Visual Metaphor

ESCAPE

BY WENDY XU & LING LIN

Concept & Story

In class, we watched several visual metaphors and we thought it is a good way to exaggerate and visualize the emotions in one’s heart. And we both decided to do something abstract instead of a logical story according to the timeline. To better realize our idea, we decided to write our own narration. It is hard and risky but it could help us make a good connection with the visual effect.

While we are brainstorming about the scenes and the narration, we always consider their correlations and try to form a kind of metaphor or contradiction between sound and vision, since we aim to describe the struggling emotions of humans and their desire for a free and fantasy life.

Fairy tales, especially Alice in the Wonderland, become an inspiration for our narration as a signal for a fantasy world. We also use kaleidoscope as an important prop to illustrate the idea and connect it with the colorful vision.

Creation Process & Execution

Storyboard

The storyboard is always changing during our creation process since there is always some new idea popping out that we think is better to apply. So the storyboard has lots of versions. But it is really helpful for us to make sure what we are going to photo, which direction, what kind of shot, and remind us what we should do.

Choosing a setting, shooting, sourcing materials, lighting, and directing

There are many shots and scenes in our project so we spend a lot of time taking photos and videos.

We also try hard to get rid of the packaging of the Kaleidoscope to make the scene cleaner. In our metaphor, movement is an important element, there is the movement of dumbbells, the flow of traffic, the swing of metronome pointers, the rising of tall buildings from the horizon, the rotation of kaleidoscopes, the movement of people, the movement of butterflies, the blinking of eyes, etc. All these make our metaphor more interesting and make the vision more attractive and variable.

Challenges

One of the biggest challenges we face is the sound of the narration. Our narration is more like a poem with a few words so it is important to read out it in an emotional and attractive way. Our professor points out that the voices of both of us might be not suitable for our narration. This problem can’t be solved in a short time but we tried several times to find out what kind of pulses and pitches is the best.

Another is the color of our metaphor. We want to generate a fairytale-style vision of some of the shots to be consistent with the narration. However, our video might not be perfect and it is hard to make adjustments to color in video-editing software. Our solution is to spend time and adjust carefully the color wheel curve.

Editing & post-production process

One of the editing processes worth mentioning is the effect of buildings growing out of the horizon. I use the Keyframe to create the effect of buildings one after another.

Also, to get a better visual effect, we decided to use a Film frame ratio, 2.35:1 instead of the normal video ratio of 16:9. To realize that while adding the subtitle at the same time, we create a png file.

And it turns out to be effective and impressive especially for this scene.

Collaboration

The communication and cooperation between Ling and I are very harmonious and efficient. Ling will have some very interesting ideas, and these ideas are worth learning. In scenes that require people to appear on the scene, I acted as a photographer and Ling acted as an actor. In addition to photography, I am also responsible for the editing of audio effects, while Ling is mainly responsible for image effects and video color correction. Also, I am the one who draw the storyboard. The video editing is done by us together. I am responsible for the production of the cover, subtitles, and credits. I am very happy to work with Ling to complete the final project of Communications Lab.

Aesthetics & Results

Consider the aesthetics you choose to pursue your concept and story such as the following, tell us why do you think it is effective and you may also share your inspirations and references:

Camera language (e.g., long-shot, different camera angles)

There are many different camera shots in our metaphor just like the storyboard shows.

Color correction/adjustment

A typical example of our color correction is the scene of the traffic. The original one is on the left and we edit it into a pink and shinning one on the right.

Tone/Pace of video

The pace of our video is not always constant. There is a break in the middle and indicates a shift into the world with a kaleidoscope. There are also cut-cuts that make the rhythm variable.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SO5B-o3U42pA9z3LfINxTf2PN_IRtrdY/view?usp=sharing