Author: Qianyi Chen

Link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~sk7383/videoProject/coding/default.html

Partner: Ruby, Tenielle

Instructor: Moon

Project Idea

Our video project tells the story of two boxes choosing the date for their anniversary. Starting from a scene of calendar, the user will go through different ideas raised by Mr. Box and Mrs. Box. Finally, the user will make the choice for Mr. Box and Mrs. Box for their date.

We choose to make a silent film style video since the box can’t talk. But the audience can still get the idea of what is going on for different scenes and engage in it.

Process

In terms of teamwork, I shot the video and edited all of them. Ruby did the web coding. We three together discussed the project idea, developed the storyline and storyboard as well as collaborated with the video shooting.

Since I’m in charge of video shooting and editing, I’ll mainly talk about this part. We have 5 scenes to shoot – park, movie, game, family mart and commonlab and we also need to shoot the opening and transitions. At first I shot a demo for the park one but the light turned out to be too dark which affected the video quality so I shot it again in the daytime. We showed the rough cut of this scene and made adjustments based on the feedback we get from the recitation.

Many interesting ideas actually came out during the shooting process. Before that we only have a general idea of which place we might use and what kind of shot we might need. When we were actually shooting for the story we tried to make the most of the thing we have. For example, in the game scene the idea of using the model and the head model just came out when we saw them.

We also had lots of discussion about the facial expression of the boxes. At first we tried to draw it in ae but it would be too much work so we chose to use the a4 paper to draw the emoji and then stick it on the box.

In terms of editing, it took me some time to find the proper bgm. After finishing the collaging, I also added some animation using After Effects to make the video more vivid.

Reflection

We made several adjustments after the user testing. The feedback and advice we received are really useful. I added the ending video listing the staff and credits and also adjusted the volume and brightness for some scenes. And we also changed the background layout as well as adding more instructions to make it clearer for users to interact with. Besides, we change the cursor from having both the “pause” and “play” button to having only one function. (When the video is played, it will show the pause, vise versa.)

In terms of video shooting, maybe it’s better to use a tripod for some scenes. In terms of video editing, it may be more interesting if I have time to add more animation or effect. But in general, I’m satisfied with the final result we have. 

This one Susie and I took videos from different angles and Anica made the sound for synchronizing. I used fcp to edit it instead of pr. And since I didn’t find the synchronize function in fcp I do it manually. (but it’s not so difficult since it’s easy to find match the audio) 

We got inspiration from a previous project called Roboto and decided to shot a video about two object-box and eraser. The setting of the story is that Mr box and Mr eraser are friends and roommates. Their job is to decorate the room – mr box will add objects and mr eraser will erase the object that they don’t want. In this way we want to make this video more interactive with the user.

We don’t have a concrete idea about the story yet. But so far we think we may do a split screen on the web page showing two different perspectives, one for the room layout(shoot from the back of mr box) and one for their talks (shoot from the front of mr box). When the user want to add something their will be a video pop up on the page to show the process(mr box carrying things to some place) instead of just click and show the image, this might bring other problems but hopefully we will be able to fix it.

The Ted talk given by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is about how she realized the stereotype she has on “the outer world” and how herself is also tracked in the stereotypes of others on the Nigerian in Africa.

When Adichie raised the topic of the power, it reminds me of Foucault’s theory of “Power Discourse”, meaning that people/institution with more power will have more resources to control the way certain phenomena are told. The power is not just about the ability to tell a story, but more importantly, the ability to attach significance of the story. And the group of people who is in the story don’t actually have the chance to say something against this narrative because they don’t have the “power” to tell another version. A single story is dangerous, as Adichie mentioned, not because the story itself is not true, but because many other stories are ignored in this narrative, many details and diversity are narrowed in the storytelling. And the perception and understanding of a certain group of people are narrowed down. This is unfair to the people who are depicted, for they are labeled with something that is actually not true about themselves. And it’s also unfair to the people who heard of the story, because they are not given the chance to know the whole story. So it’s crucial for the storytellers to be careful about the way they tell the story, and it’s also important to facilitate an atmosphere that encourages different stories to be told.