castle it was eating time. The bouncy castle falling over was about the only thing that went wrong that day, it all went well.

Event- Movie I.P Man 2

This is a really good movie i think watching the first I.P Man made it more sense. I myself like watching kung fu movies so this movie really is a must see for me. So it first starts out from when the first movie finished. It was good seeing the post war part of the movie, just showing us what it was like for people in china back then. So it first shows him again, doing what he does best Kung fu it looked really good as well, it made me want to do it. While watching i got so hyped up because his opponent was this really cocky English boxer that kept mocking the Chinese for their martial art.

It made you really want to fight after watching the movie because of the moves and the ending fight. This movie really hit the spot with my martial arts craving. It shows heaps of action and a lot of old school karate on it. Just seeing it makes me want to learn all of them, which will really be difficult. But to finish this off the first I.P Man was better because you feel the pain that the Chinese people endured during the war and what the Japanese done to them.

Reflective Statement for Serious Fun

I think my group could have done this better by fixing up the presentation and fixing up the interactions idea. We were so into the narrative that we forgot most of everything else but when we started doing interaction I think we bit of more than we can chew, we were doing things way more than we should have and made it harder for ourselves. We had this vision in our heads that it was going to look like something from the TV like a "Dora the explorer" type but in fact it was really hard to do. We should have thought it through and done more research on it instead of rushing things and picking things that were too much for us to handle.


For my part in this project I panicked when I realised how much animation drawing I had to do. I started to worry that I couldn't draw a lot of images for animation. So I researched other ideas on how to make flip books and comic style flip books. Chad and me found some flip book websites, which incorporates a flip animation when you turn the page. Then while we were doing research for flip books we found a comic book style flip book and decided to use it for our project and then incorporate it with the flip animation when you turn the page.


While we were doing the flip book animation Amir and Ma'ake's was doing the interaction part deciding how the person is suppose to feel when they drag items specific to their story. We made it so there's three items that make them have three emotions, which is sad, happy and angry. It shows by their emotional face and chose things from their lives that made them feel that way. For Eclipse our boxer he has his championship belt, his glasses and the boxing gloves he used in his last fight, For Octi he has a picture of his son, a piece of fish that u can feed him and the net that took him away from his son.

Serious Fun Part 2

Straight after we finished our presentations we got our next brief which was to create an interaction with our characters.

We got together for the assignment; 4 people in a group which consists of Chad, Ma'ake, Amir and myself. Hence, we used our individual characters to create the animation.

We made a slum village background right before having a meeting with James Charlton. We were advised to have a look at other ways of interaction and what the viewers was suppose to feel when they interact i.e sad, happy, angry etc. We had to decide which character from the two would show emotion and which one will have a good background story.
During the meeting, it made us think that we should change how we should meet and how you interact with them, from our characters getting mad at you to having to see their past life in a comic book style animation and using items from their glory days to either make them sad, happy or angry.

Serious Fun-Character development

We first had to draw 6 characters to choose from. I'm not a good drawer so when i drew my octopus character it looked like a normal character,so i decided to put wings like mask on it. we then had to develop that character, we first had to make a flip book on one action that my character did, so i made it swim upwards, the hardest part about that was cutting the pages so that flipping was easier, i had to make two books because the first cutting was in an angle and so the next one was a bit better.

When the flip book was done we then had to buy Plasticine to make our character come to life, i then chose on the colour that my character was gonna be, we then shaped it so that it looks like our character, i then filmed it moving around via still frame animation. I then had to rename all images so that they were in a sequence then put them up on quicktime to make image sequence then saved it to mov file.

After the presentations of our character and their movement we then went on groups of two or three then remade a totally new animation,so me, chris and tyrone thought of ideas on how we are gonna show a funny video that includes all our characters, we first thought of the idea of tyrone's character getting eaten up, then straight after got the idea of a canon hitting octi, but in the end we took both those ideas and made the idea of using tyrone to destroy my character via canon from the rabbits. so check the video out after this.

Rabbit Vs Octi

this video took about one and a half hours to do and it was around one hundred and fifty images.

