WCS 2010: Skip Beat Journey!

And so with procrastination and life, this entry comes unbelievably late. I really ought to have posted this before the guide to korea.
Anyway, just thought that even though we didn't win, I should still chronicle and share our wcs journey. Afterall, it is part of my life journey too =)

So gin and I only decided on the series a month or so before the competition. In fact, we only thought of joining the competition roughly around that timeline too. Gin wasn't super keen but with 'cosplaying skip beat' as a bait, i managed to lure her in. Muahaaaahahaa *kaika evil spirits loiters* After that, it wasn't until another 2 more weeks before we started our actual script details and practise.
<<-- My ultimately not used “Fuwa Sho“ Poster
The delay was due to our over imaginative ideas in the beginning. A lot of time was spent conceptualising the script and figuring out how to do the special effects without any stage ninjas. We had many big ideas for the script and we brainstormed endlessly for a solution to solve the technicalities.
For one, my initial idea was to create a 'spirit hand' , well, kyoko's famous spiritual power, and grab gin with it. We also thought of creating gravity defying spirits like how it should look. But they all had to be scrapped for obvious reasons. Sigh.

You know, sometimes its really challenging to only having 2 cosplayers in the skit. There is just so much storyline limitations!!!  And telling a story to a group of audience who probably don't know who the heck you're cosplaying is .... Just "Icing on the cake".
And seriously, choosing to cosplay Skip Beat in a competition that judges very much on your costume is suicide. Yes, we know… but we couldn’t resist the urge to cosplay a series both of us so dearly loved. And having the chance to acted out a skit AS the character was another offer we couldn’t turn down. So we choose to overlook our chances of winning and go ahead with Skip Beat. And I guess reality has showed how wrong(results) we were but… overall, I’m still really happy we did Skip beat.
Off tangent with my rants again, sorry.     

After altering the script to have lesser or no 'special effects' . The next step was voice acting and audio mixing. Gin came over to our place and recorded with my pc microphone which i then mixed together. After getting the first audio draft out, we started working on the props and acting.
We tried to paint the signboards but it didn’t work out so we just got them laser printed.

Gin’s ultimately not used “rugby ball”  (lower left)

In the skit, there was a 'stripping' scene where gin will hide under a big black thrash bag and change under it. We had spent a lot of time decorating that bag with wordings and kyoko's spirit so that when she shakes the bag, the spirit tail will sway too. Sadly, we forgot to highlight that to the stage crew and the thrash bag ended up facing the wrong direction ToT.
It was a very very upsetting part in the skit.... After all, we didn't spent so much time on those props to have it hidden. But what's over is over =(

A lot of time was spent fine tuning our skit actions. We wanted to make sure we performed everything to perfection so every time we rehearse, we'd film it down and review later on.

Bruise on my knee from all the falling at 3:04. I love how Zeratul’s video angle captured the impact of the grabbing most xD

Argh the wig >.<

Almost every gesture, every movement and every expression was scripted/planned. Like the change from 'happy' to 'angry' mode at 1.00, i specially choreographed my body to tilt at an angle and have both arms lifted up to my face area so as to enhance the dramatic-ness of the arms dropping and dangling.

I like how Gin did her arms and face expression at 3:04 to match her voice over. Her disgust for the “Love Me” section and Kyoko (my character) is portrayed so interestingly xD

I love Gin’s acting here XD 

3:50 has got to be one the most fun part to act out xD I truly enjoyed intimidating Gin here MUAHAHAHAH. It took us some time to figure out how we should position and move our body posture here. In the actual manga, Kyoko was supposed to rise from hugging Kanae’s calf and then caress Kanae’s face with her hand.

But obviously we couldn’t do that here because I’m 2meter away from her. So we decided to go for a ‘side tilt intimidating’ effect .

 

Disgusting dance ahahhahaa . Well, I had to do something to distract the audiences while Gin changes into her uniform right XD?

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Can you spot Kyoko’s spirit and curses on the thrash bag T_T?

Marionette wahahahhaa

This still is really comical to see. Kyoko looks so freaking happy while Kanae is shocked outta her mind xD

  

Lalalala ~~ *prances around the summer field*

 

Marionette 2. GUAGUAGUA XD

We found it hard to synchronise both our actions at this section. So we decided to let Kyoko take the lead and turn Kanae while Gin (kanae) will just allow herself to be turned around :D
Argh stupid wig and pouch kept running around =_=

We wanted to highlight Kanae’s OTLness so we designed for Kanae to lean over to the sides to look like she’s dying/fainting/spirit coming out from her body.

