Amelia and Xiangyi
12/05/2023
CONCEPT & STORY
For the Visual Metaphor project, Amelia and I want to demonstrate the feeling of losing a loved one. We put this abstract idea in a context of a story between ai and human, in which the person lost his/her loved one, created an AI for spiritual solace, and lost it again after a system breakdown. We chose AI as one of the main character here, since it originally has no idea of how does “lost” feel like, thus emphasizing the idea of losing.
CREATION PROCESS & EXECUTION
Frankly speaking, we initially did’t have a clear storyboard according to which we were supposed to shoot every scene. We, however, have a brief and general idea about what we were going to include in our project. So we considered and adjusted the shooting angles, contents, as well as lighting and colors while shooting, and based on that drew our storyboard.
The majority of our scenes were done in Amelia’s home. I took devices borrowed from ER to her home twice to work on the shooting part together with her. For the video material, the symbol of the main character in our video is a small wooden figure, in addition, in order to reflect the meaning of separation, loss and lack, we thought of using puzzles. To express the happiness and joy of the two’s getting along with each other, and the process of mutual penetration, understanding and love, we planned to use colorful candies in the form of stop-motion.
For better lighting effect, we have tried LED video light, photography silver reflector, as well as several table lamps.
storyboard
COLLABORATION
I have to first express my sincere gratitude to my partner Amelia for her understanding and hard work when I was sick and could not fully devote to our project. I co-worked with her in coming up with voiceover script, the ideas of storyboard, recording voiceover (asked my roommate for help,) and shooting video clips. After taking the majority of video footage, I was also in charge of taking some extra ones like the chopstick scene, hands scene, and dumplings scene as supplement. There were constant discussions and communications during our collaboration. Sometimes I felt extremely nervous at night because we did not reach an agreement during the day. However, I finally found out that it is okay even if we haven’t got a very precise idea of every step and every single design for our work. It always turned out that during our taking videos the next day, some new interesting thoughts just pop up. Therefore, one of the most important thing I learned form collaborating with Amelia is always be hopeful, and never be over nervous before really getting a bad result.
AESTHETICS &RESULTS
I think our project features on the stop-motion aesthetic and sci-fi style visual elements. Because our work is more narrative, we take stop-motion animation to show the development of the story in order to avoid a running record. In addition, in order to show the feeling of loss, we use masking and emphasize the visual effect of loss by overlaying two layers. In addition, when expressing the character’s happy mood, we deliberately considered using brightly colored candies as a carrier to give the viewer a jumping, excited visual sense. The light treatment is also based on the storyline and the mood of the character. Basically, we set a steady camera by using the tripod, and utilized camera languages like span, zoom in/out.
While editing, we added lots of sci-fi special elements to make it more related to “AI.” Our project had some problems with the pace, cuz we received feedbacks that it’s a little too informative and overwhelming to the audience. So we tried to adjust the pace and tell the story in an acceptable speed.
Picture size and uniform font with appropriate size are some other lessons I learned from other’s feedback. It is also worth mentioning that during the presentation, Professor Wuwei reminded me from another perspective-the rational, that why the main character would do this. I feel that after the initial discussion of concept and idea, we both focused more on the technical angle of shooting and editing the video, but lacked consideration of the logical construction of the story.
In the end, I want to express my gratitude again to Amelia and Ian. Thank you!!!!:))))