Problem Solving
COVID 19 - Restrictions
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One of the issues I knew I was going to face before I even began this FMP was the COVID-19 restrictions. As I returned to college in person and began my final major project, the lockdown rules were eased and we were able to meet up with one other person from a household outside of college. As I started my FMP and decided to create an electronic press kit as my media product, I planned and successfully was able to have my father, Paul Putwain model as the character Nic Alcott and my friend Dutch Loveridge model as the character Allen West. By having Paul and Dutch model for my visual designs, I was able to stick to the COVID-19 restrictions, as I live with my father which means we count as a 'bubble' and Dutch was the only person I photographed from outside my own household. To be even more precautious of COVID-19, each of use did tests weekly to prevent any risk.
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Character changes
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Another issue I faced in pre-production/planning was having to cast the models for my characters that will be featured in the visual deigns for my EPK. Initially, I was going to have only three characters in the visual designs, elder Nic Alcott (protagonist), young Nic Alcott and Lili West (the carer). I was able to find actors for both the elder Nic (Paul Putwain) young Nic Alcott (Dutch Loveridge). However, I was unable to find a female actress available to play Lili West and I really wanted the carer character to feature in the designs. In the end, to solve this issue I decided to make the carer character male instead and call him Allen West. I spoke to my actor for the younger protagonist Nic and asked if he would be happy to instead play the carer character Allen which he thankfully agreed to and the problem was resolved.
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Time management - Models/Actors
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Another problem I faced during this project was managing my time around my actors/models during the production process. Dutch Loveridge who is the actor/model of the character Allen West in my project was luckily available most days during the week, however the issue we faced was the transport to get to his location (his home) where we were going to take the photographs for my visuals. In order for me to get to his location, I had to take two different buses which did delay time but thankfully we were able to capture all the shots in time just scrapping my deadline. My other actor/model was Paul Putwain, although he is my father who lives with me, I had to plan my filming times around his accessibility. As the week approached to photograph him, he became busy with work and we ended up only having two days to capture his shots and they were slightly rushed as I expected to have more time, although I was aware this issue may occur and took more photographs than planned as extra to use if in post my initial plans did not work out.
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Photoshop Issues - Full Disk Cache
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After I completed the production shots for my EPK and moved onto post production on Photoshop I had a reoccurring issue of having a 'full disk cache'. When this error appeared on my Photoshop, it disabled me from making any changes or saving my work. This problem became very stressful and caused me lots of anxiety as I had never had this error pop up before whilst using the program. To fix this issue temporarily, I watched the tutorial listed below which explained that I needed to select 'edit' and then choose 'purge' as this will clear my editing steps in the history which take up a lot of storage space. However, even after I had done this, my disk cache became full again very quickly.
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Source, Video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpArDv6GJpo
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Harvard Reference - PiXimperfect. (2019). "Scratch Disk are Full?" The Final Solution in Photoshop!. PiXimperfect Youtube Channel.
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To finally solve this issue, I tried clearing out the Library on my MacBook (as shown in the image below) and I got rid of my old storage saved on my Dropbox. Thankfully, this solved the issue and I have not had any problems since. I now know that I should frequently remove any inactive files/caches to save storage on my MacBook and to help me run my Adobe Cloud smoothly without any issues.
