On the Monday afternoon after the lecture and the Tutorial the fabricators in our group went to the 3D lab to finish the trolley. It only required the camera mounts to be added and there were also less people in the lab so it didn't take very long. I'd seam wielded everything partly because I wanted to make sure the rig was as strong as possible and partly because I just enjoyed wielding. We wheeled it back and on Tuesday afternoon we discussed painting it. Tuesday morning the whole class assembled for presentations of concept. While the Fabricators had been building the rigs last week, the CAD operator and Producer worked together to research and refine our concept and produce a presentation. It was a great separation of talent in our group too I felt, because our fabricators were quite practical people while our presenters are great conceptually. Obviously we are all capable of either and can produce examples of this but I felt our various strengths had been played to somewhat. There were a couple of excellent presentations in particular, one group really nailing the conceptual side very well and will probably also do the same with the practical results, I felt our group was also conceptually strong and I was fairly proud of their presentation - though visibly nervous which is understandable, it was nice for me to be able to sit back and watch all the presentations without worrying about going up myself.

So that afternoon we divided up again, 2 of us to cut a piece of tube that was going to house a lens fitting - a door peephole as a makeshift fisheye lens, while the other 2 bought some spray paint. That afternoon we were going to paint the rig bright red in the 3D lab until we discovered that it was closed for the afternoon.

On Wednesday morning I went to the lab and painted it myself. The paint was quick to dry (20mins) although it might have wanted a few hours to be properly hard. I had intended to bring masking tape and newspaper in with me but didn't (due to forgetting and also due to already having a lot to carry in on the bus...) however the 3D lab had some sort of plastic cling wrap for masking. It wasn't clingy enough though and I got a bit of paint on the tyre. Grr. The paint did a great job of sprucing up the look of the thing and making welding less obvious (we'd decided not to grind it afterwards).

We mounted the cameras and went for our test drive. The process was quite enjoyable even though we received a lot of odd looks and a few comments from passers by, which always mortifies the younger team members in particular. I was the first to push the rig along as we ventured down Queen Street, up to Albert Park, Down Lorn Street and towards Britomart. In Britomart as we descended to the Train terminal and not to anyone's surprise we were stopped by security. This of course gets my - like any resident Aucklander's - temper going, even more so as I felt a telling off coming by the security guard who thought we were all under 20 so could be easily terrorised. I was waiting my opportunity to pounce when a nice manager came along and explained that the Council has instructed them to keep camera's away without prior permission (even though it's a public area) because they want to charge people who do film there (scum). So with that we agreed to go elsewhere.

Outside, one of the cameras which was mini-dvd based had run out of space. Our team member mucked around with it trying to get the test footage off to make space as we hadn't even reached our ultimate destination yet (the wharf) and accidentally erased the whole disc.

After some despondency we got it together and continued to the wharf to film. We got a bit of that footage when the same camera ran out of battery power.

That night I transfered all footage to the computer.

Thursday morning we had an After Effects tutorial. It was mainly housekeeping which is important but possibly lost on some of the class, who were looking forward to knowing how to apply effects to footage - even though that part is relatively simple. In the afternoon we shot more footage and once again I transferred it that night.

Friday we shot even more footage. We'd had a few issues with cameras and we felt the sound wasn't particularly good either. It was an enjoyable day though, we walked around Albert park and various streets. We had the 2 cameras on the rig, plus another camera documenting us and I'd bought my still camera along to document the documenting.

That night I worked on syncing the footage up. It wasn't as simple as it should have been for a few reasons. One was that the mini DVD camera had a loose battery and  that had come off a few times. This caused write errors on the disc and also sync issues. Getting the files off the disc wasn't straightforward. Also, power had run out a couple of times and we wound up swapping cameras out meaning footage was spread on multiple cameras. Last of all, so simple and I can't believe I didn't think of it, I should have insisted we write numbers on card and put in front of the cameras at the beginning of shots to number scenes and also produce some sort of sharp sound in order to make sync via audio. Like a clap board. It wound up being quite painful and time-consuming determining what came from where and then getting files synced. I had waved my fingers a few times in front of the cameras at the beginning of shots and had I not done that it would have all been even worse. But there were times that we stopped a camera (it appears) and forgot to do that. Plus it wasn't really enough to sync perfectly, just to get footage roughly in the right place.

I set it all up in Premiere Pro but didn't finish. On Saturday we were to meet up and copy the footage for everyone to use, but I hadn't finished tidying it all up so the nightmare has been shared with the group. The files are also really big, totalling around 60gb. I could have compressed them down with out any noticeable drop in quality - this is after all a 1s year project not some commercial production but I didn't do that.

I also experienced once again the difference between working on my windows machine and on my MacBook Pro. I tend to favour my desktop PC because it sports 2 monitors and more hard drive space, but more and more I find windows pops up issues that you just do not get on a Mac. So I moved my work to my MBP (connected to one of my monitors) and ethernet connected to my PC's storage. I like the UI much better anyway, Expose is a killer app and always has been for me ever since it was first introduced in Panther. This time is was a codec issue, but I have some odd windows services that like to eat CPU time. Anything made by MS usually.

Right now as I write this I'm typing on the PC while the mac renders a complete timeline of one of the camera's footage. Once that is done I might start chopping that up in Premiere and then using the dynamic link feature to flip backwards and forwards to After Effects. I've had to pre-render the timeline as a whole because After Effects didn't like the format of footage produced by one of the cameras. It's a bit of a mish-mash and if I was to do this again I'd probably set up a process of conversion to one single format first.