Event-Cousin's daughters 5th Birthday

Oh lucky it wasn't a birthday that i had to fix up and clean. First of all the cake was hand made and the cup cakes and practically was all made from scratch the night before, so my cousin didn't have any sleep at all! But the end result was a pretty awesome birthday party
for her daughter. It was also a dress up party,i don't dress up usually for parties so i didn't dress up for this one, but the theme was Fairies & Pirates. The birthday girl was so pretty! in a lime green dress with a tiara on, she was truly the princess of the day.

So after everyone ate all the grown ups were all talking and my cousins and sister planned games for the kids. First of all i wish we had games like this when we were little, they gave five dollars to the winner of each game, which was a total of 30 dollars if you win all of it? that would have been so good when i was little because everything back then was cheaper. When we were watching the kids play 4 of them stopped everyone to show them singing, wow kids singing "Justin Bieber-Baby" to the birthday girl was pretty awesome! The funny thing happened towards the end when there was a lot of mess on the floor, they played one more game which was "who ever picks up the most rubbish wins" that i must say is a pretty good game! you get the kids to clean for 5 dollars and it helps out with the cleaning, best game for a little kids party i reckon.

Straight after, my cousin gave everyone a little container with 3 hand made chocolate that she melted and put food colouring and molded them into fairies,moon,stars, etc. She really out did herself on this birthday and it showed, even the other parents were asking if she could make cakes for their sons and daughters birthday, i think the cake was called red velvet chocolate cake, it was really good and she told us when she made it, the actual mix looked like blood and she wasn't sure how it was gonna turn out, i say it turned out pretty well.

At the end of the day it was a pretty good turn out and a memorable one, i am sure my cousin will start to get busy from all the customers asking her to bake for them.

Event-Restaurant

I had dinner last night at Republic in Manukau. They had great food but the service was not good, they took really long to get our food and the water tasted weird, the food was worth the wait though, a mixed platter of food, and ribs. Just looking at it made my mouth water, it was really nice too look at. We both dug into our food, while waiting you could see other people waiting for their food and getting frustrated at the same time, the other people just went upstairs while waiting for their food. We just waited their for around thirty minutes.

It also has a bar and it looked really good. The lights made it look really modern and sophisticated and the drinks were cheap. They also have a upstairs which have a pool table. So it's a restaurant/night bar in Manukau. I usually find these in the viaduct area in Auckland CBD but i found one close by my house.

Event- A friends Graduation party

A hard day at uni, but it all makes up with my friends graduation party. He invited us to his Auntie's 3 story apartment/house in Newmarket and wow his auntie is rich, first we all started talking playing board games then started drinking and one thing led to another until heaps of people were drunk, he eventually had a talk with me saying that he is going to America for a vacation (lucky guy) and after he was showing me his Auntie's apartment, then he told me the big surprise, the reason why we were there at his Auntie's apartment, He actually got the apartment for his graduation present!! what is up with that! how come when i graduated i didn't get an apartment. Oh well i guess i can't get worked up over stuff like that, but just thinking people are lucky.

"Just thinking about luck, isn't it funny how luck goes sometimes, my friend had something bad to him and in return gets an apartment, how my sister got cancer and started winning lotto. I guess u lose things to gain things."




But back to his graduation party, i couldn't believe how lucky he was, his auntie is pretty successful through her years here in NZ, she has so much awards from being the most improved to the best Manager of her job throughout the whole NZ. That's something that makes you think, work my hardest and maybe one day i could be like her, successful in life, it does happen to those who work hard. So my friend wasn't done with the gift giving as well apparently he is getting the Mercedes SLK Compressor in the garage!! wow so lucky. That's pretty much what amazed me during that night.

Event-Japanese Art Festival

It was one of the rare days that I decided to drive to town and park at Sky City.

After filling our tummies up after a long day of classes, we decided to head home. Being lazy, we walked through Crowne Plaza and there was a lot of people standing around the lobby of the hotel. Being curious we noticed a pin board on the side of a flight of steps.

'Japanese Art Exhibition
26/03/2010 - 28/03/2010 '

My friend, Audrey, got all excited and exclaimed how her best friend told her about it and that we have to go! Up the steps we went to see what was on displayed.

'OMG Audrey! Look at this! Its going for 14k! The details are amazing!! WOW!'
'Oh wow! If only I can draw like that! I would be rich!!'

