Visual Metaphor Documentation
1. Concept & Story
For this project, we primarily wanted to explore the concept of grief and what a person may visualize and/or feel when going through the five stages of grief, but in the ending giving a hopeful message to anyone who are viewing the video that might be going through their own grief. I got inspired to make this project from inspirational and motivational videos that are made to encourage people whenever they are going through a bad time in a specific area, such as health or education videos, as well as “Birth Control Your Own Adventure” which we watched during class, which inspired the visuals style we wanted to go for. The idea was to follow a similar format to those kinds of videos, with professional looking visuals and a narrative spoken towards the viewer of the video in order to get the message of the video across. I wanted to explore this topic as I wanted to experiment and make a project that is less story driven (as least compared to the other projects I’ve seen) and more about teaching a possibly helpful lesson to the viewer. Also, since pretty much everyone goes through grief at least a few times in their lives, I wanted to create a project as to describe what they’re going through but, in the end, inspire and give them hope.
2. Creation Process & Execution
Our originally storyboard would have been about a single person visually going through the five stages of grief and then finding meaning out of it. However, we would receive feedback that this would have been a bit too on the nose and be less like a metaphor for our topic but rather touching upon the topic directly. Hence, we shifted our vision and visuals to be more metaphorical, not directly showing the things happening in the audio but a fitting metaphor for it, going for a visual style similar to “Birth Control Your Own Adventure”. To going along with this, I had developed a script based upon an article about the 5 stages of grief, and we decided to use an AI voice as it’d be the most professional sounding option for our project. Me and my partner would meet up to record ideas we had for metaphors and primarily done so in my kitchen as we thought it would provide the cleanest shots. However, for some of the metaphors like for anger, we couldn’t consistently record for, hence we resorted to stock videos to fill in the gaps and as placeholders for the time being when the 3-4 scenes were due. I had the idea of making all the clips black and white to really emphasize the topic at hand until the last two stages, which I turned the saturation of most of the videos all the way down, which seemed to have worked when viewed. However, the primary feedback that we got from that was there was too much a quality difference between the stock videos and the shots we recorded ourselves. Hence, we made the decision to use only stock footage as they would better convey the metaphors and messages we wanted over what we could have recorded. We also gotten feedback about how the scenes transitions were quite sudden and were basically just jump cuts, which didn’t give off an impact of the messages. Hence, I inserted in transitions to better convey the messages and transition smoothly from scene to scene. Lastly was the music, which was quite fitting for the project but didn’t convey the rising hope towards the end, hence I shifted the music to better fit the entire video and convey said hope in the end.
3. Collaboration
I would say that my role was primarily that of the director and editor of the project. I came up with the topic for the project, came up with most of the ideas for the visuals, and edited all of the video. However, that doesn’t mean that my partner didn’t contribute to the project. She would be willing to meet up in person to almost every time we met to discuss and work on our project and would help come up with some of the ideas for the visuals, as well as record a good majority of the videos before we came to decision to use all stock videos, all except for one clip (the clip with the clock). Given our respective schedules, it was commendable for the work that she was able to do.
4. Aesthetics & Results
As previously stated, our aesthetics for the video were primarily based upon those of inspirational videos and of “Birth Control Your Own Adventure”, in which in the end we decided stock videos would best represent our metaphors and messages while also conveying a more professional look than what we could have recorded, to which I think succeeded as it gave a serious tone to the video, which would convey the messages we had in mind and strengthen the final hopeful message in the end. The use of black and white in the first four stages of the video I’d say help convey the tone of the video before shift to color to really convey the rising hope and ultimate message of the video. The music also helped in this regard as well, perfectly shifting in the last two stages to really emphasize the hopeful message we wanted to convey. The voice we used also conveyed a sense of professionalism and seriousness for the script we made, conveying that the video should be taken seriously and thus the messages of it as such. Overall I am satisfied with the video we made given the time constraint of 90 seconds for the contents of the video. However, if there wasn’t a time constraint of 90 seconds, then I think our messages could have been better conveyed as pacing would be slower to really convey the messages better. But for what it’s worth, I think our final result was the best it possibly could have been to convey the professionalism and message we had set out to have in our project.