Author: Jinyuan Xu

A. Concept & Story
The story in the project was that a boy was suffered from toothache due to procrastination. He was also very anxious, but at last he made the choice to go to see the dentist and face the problem directly. The main concept is that stop procrastinating so as to eliminate anxiety. There were two main inspirations of the project: one was that Rebecca had some bad memories of going to the dental clinic. Another was that Rebecca and I were very interested in the way Sindha Agha shot the short film “Birth Control Your Own Adventure” and we thought that the story was proper for this kind of style. Firstly, we set the topic and fiming style. Then we figured out the specific plots and how to shoot them while drawing the storyboard. The reason why I wanted to explore this topic was to stress the common problem of procrastination and anxiety among young people nowadays. Also, I regarded it as a golden chance to practise stop motion animation and advertising style shooting.

B. Creation Process & Execution

Here is the storyboard:

The processing of making storyboard let us have a clear understanding of the design and sequence of the plots. And the interesting point of storyboard was that it was mutable. In other words, it could be revised or improved based on better ideas, feedbacks or critiques.

We chose to film at school because most scenes were indoor shooting and closed spaces were easy to find at school. (But we didn’t show any elements related to NYUSH) What’s more, there were lawns within the campus which fitted the background scene for the beginning. The camera we used was a Canon 7D. For indoor shooting, we mainly used the flash in the cell phone while natural lights and color correction in post-production were used for outdoor shooting. The materials we bought were a hand puppet, an apple and a bottle of cola. One challenge we faced was the focus and stablization of the camera. Our solution was to keep shooting clips and choose the one with the best quality. We also put the hand puppet on the floor and shot it from the view above to avoid trembling of the object. Another one was the stop motion animation. Rebecca and I looked for tutorials online and then follow the steps to overcome this difficulty. Since we divided the video into several parts, we often edited one part once we finished shooting it. The basic tasks were matching the voice-over and sounds with the image, adding subtitles, changing the tracks and positions of the clips. Overall, we did it smoothly.

Here were two editing techniques/effects I learned:

1. Juxtaposition of multiple clips

2.Stop motion animation

C. Collaboration

My own role included recording the voice over, making adjustments on the audios, editing the stop motion animation and shooting the clips. Rebecca did most of the editing work and I thought it was successful and high-quality. She was kind and easy to work with so that we could always communicate with each other easily and reach an agreement on the best solution if we had different ideas. I also learned a lot of editing skills from her, such as pop in effect. In short, the collaborative process and exchange with Rebecca allowed us to figure out the best way to demonstrate a scene. Besides, it formed an open atmosphere for us to communicate, which was crucial in teamwork.

D. Aesthetics & Results

I think there were two successful parts of metaphor. The first part was the stop motion animation in which the scenes of an apple hurt by needles, a flat cola can and a pinched paper ball could show the pain when the boy was suffered from the toothache. The second part was the usage of clips like drills, hammers and electric soldering. They perfectly demonstrated the anxiety and fear of the boy without showing the real scenes in the clinic. The effects of the sounds such as distortion also made contributions to the aesthetics. These sounds often appeared at the same time as the picture, which allowed the audience to better experience the boy’s feeling.

Rebecca Xiong and Jack Xu
Updated version of Storyboard:

Concept

For my Memory Soundscape, I decided to focus on my memory of coming home from senior high school every day. I was under a lot of stress at the time due to a high workload of homework and tests. However, on my way back home, I always felt a sense of relief as I walked on the streets, hearing the sound of the hustle and bustle of city life. What’s more, my parents were cooking dinner when I was on my way back home and I could enjoy the hot meal once I arrived home. Hence, I hoped to convey this warmth in the midst of busyness to my listeners. To achieve this goal, I chose parellel editing, namely, using the left channel to demonstrate what was happening in the house while using the right channel to talk about what was happening on my way back home. These two channels made different sounds at the same time, which added more communications between them.

Process

As I mentioned, I divided the sounds mainly into two categories: sounds on the way back home and sounds at home. For the former, I recorded environmental sounds at the end of class, sound of sound of students’ chit-chat, footsteps, sound of cars and old bicycles passing by, sound of passers-by talking, sound of a shared bike unlocking, sound of the convenience store opening bell and the sound of subway. These sounds were representative sounds and they were relevant to each other so that they could coherently tell a story. For the latter, I chose the sound of chopping and frying, the sound of the hood, the sound of the gas stove, the sound of the faucet and the sound of opening as well as closing the door. My reason of using these sounds was that they were close to real life and thus made it easier to feel the warmth in the simple daily life. The techniques I used were the recorder and shotgun. Since I didn’t have a hurricane globe, some of the recording sounds were not satisfying due to the sound of wind. To solve this problem, I worked out two feasible solutions: one was to record more sounds in indoor environment and the other was to add effects in Adobe Audition. Later it turned out that it worked!

When it comes to editing, I removed the background noises for some sounds while kept the environment sounds for the others according to my design. Next, I sorted tracks into cooking, road, talking1, afterclass1, metro and other sounds and I added different effects to each tracks. For example, metro track had parametric equalizer and was fully reverberated and road track had slight delay and fully reverb with different settings. Then I changed the panning setting based on the sounds’ category: the left channel was about sounds in the house while the right channel was about sounds on the way back home. After that, I adjusted the fade in and fade out to make the separated sounds as a whole. I also edited certain points when two sounds played at the same time and had other sounds after one sound stopped so as to make the sounds more cohesive. My main challenge was how to keep a balance between left and right channels. My solution was that the right channel had louder sounds at first and the left channel had louder sounds once the frying sounds joined in. In the last part, the two channels combined into one channel. What I had learned was how to deal with original sounds, especially how to firstly make it purer, how to add effects on it and how to make it more cohesive with other sounds.

Conclusion

If I had more time, I would adjust the volume to make some sounds more suitable rather than have sounds that seemed like to be in different layers. I would also tried other effects that I had never used before to figure out whether it was helpful to the project. At the presentation day, I was glad that most classmates got my main idea or topic. Still, I received some illuminating feedbacks: one said that two channels playing at the same time might be a little bit messy because the listener didn’t know which one to listen to. I had to admit this point because this was the negative side of using the risk-taking parellel editing, but I thought having more effects and changing volume could be one solution. Another feedback was that I could use some effects on the frying sound to make it less harsh. I found this feedback feasible and helpful. Professor Chen also suggested that I could try put this idea into video editing and I thought I would probably give it a try in later video assignments.

Image of Audition

Steyerl talks about how the “unbroken belief” of the documentary form is challenged: documentary form used to be objective and focus on capturing the authenticity of the events. However, when more technologies are developed and put into use, the authenticity of the documentary is greatly reduced. Hence, documentary images are even more powerful because there is no more unbroken belief in their truth. More and more campaigns and propagandas started to use documentary as a tool to achieve their subjective goals. Speaking of the relations between truth and fiction, I believe that truth can provide inspirations and lay a basis in context for fiction while fiction explores freely and uses more imagination under the big picture illustrated by the truth.

The authenticity and representation of the truth in the media are crucial because they can be more dangerous than we expected if used in a misleading way. For example, a difference in the detail such as date and gender can result in numerous rumors or even verbal attacks towards an innocent person, which can cause more serious problems. From my point of view, a live broadcast should take the responsibility to document the events that occurred as realistically as possible, including every detail since it provides audiences with a sense of reality and immediacy.