We were both facinated with the work presented; in a good way and not so good way.
There was a painting that was going for 14k as well. But all it looked like was a few different colors of paint on a piece of canvas. Thinking that it was an abstract, we stood in that spot for a few minutes before giving up trying to figure out why it costs so much.

Then there was a separate room where Freelance Animation School has work from their students presented.

Walking through the space, we were once again amazed at the highly detailed hand drawings and computer renderings that was exhibited. There was no difference in prices in the room compared to the previous Japanese ones.

The difference between Japanese works and works from Freelance Animation School, apart from the Japanese ones being hand generated and the ones by Freelance Animation School being mostly computer generated, the one from the Animation School seems to be more detailed than the ones from the Japanese side of the exhibition. Maybe its because its easier to be detailed on the computer?
That said, the few highly detailed hand generated ones from the Japanese exhibit was very impressive and very worth the price tag of 14k.

There was a lot of artwork already sold when we visited late on the first day of the opening. One animator's work was fully sold and they cost less than 5k a piece; and he/she had at least 6 works up on the exhibition board.

After seeing all that has and can be seen, we went around the exhibit once again. Audrey talked about how she wants to be able to decorate her house with art works like this one day and proceeded to point out all that she would buy, which will cost more than an arm and a leg of her new born.

Event-Wedding 10-04-10

What a day seeing both your friends get married is truly magnificent,no words could explain the joy for both of them a day they have been waiting for. Usually i would be helping out at weddings so this is the first i became a spectator and it felt good not being pressured to take photos or do this or do that and when you watch occasions like this, you just feel honored to be in it,well that's what it felt for me. The years have gone so fast and when your there you realise it's been 4 or 5 years since you helped them get together..just amazing!!!

When i congratulated my friend you can see in his eyes his happiness and joy, nothing could go wrong on this special day and it really didn't the sun was scorching hot,blue skies it felt like summer again! We where seated on our seat on the lovely garden waiting for the bride to come and she did come out it felt like your a paparazzi, clicking away at one of your closest friend and thinking a couple more steps and her life will change forever, all that was going through my head was this is what people talk about when they say one giant leap of faith.

The next part was the reception! party time! woo hoo! our friend/MC for the night drunk, as the dad of the bride gave one hell of a teary speech my friend the MC just had to make himself look fake by saying it brings a tear to my eye and then laughs afterwards. ha ha!Speeches! Wow how i hate speeches, the speech the best man done was great here's one of the things he said "Wife put your hand on the table, Husband put yours on top,Brother i want you to remember this moment and hold on to this moment, for this is the last time you will get the upper hand"it was too funny and also "Me and you fighting all the time saying who was the better man but guess what little brother i think we both know who was the best man is" two lines that i will always remember.

To sum this event all up. It was too great it made us feel that there are good things in life and there are things worth risking for and taking that giant leap of faith. Awesome Wedding!

Super idea!! haha

continuing my superhero idea i thought of heaps of characters that i liked but then realised i need to find a character that used gadgets, so batman was an obvious choice and same to iron man sort of and then when i couldn't think of other ones i picked other cartoon characters that use a wristband or some sort of device on the wrist, so i picked power rangers as the last character, 3 would be enough to show my interpretation of gadgets being used by superheroes.

Now thinking what my gadget wristband does is the hard bit, i started writing down what sort of things it would do i.e. play music, videos or pictures and what does each button do and will it change by itself or when u press one of the buttons. after thinking and doing more development i decided i will be playing their theme music. when u press the button batman's theme goes on and if u press the other button then another theme and maybe add video to show how they use some of their gadgets.

First week of Mid Sem-Break/Project

Before the break we got told that we had assignment to do while on the break. It had to be a garment that controls screen garment, basically a remote control that you can wear. First i brainstormed ideas on what garment to use and whats simple and can visible and stands out. Looking through my ideas Shirts,Pants,gloves shoes,bags etc. I found that using an Wristband is different from the rest, i mean most people would use shirts cause it's the easiest to see on someone and the it has a lot of places to put the keyboard circuit, but using an wristband is different and it stands out when someone is wearing it, because it's just their on your arm and nothing else is around it.

