Evan’s Documentation Blog

1. For our video, we first chose Farewell as our topic. However, we found it hard to discuss such a big topic. Therefore we turned to explore a more specific one—about those from small cities who said farewell to their hometown and came to work in Shanghai, a bigger city. They are strangers to this new, modern city, just around us. We have great interest in their thoughts and feelings. Especially, we want to break the stereotypes of them to show more respect. In our video, the interviewees are not always in difficulty. They came to Shanghai because they don’t want to waste their lifetime. And in general they enjoy the time here.

 

We interviewed two people of this kind, an Ayi, the housekeeper, and a street cleaner. We asked them why they came to Shanghai, what difficulties they met, how they felt when staying in a bigger city, and some positive things they felt here.

 

To use visual metaphors to visualize these interviews, we include some scenes when they are working and daily routines. We also use things like the telephone booth to show their missing home. Most importantly, we want to use them as the two typical people who can represent thousands of people like them. Therefore, we use the juxtaposition to show many scenes we capture on the streets to reveal how common these scenes are.

 

In addition, we want to show how those people might be ignored by others. So, we use a juxtaposition where there’s a stream of cars below and a standing rubbish cart above, which is then pushed by a street cleaner. This scene demonstrates the contrast between a busy city and these quiet workers, showing that those strangers might be ignored by other busy people in the city to raise more people’s awareness of their quiet contributions.

 

The music we use is “five hundred miles”, whose lyrics show how a person leaves his or her hometown, in search of a brand-new life. This accords with our theme of those strangers adjusting to a new city.

 

Everyone in the city of Shanghai has his/her unknown past. We meet a variety of people in Shanghai every day and each of their stories deserves to be listened to. This time, we focus on the strangers in Shanghai, whose past is buried deep and far away. We want to be participants of social connection, hearing about what the strangers want to talk about. It turns out that their experience of leaving home to stay in Shanghai is like taking a new journey along the road, tough though colorful.

 

• Visual Metaphor Proposal

  I.   Project Title: Farewell

  II.  Team Members: Xinyue， Qifan  

  III.  Concept | Storyline:

   1). The piece (article, poem, story) for the narrative voice over?  

   “I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. The cloud clears as you enter it.”― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

  2) storyline

  Line1–A lady put down all the photos—- memories and left home. Running quickly towards the streets to the airport, he is resolute to get into the unknown future where his new life may start. Just like stepping over the fallen leaves, which shows the death of the past, and running from the forest to the grass that seemed to be scary, but once stepped into, became bright.

  Line2– An airplane is setting off.

  3). What kind of style/aesthetics are you going to pursue?

  Realistic incidents with unrealistic expressions.

  IV.  Execution Plan:

  1). What equipment are you going to use when shooting the movie? (cell phone, DSLR camera, sound recorder, stabilizer..)

  Camera, tripods, stabilizer, sound recorder.

  2). Which locations will it be shot at? When is it?

  Airport&Park&Inside a room&Streets

  Both daytime and nighttime.

  3). What are some challenges you might encounter and how will you prepare?

  Struggling with technical troubles—- Some research in advance

  Failing to convey the main idea—- Elaboration on the storylines

  Bad control of light and missing the best time when shooting outside—- Predictions in advance

  4) Division–– Undecided

  V.   Storyboard Draft 

• 

• 【百岁山广告完整版-哔哩哔哩】 https://b23.tv/4TjQKMy

https://wp.nyu.edu/nyushanghai-evantang/2022/11/28/70/

According to Ritchin, “fluidity of the digital” means that data is ubiquitous and pervasive like water. Where there are people, there is data. And where there is no one, there is still data. “fluidity of the digital” is an inherent fundamental attribute and a sufficient condition for determining the value of data elements. If the data does not flow, it means that the data cannot be applied, and in theory, the data will be worthless. Special graphic image recognition technology in digital imaging is a good example of this. It specializes in the processing of huge and meaningful data to accurately locate single images and obtain final recognition results. However, it can’t achieve this without the “fluidity of the digital”. Because one advantage brought by the “fluidity of the digital”is that it can extract information and knowledge hidden in massive data to provide a basis for human socio-economic activities, which is needed for the development of non-destructive digital imaging technology.

The camera’s ability to capture reality is limited. The camera has a strong ability to capture highlights, but it can’t capture shadow details well. As the light signal decreased, the noise began to soar rapidly. Noise is a random expression of the brightness of the real signal pixels of the picture. When the sensor can’t see clearly, it begins to give a random value randomly, resulting in noise. Therefore, when below a certain brightness, the image may be damaged by noise, so that the details in the shadows are not accurately captured.