Blah! I had too much fun screencapping. Sorry for flooding you guys with our fugly and caught-in-action pictures. I just HAD to caption and share them xD.
Apologies for being off topic and going on non stop about the little details. Hope you guys enjoyed this entry nevertheless. Leave me a comment and share your thoughts ne ^_^?

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NE?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Just Be Friends Cosplay PV (Behind the Scene)

Below is a JBF Behind the Scene Video I put together. Sadly, as Youtube only allowed 10minutes of airtime, I didn’t include day two of the filming into this video. Would you guys be keen on watching how we did all the flashback memories?

Couldn't embed and Show this video in the previous post about Post Production because Blogger doesn't allow video embeds to show on the top when you have an entry cut @_@

Just Be Friends Cosplay PV ( Production Diary )

Hi Peeps!
I’m back again with something related to JBF. I know you guys must be so tired of me/us with the same serie/song again. But please bear with me alright ^^?

So, I was very inspired by the Production Diaries Peter Jackson did for the KongisKing.net fansite and halfway through the post production of JBF. I decided to keep some simple sort of diary to chronicle this very long and arduous journey and started writing twitter style emails and blogs to myself and have complied them below. Click on the link to read more =)

The teal coloured words are written AFTERWARDS to fill in the blank period where I had forgotten to chronicle. And as can be seen from the start date, I did these diaries very late into production …much apologies ^^;; I have soooo much to say about the post production but…guess I’ll shut up for now. Let me know if you guys liked it!



17th Jan
It is now 4.08am and I have just stepped out of bath. It has been a long and hard Saturday of non stop photos editing and animating. The TV was on almost the entire day and I’ve even watched reruns of the same show from the afternoon slots to the late night slots ahah.
Yes, it had been a very long day.
But on the bright side, I’ve completed almost all 60% of the second half of the song (I split the animation of the 2ong into 2 parts for easier handling). Finally got the audio and animation to synch reasonably….well at least it does so on my PC. When I sent the first swf file to reiko it didn’t worked for her =\
Okay, back to finish up as much stuffs as I can. Gotta do something about the ‘kissing paper plane’ scene. Sigh…didn’t managed to get any nice pics that day so…really need photoshop to help save the day =(

Some pics that were manipulated today.

19th Jan
Omg damn happy! Edging closer to the ending soon!
Finally got pass the parts with their numerous memories photo. And got the sound to sync!!!
Still a lot to be done though. Gotta sing the song and edit the swf in Ulead. 

20th Jan
Just went out for dinner with kns and cvy. While walking back, Cvy started pimping a nico singer's just be friend recording to us. Ballad male version. 

Which got me slightly depressed about the massive delay in our own project.

22nd Jan
Am very very very very upset and frustrated to the point of tears. I just lost my entire flash working file. Yes, lost it. The bloody system deleted it.

I was loading some photos into the Flash document when my mom who was mopping the floor accidentally knocked into the cables of my external HDD. And that jerk kinda broke the whole connection and caused flash to crash. I tried to save a copy of the document but it wouldn’t allow me.

What puzzles and bewilders me is how it deletes the entire file! I mean, it didn’t just not save the new changes. BUT it literally deleted everything! I can’t even find the file on my ext HDD!
Very very upset. I’ve just installed a recovery program….hopefully it can find the file back. I’m not very hopeful but…sigh. I wish I have a better system and I wish the bloody connection between the Ext HDD and PC is not so fragile! ARGH!!!!

This just made the journey 1000 times more difficult. I’m already nearing the completion of the pv and this happens… totally can’t believe it.

23rd Jan – 4th Feb (unclear timeline)

Reiko and I spent the next few days searching online for free Data recovery programs. I tried out a few and the last one (Recuva) kindly recommended by Zeratul worked. But the FLA file recovered was corrupted and could not be used at all.
We then realise the video editor wasn’t working with the SWF file. It wouldn’t load some scenes and showed red screens instead of photographs. Either that or the animation would be totally out of its designated path.
I had initially wanted to do the animation in Flash and then export it as a AVI file. But ran into a lot of issue with that because the files were just too heavy and Flash kept crashing.