So using the Wristband idea my immediate idea was sports because they use when playing. I wasn't sure what sport to use for the idea so using my favourite sport i used basketball as my idea, it would basically show videos of players that use wristbands and armbands, basically anything to do with the arms. So using that idea i went straight into what key functions do what, just like a media player i decided there should be a button like stop, play, pause but then i remembered i don't need all that i can just do the programming for that when a button is pressed it automatically stops and plays the next one. So each letter i have represents each video or person it's going to play.

But looking over the idea it wasn't enough i knew it needed to be more creative and what's more creative than superheroes?Nothing! People draw them to do cool things and have their own powers, drawing itself is creative so i started thinking of ideas of how I'm gonna integrate the idea into the wristband and how it will show the connection between the two.it's getting late ill think of the new idea tomorrow.

3R's-Reprogrammed and Rebuilt Robot

1 more day till demonstration day and we were still unsure about the robot.but when everyone came we all had it in our minds that we got to at least do 1 drawing by today. Determined to finish this we started our robot and worked perfectly, we tried to connect the sound and it did work but then was too much in a hurry to think about another sensor so we took it off and took of the programming for it.

We then added Glow sticks to the robot and use blue tack to put the led lights on the robot which looked like this.
We then tried a trial run of the led laser lights and it worked perfectly with the right adjustments on the camera we got it to work and it looked like this on our trial. Straight after we took our first drawing which was light graffiti. So we have done the first drawing for our robot. Everything was working perfectly and how it's suppose to work so we decided to do everything today, After light graffiti we started preparing for the next one which was drink satchets and water. it also went well only minor trouble like the robot getting stuck on the board( it wasn't even) we then fixed it all up and got this picture. our 2nd picture done!
Now on to the last which was the dabber painting. We used Highlighter colours which were Green and Orange. We took of the bristles from the tube and added a slight wet tissue and added paint and from there attached it to the arms and then we let it do its thing on the paper and it turned out like this.
So Finally we done 3 images all different from one another and it all worked perfectly. Lets hope the demonstration works well.

Prototypes/Finished Robot

So Wednesday came and we were of with our robot building while the others made parts for the drawing parts. We got the cogs working properly and the sweeper was partly done.
Next part was getting the water spinners at the top to work properly. Which took a bit but we got it to work out. So towards the end the robot looked like this.
But it towards the end it didn't end up like this we had minor difficulties and due to that we had to rebuild everything again into another robot and strengthen it's parts, so during the day it was changed completely and programmed it so that the sensors would pick up objects in the way. The new robot looked like this, but the complications of the parts being to weak was still an issue and after the whole day of working on this robot it was completely changed over night and reprogrammed and fixed the issues of the sweeper. and strengthened the parts that needed to be. The final Prototype after going through 2 robots was this.

Project Drawing Robot

We started of this project by doing each individual their own ideas and drawings of how it will work and the next day put them together and decide which ones would look great and make it different from the rest. We chose on 7 ideas and from there we saw how it will work out and if it is a good idea to do them. From there we cut it down to 4 which was Paint Sweeper, Glow in the Dark Paint, Spinning Pen Dabber and Light Graffiti.

From there we went off to find our equipment and tried to find those 4 ideas if it could work.
We picked out the glow in the dark paint first, We couldn't find it anywhere so we just made it ordinary paint but highlighter colours and we also put the dabber and idea with this because it's just the same idea but put together as one. The next idea was Paint sweeper, that was easy to find because any ordinary paint brush will do, the next idea was light graffiti, any led laser light will work for this so we tried to find the cheapest led light. The last idea sort of changed while we were searching for it which was paint dabbers, we instead thought of ideas on the way, which was using sand and the sweeper to sweep the sand away and make a shape, others had ideas like using fire which could work but the parts might melt or burn so we decided not to. We then thought of other ways of using sand like black sand will work with magnets, we tried using that idea, while trying to find magnets and thinking if its the last perfect idea we then thought about drink satchets instead and water getting flicked onto the paper covered drink satchets. i thought it worked well with how we are going to be different from the other groups, using food as art. As we got back it was a bit late so we called it in and start fresh tomorrow with our ideas and our equipment for the robot.