Visuan Metaphor: Documentation
A. Concept & Story
This story pictures a boy who had a toothache and decided to go to the dentist after hesitating, procrastinating and being tortured by anxiety. This project is based on my personal experience that I have been afraid of visiting the dentist from a young age, but after the treatment, I would find that things weren’t actually that bad.
We came up with a scenario that a person was suffering from toothache and had related it to some other experience at first, and then expanded it after our instructor’s advice and made it more abstract. We want to explore this topic because nowadays, many people had a bad habit of procrastinating, though things would only go worse. We want to make it like a public service announcement, which used to be played frequently on TV.
B. Creation Process & Execution
The stroyboard helps us plan the process of recording, shooting and editing. It is very convenient and flexible to check the details on the storyboard.
We shot all the clips indoor at first, and decided to shoot the opening part outdoor after the peer-reviewing, to make the clips more diverse and vivid. To make the background clearer, we shot the cola can, paper and the screwdiver on some chairs, which could block other things in the background. We shot other indoor scenes in a practice room with mild lighting, to make it more daily. We chose some footage from the internet when those things we want to shoot weren’t accessible to us.
From the very beginning, we decided to shot a real person with more direct elements, but it turned out to be opposite to the prompt, which should be a visual metaphor. What we made was more like an “audio metaphor”. To make a difference, we took the advice from our instructor and made the visual element less specific and made the audio focused on a specific story. When recording the audio, we chose an AI generator at first, but it turned out that the AI voice didn’t fit the plot well, so Jack recorded the stroy with his voice, using his professional microphone.
We used Premiere to make several stop-motion animations, used keyframe to make some animations and effects in the video. We also used Audition to adjust the volume, add some effects to the voice in the middle and adjust the speed. We find out that when changing speed in Premiere, the tune of the voice would change a lot, but when doing that in Audition, it would be a lot better and we can manipulate the tune more easily.
C. Collaboration
I drew the storyboard and edited most of the video in the project. We made most of the shooting together, and Jack is responsible for the audio. His advice is very helpful, and this project is completed by our joint effort. We exchange our ideas both online and offline and made full use of both our skills. I learned from him that there are great differences between professional microphones for recording human vioces and the ordinary microphones that are built in our phones. I’m not good at listening, but he helped me find out this difference.
D. Aesthetics & Results
Most of our shots are close-ups, for we want to focus on the protagonist. We choose a doll to symbolize a person because the identity of a doll is not specific, and everyone can imagine to be the protagonist. It is also more interesting to shoot a doll instead of a person.
We adjusted the contrast and saturation for the outdoor scenes to make the color more dynamic, for it was cloudy when we were shooting, and the color should be brighter to fit the boy’s image.
The tone of the video is quite calm at the beginning, but became more and more stressful in the middle when the boy is struggling to show his anxiety. After he decided to visit the dentist, it became calm again, to show that the problem is solved, and made it more like a public service announcement.