“Books are cameras that can record the history of ten thousand years.” Actually, the book is an accurate description of the text, and the camera is the accurate presentation of the picture. Both are very accurate in capturing reality. But the camera can only capture one moment, and the book can capture the whole process. This is the difference between time period and time point. The advantage of the camera is to make a picture more intuitive and specific. However, words can only rely on the fictional imagination and experience in the human brain to imagine how the real picture happens.

Below are my ideas for Diptych Project.

Portrait: Snail crossing the highway by PS & A photo of billboards. — Snail’s horns will look similar to the board. What’s more, they will be as a whole, a poster for a road movie, whose main character is a snail.

Landscape: An eye by PS & A photo of a leaf lying on the ground. The eye can be found in the ancient mural paintings. Light and shadow will assist to make the leaf sacred. Both the eye and the leaf stand out in the central part.

Landscape: Golden glass ball by the beach and seaside by PS& A photo of fragments and chips. Shooting at a close horizontal angle, I intend to emphasize the sharpness of fragments. It will form a contrast with the round ball and gentle waves in another image. However, they have a similarity in colors.

Portrait: White ladder towards the dark sky by PS& A photo of bamboo. (Black and white. Figure and ground. Natural creation and artificial design. Complex and simplicity.)

The work below is created by me, Qifan Tang. I got my inspiration from the prelude of Eternal Summer (0:00~0:34) by Mayday, a band singing for love, freedom and youth.

• The pure pursuit is the concept of this work. It means pursuing with no fear, no question and no diffidence. I use different sizes of “/” and “o” ，which extend in the same direction.This is a reflection of similarity and proximity, which suggests the direction and distance of the extension of the picture.  The art font of “/” has a good combination with the ground. Therefore people can associate with light and shadow in the dark. It echoes the notation “*” in the top left corner. Moreover,  it corresponds to the concept of pursuit.What I have learned from One Black Square is that a combination of meaningless notations may indicate a meaningful whole, easily resulting in association.
• The most significant step was to make a complex of “8”. I think I managed to create something that is kind of mysterious, fancy and exalting considering its size. But it should have been bigger. I had created a small one then and it was really difficult. Besides the complex, I created some nice overlapping of simple notations. However, the continuity needed a big improvement, for which I didn’t come up with an appropriate idea.
• If I have more time, I will process the “/” and “o” to facilitate continuity. Additionally, I’d like to change the view of the complex, in order to make it smooth in the connection of the combination and the complex.
  

Introduction

You think time is like many pieces of butter, which can be placed on each piece of bread, that is to say, time is meaningful. It allows events to happen. However, we humans only find it meaningful when we cut time into many different sections. Imagine each section is a small amount of time, which only allows a small number of events to happen. We generally divide time into three parts, which respectively allow what we know, what we are getting to know, and what we don’t know to happen. Our life is a process of these three parts, going with time. And we call the time when things must happen as we know “past”.

There is a golden rule on the earth, you may consider it as magic, that time can turn what we know into things we don’t know. It’s like the “past” is killed by time. Is it incredible and desperate? We want to go against it. We use our unique power and make non-existence into existence. In other words, we gain something and ensure this doesn’t happen. Before further introducing it, I’d like to point out a big difference between us. Unlike your whole knowledge of everything happening in the time, we only know about the half part of them. However, we can make a difference, knowing something time doesn’t allow us to know, while you can’t disagree with anything in the time.

What happened

It can make three-dimension real things into two-dimension ones called “photos”. This assists to freeze the process into moments. We can turn to these photos of moments when we want to find out what happened in the past, remembering our histories and discovering where we come from.

I’d like to give you more detailed information about the human efforts behind the invention of the camera, showing the long history of humankind’s exploration of science. A person suddenly found that the images would be upside down when the light went through a hole. He used this discovery and created the first camera, which he operated a lot. The photo came out. But the colors of the photos are limited to black and white. There exist convex and concave lenses when lights go through them. The images are depicted smoothly on the screen in front of them. Just like the picture in the corner I am pointing to. We are happy to see the camera has more complicated features. It can change the intensity of the light, give a wide or narrow shot, focus on a specific object, and so on. Additionally, the photos automatically come out on something we call the film.

Humans explore how to better save our “past”. In other words, we are trying to obtain the ability to see through our civilizations’ time as a whole, just like the ones you’ve commanded since birth. Also, we can use these “pasts” in communication by showing them to you. You can know more about our civilization.

 

https://y.music.163.com/m/song?app_version=8.8.45&id=1910859832&uct2=yuMwTXGbQA+ggssr9Z20Vw%3D%3D&dlt=0846

(0:00~0:33)

http://分享五月天的单曲《盛夏光年（伴奏）（live in the sky版）》http://music.163.com/song/1898907962?userid=1382095366 (@网易云音乐)

（0:00～0:34）

https://1drv.ms/b/s!AtEJyRjoEz4GfjzencV_ouFRrkI