http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~tj1059/projects/video/
Our project is going to express silence through three individual videos. The five obstructions are: silence, stairs, shoot through mirrors, sync to the music, scroll only, which showed really strong contradiction between each and made us struggled. We then came up with the theme social silence, trying to shoot separated/individual scenes in the aim of presenting the same theme. That is to say, our project would not be that narrative, which was a big challenge to us. For the first scene, a boy and a girl who chatted heatedly online both felt really embarrassed when meeting with each other in reality. We shot them texting from different directions, including the detailed conversation happened in phones to show their close relationship. However, the girl’s embarrassing reflection of greeting with the boy kind of presenting the contradiction, which better interprets such social silence. For the second scene, a boy was wondering along the stairs without any sound, simply presenting silence in the real world while in a down mood. We edited it in a visually nice way, better fitting the interaction- we use scrolling to change the speed of this video, kind of showing him walking back and forth. For the third scene, what we wanted to show is the contradiction between character’s personal silence and the outside noise. He was relying on the flyover, experiencing the traffic noise, the pedestrians, the real world. Through scrolling, we can manage to turn the volume either up or down, which adds to the interaction and better fits the theme.
At first, we really struggled with meeting all the obstructions at the same time while presenting a complete project. However, after deciding not to use the narrative style, we started brainstorming. Each of us was supposed to take the responsibility of coming up with at least one specific scene, making them up in detailed plans. I took charge of the scene on stairs, edited it and shot both the stairs and escalator scenes. By the interactive day, we had nothing except for only three incomplete videos. Thanks for Elena’s main editing, we finally finished the three general videos. Then with the help of Leon and Mengting, we had an interactive page which includes three scrolling part. Then I came up with the idea that we can have a very starting page introducing the scrolling model; later using scrolling to link to such interactive home page, which separated each video as well as indicating that they are all individual ones with different interaction.
We use different kinds of interaction to fit in each video based on the scrolling. For the stairs scene, we made it scroll to change the speed, playing the video with scrolling instead of auto playing. For the bridge scene, we used scrolling to adjust the volume of the video. For the first scene on the escalator, since there are sounds of notification and keyboard tap, we were supposed to use the scrolling interaction controlling the video speed together with its audio, however it turned to be more unrealizable due to the limited time. So we chose to play the original video without interaction, putting more emphasis on its sound to better express the silence. As for the obstruction of mirror other than the webpage design, we both considered using abstract effect to edit and exact mirror to shoot. We were not quite sure at first but the finalized effect seemed to be better than we expected anyway.
Generally, I think our finalized work is not that bad considering the theme of social silence, especially compared with what we had by the interactive day. However, I do think that we should reflect more on the process of cooperating with each other, which in my opinion is lack of carefulness, clear plans, proper division of laborand effective communication. The thing I would change if having more time would be the interaction of scrolling to zoom in so as to read the messages that are shown in phones in the escalator scene. This is kind of an obvious pity of our current project. Furthermore, if possible, I might reconsider changing the current theme which is social silence, trying to present silence in a relatively more abstract and literal way. Anyway, I now still appreciate what my partners do in this project as well as this experience.
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