Concept & Story
The love story is told between two peoples’ different perspectives with an unexpected ending. The audio consists of two people individually speaking about their perspective on the relationship that was had. However in the end it will be revealed that they’re talking about different people. So, the underlying idea is that a guy cheated on a girl. She is still in love with him, but he has already found a new love interest. It is the real-life story from Irene’s experience which makes it even more spicy and that’s how we got inspired and found our script. We wanted to explore the topic of relationships, even though it is really popular. But we still thought that it was quite interesting. One more detail is that the metaphor itself – changing sky came to us only after the name – “shifting skies”. First we planned it just as a narrative, but the shift in sky brings so much more to this work. The connection between the guy’s name and the weather helps us to represent how their relationships changed and it makes the whole story more structured.
Creation Process & Execution
We started from the storyboard and the audio. We used a storyboard as a place for our sketches. First, we recorded the audio. Then our main problem was to cut it to only 90 seconds. Originally, our audio was around 2.30 minutes. However we managed to cut it down to 1.30 seconds. We had some notes for the shots that we wanted to do, however in the process we changed a lot of the original ideas.We used scenes from the storyboard, however, I think that we changed the order of them. It worked really well for our team. At the class on the first day of this project we discussed scenes that can help us show love stories. We decided to use a lot of sun, sky, grass, and eyes. We got inspired with these ideas from cinematic poetry videos. We wanted to use more real-life shots than symbols of life. Our video is more a visual aid than a narrative, especially because the interview is talking about different times. Our setting choice was our campus and places next to it, because it helped us to work more efficiently, thanks to the proximity of it. We used a field, quad, IMA studio, and a classroom. However, we needed to follow the directions of this assignment, so all of the shots in this area are subtle without recognizable NYU symbols. So, you can’t really tell that it is nyu unless you know the campus really well. We chose natural lightning, and daylight. All of our scenes are full of sun. It represents warmth, love and sky. We shot some main scenes first – grass scene, classroom scene, and typing scene at first. We didn’t use the stabilizer, however, I came up with the idea to use a desk and a ribbon as the stabilizing tools. It made our scenes more smooth, especially the classroom scene. Irene was an actor, because it was her life story, however, we discussed all the shots together and corrected each other. I was in charge of filming everything. Our team work was efficient. We spent two days on the filming process and discovered one really interesting lifehack. After the first day of filming we put our scenes together with the audio and filled missing parts with scenes from the youtube or words with what we want to shoot in the future. It helped us to put together the first draft and structuralize the next step of filming. It was much easier having the whole ready script. In the post-production this technique was also really useful. Because we just changed already existing clips to our own filmed shots. One of our big problems was the search for a male actor. We ended up just asking a boy from IMA studio to participate in our video. One more interesting approach that we used was to film scenes in the middle (Sky’s part) without stabilizing them. I was running while filming on purpose to make those shots look natural. We wanted that part (where Irene is acting cute in the quad) to be the representation of their relationships through the eyes of Sky. So we decided to make some of the clips shaky. It added some natural feeling in them and more comfort, like he filmed them. One more challenge was how to make a phone light up with the notification. We changed our own home screens and WeChat names, and created lots of fake messages. It was quite funny. For the post-production process – editing was quite easy for us, because we didn’t need that many effects. We used split screens and some interesting transitions. We chose our favorite shots, decided where to better place them, cut some of them and made some of them longer to better fit with audio. BEcause our audio was already 1,30 seconds we were not able to add additional slides for the title and credits, so we made them a part of our visual aid with transparent text field. At the end there was a sky background which logically ends our story with rain, symbolizing the end of their relationships and also showing our credits. And in the beginning you can see a pretty scene of trees and bright sunny sky with our title and names on the slide.
Collaboration
Since the story was Irene’s I proposed to film her which also helped us, because we won’t need to search for an actress. I was in charge of the filming process. We came up with all the shots together, exchanging ideas and thoughts. I was also searching all the missing materials and inspiration on YouTube. I was the one who came up with the sky metaphor and I was trying to develop this idea even more. Irene did a great job with the editing process. She put a lot of effort into it and the result was very good. Especially I love how she did the split screen and all of the transition effects. She is also a great actress:). First round of editing (video draft) she did all by herself, however we were working together on the second round. All of the ideas we shared and everything was really good. We had our different views on some of the minor parts of the project, but good communication and argumentation helped us to decide which idea to use. I think our collaboration informed our project in a lot of ways. Both our similarities and differences influenced it. Irene has a lot of experience working in the new media industry and I have a lot of unusual ideas and some filming experience. Our ideas complimented each other. By connecting our visions we came up with the final project. Irene taught me some life hacks mostly about the technical part of shooting and editing. I learned how to efficiently organize and manage just filmed shots, how to make draft videos, how to merge our own videos with outside sources so it will look mostly similar. I also learned a lot about the collaboration process itself – how to critique and how to balance between following and leading.
Aesthetics & Results
It will be very raw and emotional. Not a whole lot of audio effects but more artistic with the videos. We tried to mix different camera movements, used a lot of close-ups and extreme close-ups to show emotions and text messages. We also used smooth camera movements when showing background story and shaky shots for the Sky’s part. Pace of our video depended on the audio file. Every scene in the audio corresponded to the new video scene. Most of our shots are medium length. Also, for almost the whole video we asked our actors not to look at the camera directly to show the story from the side, however for the Sky’s part with shaky shots Irene is directly looking at the camera, because this part was supposedly filmed by the Sky himself which makes it logical that she will look at the camera. It adds more naturality to that part and more professionalism to others. Our main colors when filming were green and blue. We used warm shades of them. Pink is a little too popular for showing love, so we decided to change it. Green looks comfortable, natural, warm and it is associated with summer/spring feeling which is associated with love and liking. Green is a perfect color for us, because we had a lot of nature scenes and this warm, loving green gives the whole motive to the video, because it is in almost every shot. Blue we used much less, usually for Irene’s clothes and for the sky. We tried to film a lot of shots with the sky in the shot. Also one of our colors is gray. You can see it in the background behind our male actor and when the sky changes to rain. Our whole video is supposed to be calm, with a little bit of contrast, fresh feeling, natural raw shots, innocent vibes and be aesthetic and cinematic.
Footage of our process:
folder with the most important drafts of our audio and video: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1BGnK5GqM_IET_RBTQeNVkf4lRHKewfu-?usp=share_link
all of the minor steps can be also found in our previous assignments submissions