A.Concept & Story

• Our concept is about desire and meaning. When “you” first saw a fancy city called Phyllis, “you” were attracted by all the fancy things and amazing life in the city, and “you” wanted to stay in the city forever. However, when you could really stay there, as time passed, you found all the surprising things disappeared. You felt bored,  void and meaningless. When we were discussing the text of VO, we wanted to talk about something relatively deeper. Crystal recommended the book Invisible City, and we picked this chapter because we found the topic of meaninglessness very interesting. 

 B.  Creation Process & Execution

• The final video actually changed a lot from our originally storyboard. But by thinking about the storyboard, we had some basic ideas and we followed them when making the final video. For example, we wanted our video to have some reflections and we kept the beginning and the ending. We wanted to present the process of a curve becoming straight to show the disappearance of things and convey a sense of emptiness. We Based on these ideas, we draw a new one and made our project according to it.

• For most of the scenes, we first decided what to shoot, and then we thought about the places, settings, etc. For example, we have two scenes of fish, the first one is fish swimming in the water, the second is fish struggling on the ground. Our primary idea is that in the first one we show they are in the ocean, happy and free. To find somewhere that looked like the ocean, we went to the aquarium and shot some fish in a simulated undersea tunnel.  However, the second fish scene is an exception among all the scenes. We had wanted to shoot some dead fish being sold, so we went to a supermarket. Suddenly, a fish jumped out of the glass box and struggled on the ground. Chenxuan quickly shot it, and we thought it  showed a kind of hopelessness, which is even better than our original idea, so we used it, which is totally a surprise.

• At first we wanted to use some clips to show the fancy life in the city, such as jewelry, beautiful dresses, or something like that. However, it was really hard for us to find these objects. We shot some candies, flowers, but if we simply put these things together, our video looked very “broken”, and the scene didn’t look fancy either. Finally we decided to shoot a party with delicious food, laughing people, wine ( which was actually grape juice)and glasses. We had dinner in the CenturyLink complex and honorably had my roommates to act as the people attending the party.
• We edited different scenes severally and then combined them on my computer. Mine is two eyes scenes, the party scene, the hands’ scenes, and the lego people. For the eyes scene, I used crop effects to make the eyed fill the screen, and I also checked the number so that the eyes in two different scenes could look in the same place and the same size. For the party scenes, I adjust the speed to make it more immersive. There were some specific scenes (such as the one where someone was filling a glass with wine) that were not stable, since the speed adjustment and stabilizer could not be used at the same time. I exported them separately and then imported the slower one again to add a stabilizer on it. For the hands’ scene, I also adjusted the speed to match the timing. The legos were the scene that I spent the most time on. We wanted to make it look like some stop-motion animation, so I cut some frames from the long video and presented each frame for the same time. Due to lighting issues, there was one frame that looks brighter and yellower than others, so I also adjusted its color temperature. After putting each piece together as the whole video, we polished some transitions, timing issues and added the title and subtitle together.

C.Collaboration

• We three brainstormed the description of the storyboard together. At the filming stage, I was the one whose eyes and hands were shown in the video. I also filmed the party scene, the glass scene and the lego scene with chenxuan. At the editing stage, we assigned our work and my parts were as above. 
• Crystal is the one who recommended the text and finished the voice over and chose the background music. I really love her voice and our audio for the project. When we were editing the video, she made some cool effects and she helped us to make the timing and subtitles look more perfect. Since she is the only native English speaker, she really did a lot when we were dealing with things related to English.

Chenxuan had many brilliant ideas when we were thinking about the storyboard. She also shot many beautiful scenes. and she was also the one that reminded me to think about the reality when I got some unrealistic ideas.

• When we were shooting the scenes, sometimes I thought one scene was “Okay”, but my teammates always told me that we should make it “perfect” instead of  just “Okay”. I think that’s what I should learn from them.
• D.Aesthetics & Results

• Generally speaking we chose a documentary  style for our video. So most of the scenes were shot in real life settings and natural lighting, and we intended to make the lighting not quite bright to achieve the documentary style. But the object we chose had some metaphorical meaning, for example, the string scene were shot in front of a blue board under natural light, but the string could represent the city, and two hands playing with it just like a person wandering in the street, finally its drop metaphoring the disappearance of the fancy city.
•  We tried to explore as much camera language as possible. The eyes were an extreme close-up, through which we wanted the audience to feel like they were the “you” mentioned in the voiceover. Then, the party scenes have both close-up and medite shots, also various angles of the movements of cheering up to better show the fancy life of phyllis and then we put a still scene of the close-up of glasses that were put together to express “stay there”.
• One thing that we spent much of our time working on was the connection between each scene. Both the beginning and the ending were a person opening her eyes, but the audience can see that at  the beginning the eyes were full of excitement but at the ending they become tired and the light in them disappears, we want this comparison to show “your” emotional change. The scene of filling the glass is connected with the party scenes as well as the broken glass scene. We wanted to show some process of accumulating and destroying, which is the metaphor for not only the fancy city Phyllis that became invisible but “your” desire and excitement disappearing and being replaced but the feeling of meaninglessness. 
• The pace of our final video was slow, because we wanted the audience to have more time to consider all the things that happened and feel more immersed in our video.