Inspiration / Idea
The inspiration from this project came from a very personal experience of noticing and seeing a very contrasting difference between the routines of me and my friends. I tend to be very early riser, early sleeper whilst one of my other friends don’t even get up until past noon and end near the early hours of the morning. Hence, I found this quite fascinating how we are all living in the same time and space; yet, our days can be very different to one another.
To transform this idea into a video, we decided to have it focused on 3 main characters with different lifestyles: the early waker, the late waker and the one who never even wakes at all. With this, we also added a storyline of the early waker having a very important show on the day whilst the one who never wakes is his significant other who doesn’t show up – leaving the early waker completed dejected. With this, we really wanted to capture that feeling of that total heart-wrenching disappointment when the only person that really matters to you, doesn’t show up.
Process:
Film shooting/editing
We had some complications and difficulties shooting our video. Firstly, since not all of us lived in the same dorms, we had to commute to film our morning routines. After some complications of who wanted to which characters, we were able to do get some good footage. It wasn’t exactly as I had imagined, however we worked with what we got. Although it was visually fine, some of our clips only had white noise and didn’t pick up any of the background noises which was quite essential to what we imagined our video to be like. However, due to time constraints, we weren’t able to reshoot these scenes and just decided to have each character have their own soundtrack to mirror their routines.
Me and Adam both edited all of our footage on Adobe Premiere whilst Kai opted for iMovie. Both of us learned a great deal and realised how powerful Premiere really is. For me, I learned keyframes and that’s how I was able to animate the text message. For each perspective, we wanted to make their perspectives totally different to one another hence, we tried to have them distinctly different from one another especially in terms of editing. Whilst Adam had much longer shots of him getting ready — mirroring his normal routine of getting up early, I had very quick fast pace scenes that mostly only lasted a few seconds to capture how my character was in a rush as I was already late. Kai’s scenes were generally very slow and dark as she does never wake up.
For interactivity, I made hand drawn animated buttons for users to switch between perspectives through the symbolism of time (alarm clock, wall clock or phone clock, depending on each character). We also included interactivity on the metro scene which was a hover effect in which the user can hover on and off to hear the different sounds of different people commuting.
Coding
Perhaps one of our greatest mistakes in this project was underestimating how much coding we needed to do. As this was 3 different videos due to 3 different perspectives, our code became complicated, messy and very long very quickly. Adam did almost all of the coding, and he did a phenomenal job with trying to put it together. However, since our project’s code turned out to be quite complex and long, that meant we had to try to help him. Whilst I attempted to help with the CSS, hovering and buttons, another problem we realised was how much time it also took to piece 2 codes, done by separate people, together. Even when it worked on one person’s laptop, it somehow didn’t work on another person’s which was overall, very frustrating and time-consuming having to fix.
Moreover, the fact that we were dealing with not just still images, but videos this time, made editing and styling a lot more difficult. Also, as we had many different videos, images, gifs, audio and buttons to code together, we encountered many bugs and things that didn’t work.
Final Thoughts
Overall, despite it not being finished, I’m still proud of this project as a lot of work for filming, editing and coding went into it. It was definitely out of my comfort zone; I learned how to edit on Adobe Premiere, animate objects (such as the text messages on our video) and how to make film. Despite not having much knowledge or experience in filmmaking in the past, we really tried to tell a story through our project and giving users the experience of interacting with these characters as the narrative unfolds.
If we had more time, I’m sure we would have made this project work and flow well between different perspectives to show the contrast between routines of 3 different people whilst also telling the narrative of being disappointed by a person who you really care about.
From this project, we really learned the importance of starting early, dividing workload and making sure to not just focus on the idea and assets of the project, but also if its able to be realistically done within the time frame we were given.