When I first think of insects, I immediately think of nature and their incessant humming. I love being in nature and being surrounded by the greens, the orchestra of tiny insects I couldn’t see but sings loudly and the chorus of the birds. If water is near, there is sometimes also the blurb or swirl of water-drop as fish turn and jump out of the surface. I wish to recreate all of these in my video. For the choice of insect, dragonfly came to my mind because of their elegance and sense of “cleanness”, which is not often associated with insects at large.
I and Sienna found this cute lotus pond in the Century Park. It is a shame that now is not the season of lotus flowers – anyhow, I tried to micmic a dragonfly’s journey through the wide green freshly scented leaves and show the beauty of the pond as well as I can. In its journey, the dragonfly sometimes ascend and descend towards the surface of the water, bringing the audience a view not so familiar to the human eyes – I hope that peaking through the holes of the leaves and being near the water with lemmas creates the illusion of living a dragonfly’s life, and experiencing nature in a more immersive form.
To be able to catch the scenes on the water surface – and without my holding the camera with my arms to break the illusion, I brought a fish net at the park and placed the camera within. To block the view of me holding the stick of the net, I added a piece of lotus leaf into the net, attempting to make the scene as natural as possible. One interesting effect that comes with the net is that it has divided the view into myriads of little round sections – which is similar to the insect’s compound eye. It adds an interesting touch to my work, and I like it quite much, thinking that the insect may see the world in a vastly different way than our own perception.
When editing the video, I preserved one long shot and cut out a bit in the end where I attempted to bring the camera up a bridge to show the audience the whole view of the lotus pond. It was a good view, but not so insect-like anymore as the height is closer to that of a person. Then I cut out the voices of us speaking and only left out the brushing sound against the leaves. I searched for “dragonfly sound” to put in the intervals when the camera was moving to micmic the flying. After that, I added the environment sound in the background, goat sound on the left channel (as there was actually a goat in the park!) and the calls of Azure-winged Magpies on the right channel (which were also present in the park).
I am quite proud of how this project turned out to be. Hope you would enjoy it as much as I do:) I think the visual together with the sound effect really brings me back into nature and relaxes me.
(All sound resources are found on freesound.org.)