Cutting fingernail

I cut my long fingernails yesterday.

I usually don't like leaving long fingernail as I found it keeping me from working effectgively, and I am such a workaholic. However, a week ago I was so busy that I kind of left my finger nail alone. And then when I tried to take videos for the chroma key experiment I was working on, it suddenly thought of trying out painting fingernail. The result was nicer than I expected, so I left them staying long.

Last night, though, I finally feed up with it. They made it harder for me to take contact lens off my eyes, harder to write on my iPod Touch, and then some. So my they are shorter.

Good and bad

The bad thing about having my roommate around is that I can't use my stereo after midnight. The good thing, though, is that he get rid of all the roaches.

More about stuff I learned through my last video shooting

• I really really really should NOT do closeup shoot on my face. It looks pretty terrible. Time to consider hiring an actor.
• Quite some minor clean I have to do after the aftermath of that several bleeding scenes.

Experience I earned about a day of shooting

Woke up at 12:00 a.m. Feeling ... good! I went to sleep at around 9:00 p.m. after spent a whole day to shot footage for my little video project and was totally exhausted. After wiriting this blog, I need to clean up a messy room left over by all the shoting I did. Am I regarding this? Hell no. It's so much fun, and makes me realize how much time and effort it takes to do a video product. At first I thought I could finish all the taping of footage within a day, but it's obvious that it takes two days, as I only finished half the taping based on the storyboard I planned.

Couple of things I learned:

• It can be very painful to be the solo person who does everything on a video project, including video photography, lighting, props paperation, acting, choreogrpaher, directing, makeup artist, special effect person, writer, producer and the clean up dude. But at least now I know how much I can willing to pay to outsource some of the work to the others :-E
• Because of the limitation on my resources, there are quite a lot of stuff that I planned on storyboarding couldn't be actualized during the actual videoshotting. Guess I have to live with my limitation.
• The nose bleeding scene was way more messier than I expected. I should have planned better.
• I was right getting an extra set of battery for my video capture device: Canon Powershot SD880 IS.
• I was also right getting extra harddisk to hold raw video footage files.
• I am getting smarted on keeping myself my being sick. I have a tendency of stubbornly continue working when I can feeling cold, especially when the weather gets chilling, and I am getting tired, and yet I am too lazy (or too sweaty) to put on more clothes. But this time I went straight to bed. Result? Full awake and full healthy me continue typing my blog.

That's it for now. Let me clean up my room and then I'll spend sometime checking the video took in order to decide whether I should re-shoot them or continue shooting result of the footage today.

Cancelled

Guess what, I DID NOT go to the scheduled MAC one-on-one makeup session. Of course, I did call them to cancel the appointment. I don't know why, but I felt like I didn't exhausted my DIY resources. So instead of going to MAC, I did some search online, find a few tricked I never tried before (like using red lipstick to cancel out the green caused by bread mark), and got some good result.

.... or maybe I am just cheap :-E .

Sigh, didn't take any shot today ....

I planned on spending today to do some shots for my little 1 minute short film. But then so many other stuffs keep me from working on the plan:

• Figure out how to make fake body fluid (blood ... and so on) for the short film.
• Figure out if Adobe Premiere can directly load Adobe After Effect product (yes, it does :-D )
• Find all the clip art and video for the film (bees, roses ....)
• Find OSX 10.5.5 on VMWare, and installed iPhone SDK 2.2 in it (Success)
• Went to Walmart to buy materials to make fake body fluid
• Brought a Blue Full Fitted sheet set for my mattress , and thought of using it as a blue screen, and found it TOTALLY failed, so returned it, and brought just a fitted sheet back. This is probably what took most of my time today.
• Tested to see if I could do my acting on to top of the mattress box instead of on the mattress. Well, it failed, and I created several HOLES in my mattress box. Not that it would affect it's function as a mattress box, but still it's kind of lame. So next time when I try to do shots, I either do it on my mattress, or I have to roll up everything and do the shot on the ground.

Well, maybe this is a good thing. I really should write out the storyboard before I take any shots. I shouldn't rush and jump right into doing shots.