5th - 7th Feb



With the original idea of using SWF animation out of the window now, I started doing the animation manually inside Ulead Video Studio. But the effects were less than desirable as the program blurred the photographs immensely.


8th Feb
spent my whole waking day trying to fix the swf to work with ulead. Kinda found that maybe we can work around the swf problem and import bit by bit. 

The funny thing is, its so temperamental even with my flash experience i cant diagnose why it isn't working when it should!  One moment its working, i make some necessary changes and the next moment it jus blanks out ! Super frustrating!!

10th Feb

This whole process of going from flash to ulead and occasionally jumping back to photoshop is getting so exhausting. Perhaps more mentally than physically. Even though my eyes feel really strained and tired. 

But yeah, so tired of ulead not working with flash. Whyyyy??? My simple tweens are not working and i have not idea why. I've gone into photoshop to resize and compress the same pic at least 3times but its still not working.

Oh god!
10th Feb


This is seriously annoying. Spent the past 1 hour or so just troubleshooting this damn scene! I’m finally at the final stages where the screen zooms out and shows the stunned face of the emo boyfriend.
After tediously Cging that photo out (we had forgotten to shoot it) and animating it in flash; Ulead refuses to load the animation properly. Instead of loading the middle portion of the photo, its loading the extreme side of it……screwed=_=

I’m gonna compress the photo again in Photoshop for one last time today before I go to bed. hopefully it’ll work…..because if it doesn’t, I don’t know what can. I’ve done all I can think of.
Each time I recompress/edit the photo. I have to go through this process of re-importing the edited photo into Flash, replacing the old photo with the new, sometimes make a new layer, tween it, adjust the keyframes to fit the middle lovey dovey photo, export the swf , update the swf file in Ulead and then check if the animation is working.

I bet you got tired just reading about it=_=U



6:08am : YEAY! It worked! I’m off to bed!!!

10th Feb (PM)
Omg 4 more days to stipulated deadline!! Still blogging via mobile because I don't wanna overwork my Pc. 
Really hope we wont miss this deadline yet again...especially since 14th feb is such a morbidly and ironically suitable date for this pv. 

Am down to the credits page already wheeeee!!! Just jumping back and forth from flash and ulead to make sure everything is time perfect. 

Really looking forward to completing it so I can dedicate more time to other stuffs. Still have not spring cleaned x.x



11th Feb


Okay...doing a check to make sure all the pics load properly. Which they didn't. I seriously need better work station sigh...
But i think i don't care already...gonna go ahead and try exporting a trial video and see how things go.  AAArgh! Export got truncated because Ulead just crashed =.=. Screw it. I'm exporting as mp4 this time!


12th Feb


Ahhhhhh its now the final exportinggggg ....just as i was hoping no red screen will appear... It did =_=. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!! 

Trying out all sorts of export settings now. Sigh. Really hating this red screen =.=

12th Feb (PM)





Oh yeahhhhhh coming to the reallll FINAL exporting and checking! Also managed to overcome the obstacle of the export video being stretched vertically. It was in the form of an optional tick.
Family has been up and cleaning the house way before I woke up. Feeling quite guilty to see my mom running around the house cleaning while I continue to sit on my chair mending this=.=
Alright the export is running by itself. I'm finally free to handle the other things in my life! Ciao!

12th Feb (PM)
I have officially finished everything for the video. All the animations that could be done is done.But no celebrations yet because my bloody system and ulead can't export the video properly. The red screen just keeps appearing, sigh. I've restarted my pc countless times and the problem persists.
Arghhhh i'm so losing my patience and interest in this! Why must this whole thing be so cumbersome??? Why can.t simple thing jus work wellll ????



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Okay. so for the most part, I’m complaining hahaa. But you seriously can’t blame me! There was so much going against me and so much curves to overcome. Almost until the very last moment, I had thought I wasn’t gonna make it.

I had just gotten so accustomed to failures I really started becoming very pessimistic. And almost every working moment I was asking myself “Why the HECK am I doing this?!”. I really wanted to give up but couldn’t bring myself to do that because I’ll be disappointing everyone in the team and not to mention, it would be an utter waste of all my previous effort.

I’m just really happy we managed to meet our deadline and successfully showed the world our effort. And when the video finally went live I was like OMFG ITS DONE!!!! LIKE FOR REAL! The hearty response was truly unexpected. Many thanks to all those who liked this PV. *kisses*