Visual Metaphor Documentation
Freddie
Concept & Story
The concept behind the project is the switch and relation between reality and dream. The storyline is that the protagonist experience extreme pain and suffering in reality and want to find relief and happiness in his/her dream but it turn out that the dream also contain lots of his/her pain and he/she finally wake up.
I’m inspired by Hideaki Anno’s work Evanngelion. I’m impressed by four sentences:
Then, where is my dream?
It’s the continuation of reality.
Then, where is my reality?
It’s the end of your dream.
For visual effects, I’m both inspired by Hideaki Anno’s work Evanngelion and Wang Kar-wai’s film Chungking Express I love the tension of shots and multiple effects they use in their work such as flashback, frame extraction and stop motion shots etc. So I decide to try them on my own.
What is the ideation process of this project? We brainstorm around the four sentences mentioned above. We found poems and lyrics that have imagery related to the misery of reality and the wonderland of dream. We then choose the sentences we like and make a random-sequenced arrangement. We got a weird but interesting poem and then we begin to think of metaphors in our reality that reflects those words. We take shots naturally and we also design some of them on our own. Then we imitated Hideaki Anno’s stream of consciousness to compose a dialog between the emotional protagonist and a holy voice above him/her. We do editing, add background, make transitions and finish our project.
The reason why I want to explore this topic is because contemporary society seems numb of each individual. We live suffering but we don’t have the power or courage to change. We escape to our dream to find happiness and meaning of life but we ignore that the real happiness should be discovered in reality.
Creation Process & Execution
The process of filming is first, we orient towards a certain imagery and think of places in Shanghai where we can shot them. Then we go to that place and begin our filming. Usually we filming objects and when it comes to a part we need human interaction, we film the crowd or we design a scene to film. We borrow the Canon camera from ER and that is the one and only source of filming. We may take good advantage of the surroundings to help use stabilize our shots. We use natural lights in every scene, we didn’t design a scene that facilitated with lights. Some moving shots we do directing. We choose a street with few people and continuous lights. We use a piece of storyboard to direct how we run.
One difficulty would be the running scene mentioned above. The focus of the camera won’t be focused on the actor’s face when I hold the camera and keep running. To solve this problem, we use the manual focus and I keep twisting the focus on the camera when running. It’s a little bit hard but I managed to shot one or two excellent scenes.
The editing process goes like this: First, I put all the sources in the right sequences. Then I cut the sources into a proper time to satisfy our needs, the I’ll adjust the size, position and angle of a scene. After that, I will choose proper color and filter setting. Some filters I really like: The Fuji and Kodak series in the Lumetri Color is my favorite. Then I will add video effects to certain scenes I would like to emphasis. For example one scene when the protagonist walk through the crowd, I use the frame extrection effect to imitate Wang Kar-wai’s film. The flashback may also be considered as a video effect but it is made more physically because simply I cut the scene I would like to flash very short and insert them between two relatively long scenes.
Collaboration
I mainly do video filming, visual and audio editing and decision for background music. Thanks to my teammate Rin, we can complete the storyline of our project. Also, the protagonist in the story is also her. I’m impressed by her acting. The audio part is mainly her work. She find another excellent vocalist Makayla to record. Rin is very strict of every scene in our project and this do help me learn a lot of editing knowledge in Premiere. Shout out to her excellent work in this project.
Aesthetics & Results
We use lots of Close-up Shots to establish a strong motion and tension of the video, which align with the suffering and misery in the reality inside our story. We also use a lot of stop motion shots to facilitate the close-up and extreme close-up shots. I use a lot of Fuji filters, adjustments in curves and color settings for shadows and lights. In the craziest scene of the dream, I reversed the total curve setting to create crazy scene in the dream part to scare the protagonist. The overall pace is a little fast due to a large amount of source materials we use so that is a shortage of our project, but in the part when it comes to showing the anxiety of the protagonist.