Visual Metaphor Documentation
“Rules of the Museum”
Siwei Chen & Jim Liu
A. Concept and Story
- concept and story
Our project’s concept is to create a video full of uncanniness. In this case, we created a mysterious and strange museum. The story of our project focuses on the rules of this museum. The museum has the following rules: all exhibits are specimens; don’t touch the exhibits; don’t eat or drink in the museum; don’t use flashing lights; and when there are illusions, stay away as soon as possible. The storyline is twisted by both the contenet of the rules and the visiting perspective of a visitor who breaks the rules. The main story is about a visitor who violates the rules of the museum and discovers its secret, while having some irreversible hallucinations and eventually becoming a display in the museum.
2. inspiration
We are inspired by a popular concept named rule-based weird story. It is usually a description of a bizarre event or episode that takes place in a fictional world by setting certain rules, conditions or restrictions. These rules may be based on scientific principles, supernatural forces, social and cultural norms or other forms of restriction. The storyline usually revolves around the changes and effects of these rules, exploring human behaviour, thoughts and emotions. In our project, our rule is that breaking the rules of the museum will make one become a display.
3. Ideation process
From the outset, we designed the audio “displays are specimens that do not move”, which indicates the sense of oddity. Then, we gradually reveal the oddity of the museum through a combination of visual metaphors as well as seemingly unrelated human behavior. For example, walking and running is shown when the narrator is saying the specimens should not move, as well as human eyes are shown being stimulated by the flash when the narrator mentions the fact that using the flashlight may cause displays’ abnormal reaction. Then, we are mainly focused on the experience of a person breaking the laws and gets more and more sense of illusion. Finally, we try to use different angles and perspectives to show the fact that the person himself becomes the display. Overall, the combination of sound and image allows the viewer to discover the truth about the museum: the displays are actually human beings, which is a great metaphor.
4. The reason for exploring this
Because all the rule-based weird stories so far have been presented mainly in textual form, we wanted to combine them with visual images to narrate the whole story in a more direct and immersive way using video. Therefore, we explored this theme in this project.
B. Creation Process & Execution
- Storyboard
The designing of storyboard enabled us to better have an idea of what we should shoot before editting. Because we have only one chance to go to the Shanghai Nature Museum to shoot related scenes, the storyboard made us planned effectively, saving us time in the shooting process.
2. The process of choosing a setting, shooting, sourcing materials, lighting, and directing
The setting of our project is based upon the audio part. The content of it was well suited to be read out in AI voice in the case of our project, thus it was completed quickly. After having the narration, I added some sound effects of emptiness and metaphysicalness to make the narration sounds more bizzard and weird.
Here is our narration’s transcript:
“Welcome to the xxx Museum. In order for you and others to have a better visiting experience, please observe the following rules:
1. All displays in this museum are specimens. If you see or feel a display move, please move away as soon as possible and ask for help from the staff.
2. Please do not touch any of the displays. If you accidentally touch a display, wash your hands with alcohol sanitizer or ask for help from a nearby staff member.
3. Food and drinks are not allowed in this museum. Please do not use flash photography, as it may cause abnormal reactions to the displays.
4. If you feel dizzy or uncomfortable, please leave the visiting area immediately.
5. If you violate any of the above rules or have experienced irreversible hallucinations, please contact a staff member and enter the display area under their direction. ”
When shooting, we first completed the easy parts, such as eating, using the flashlight, touching faces, etc. Because our project is meant to be weird and having a lot of effects, we do not have much requirements on the visual quality of the original video clips (even a little bit blurry is better), thus we shot most of the scenes using the phone. All the lightings are indoor lightings. After that, we went to Shanghai Nature Museum for shooting the other parts. Finally, we editting, we found that there is something more that could be shot, and thus we shoot them during the editting process to better our storyline.
When it comes to the process of sourcing materials, I mainly found sound effects on the website Mixkit, as well as some coloring templates to make some effects.
3. Challenges
First, for the shooting part, we had decided to go to the museum to shoot scenes, but we met with some problems. Because we did not prepare enough in advance, the camera borrowed by the school ran out of power. We had to use the cell phone to shoot. Even worse, the cell phone did not have much battery. Luckily, we finished almost all the scenes required.
We had a lot of challenges in the editing part mainly because of my computer’s problem that it cannot render 4k video greatly. Also, the cell phone video encoding and the computer’s encoding do not match, thus importing the videos into Premiere Pro would cause some laggings. By asking the the professor, I eventually found the solution that we can use HandBrake software to re-encode the problematic videos. That actually worked very well.
Also, there are some effects that are hard to make. For example, the effect of opening one’s eyes. I tried for a long time, but eventually sought some tutorials on the Internet and found some solutions.
4. Editting and post-production process
Lining up the videos are easy, but mastering them smoothly is hard. Getting smoother transitions between clips is the major challenge for our project. We thought about a lot of ways to deal with some very unclear picture quality and weird colors for videos taken from a phone. Siwei first tried overall changing color, such as making the whole video black and white, but that didn’t come out well. Finally, we found some templates on Mixkit to make the whole introduction screen old and technological, both to reflect a sense of oldness and weirdness (which is part of our metaphor), but also to cover up the shortcomings of cell phone shooting.
Also, there are lots of places that needed flashing between two scenes. It is a pain to combine these things together to make the flashing smooth.
C. Collaboration
My role in this project is mainly searching for and editting the sound, acting in the scenes when filming, and post-production editting (mainly doing the video arrangements and transitions).
At the same time, my teammate Siwei also contributed a lot in the collaboration. She mainly did the script writing, storyboard production, filming, and some of the video editing. Collaborating with her has greatly enhanced our efficiency. Also, I learned a lot from her. I am a bad color controller. I indeed learned a lot from her about color correction skills. Additionally, we have feedback for each other, so that the project producing perspectives would be more comprehensive.
D. Aesthetics & Results
- Camera language
For the filming techniques, we used extreme close-ups of the throat, mouth, and arms when shooting the characters, which makes it easy for the audience to zero in on the subjects. For the shooting angle, we mainly used eye-level shots, without over-emphasizing the subject. Also, the shootings are made up of both first-person-perspective and third-person-perspectives. There are also a lot of tracking shots.
- Color correction/adjustment
We color-correctioned all museum-related images to be relatively dark and with less color saturation to create a sense of uncanniness. All the images about the people were toned to black and white as a metaphor, and the rest of the images were just normal colors with basic color correction. This is actually a hard work that needs a lot of artistic inspirations.
- Tone/Pace of video
We followed the audio to decide the pace of the video. Because the whole video is in the tone of horror, uncanniness, the pace of changing scenes is fast in some situations to create tension. For example, the part where it is flashing between a person running and a still speciman.
At last, we show our gratitude towards those who have given us suggestions, such as the professor and the peers, and also towards the source owners in our video. I think the project is overall a success. However, it could be done much better if we had a better filming quality, which may give us more error tolerance.