Author: Yumin Cai

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Week 10 – Video Project – Milly

Link to the project:

http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~vsw227/videoProject/start.html

Project title:  A Perfect Day — Imagination vs IRL

Partners: Vincent & Oona

Project Concept

Our initial idea is to make a funny comparison between the words that people are truly thinking about and what they say in reality. But in the end, we expand this idea to what you are imaging about versus what you do in the end.  We make this story into a situation comedy with a full circle of a series of stories that happens in the small universe we have set. Each scene has some connection to the others, for the characters and location is consistent and related.  This project is set in a relaxing and funny atmosphere with dramatic expressions and interacts with the viewers through different choices of imagination or IRL.

 
Process

During the brainstorming discussion, I suggested the idea that making the comparison between “true words” and “words you said”. Vincent and Oona then come up with the broader improvement. We then settled down our topic as “true thoughts/imagination versus reality”. 

As for the labor division, we have done most of the work together for the first half while doing the latter half separately. It’s an amazing and delightful experience of teamwork.  Story writing and video shooting are down together by us: Onna comes up with the storylines and then we discussed and improved together; each of us took part in both the acting and shooting. After that, Oona is mainly responsible for the first round of rough cut and time management, while I’m in charge of the after effects, light, and sound adjustment. Vincent is working on the website and coding.

In the shared google drive, we kept the working process and different versions of editing

We tried to film the scenes from different angles, which would make the video to be more expressive. However, the biggest problem for us is sound. We tried to hide the mic while shooting, but the result was not good. And for some scenes containing big movements, the mic just failed to record. Thus, it was really tough work when I was editing the sound. Besides, I also tried to make the scene more focused on our characters and have some film-like sense, therefore I played a little with the shadows. It’s my first time to try the light editing, though far from perfect, it’s still a meaningful lesson for me.

 

Before

After

I have done most of my work in after effects. With the tool of masks, keyframe and time remapping, some preset effect assets and so on, I tried my best to add more interesting elements to this project. Though Oona had already prepared the quite well-edited video before I was going to work on my part, it still took me such a long time to finish this task since I was learning many new things at the same time. But after all, I really enjoyed this process and learned a lot.

Light part:

Mask with a solid layer – general shadow

Mask light focus on the main character 

“Annoying Friend”- cannot stand the voice effect:

 Change RGB channel with multiple layers (my favorite scene hhh)

“Cute Big Head”- slow down repetition:

Mask track a character

 

Scale and adjust the edge to make “bigger  head”

 

AfterEffect Files

Reflection

As for this project, we have devoted a lot of effort to the video shooting and editing part, however, lack in work of the website. Thus, next time we may need to balance these two part. Besides, I also get the feedbacks like is the scene could be lighter while the shadows existing to make viewers still focused on the main characters. I’ll try to practice video editing more in the future. And due to my personal reason, I have got bad flu which caused me almost one and half a week away from school. Many thanks to my teammates and professor Moon’s help. We finally made it and finished this project!

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Week 9 – Storyboard for video project – Milly, Oona and Vincent

Following are the storyboard we have so far. After the initial proposal, our idea has been changed a lot. Anyway, the basic concept to show the contradiction between people’s behavior (expression/ words) and their true thoughts in their mind. In this story, we try to form up a closed circle in a community, which would be made up of three main characters. Though some of the scenes are independent of each other, the viewers could still figure out a connection between them. 

The general storyline:

scene1 – a girl finished her tiresome class and walking with her mind full of food, however, she just meets her annoying friend

scene2 – conversation: they sit and have lunch together, the friend starts talking about the grade

scene3 – conversation: they sit and have lunch together, the girl tries to talk about the music

scene4 – a boy is playing ping-pong while a girl passes by, he imagined a lot, however, he just stands there with a silly smile that makes the girl feels weird. The girl here is the one in the beginning scene, and she is on her way to the cafeteria.

For the opening, I’m thinking about three choices: 1. a fasten rewinding of all scenes to the beginning scene; 2. a simple title shows slowly to fit the character’s tired mood; 3. an opening intro for each character.

For the transition, we would like to imitate the traditional sitcom, an abrupt pulse and a blank space for the viewers to feel, where we would also try some facial expression zooming in the shot. 

                                                                     scene 1

 

                                                                     scene 2

                                                                     scene 3

                                                                     scene 4

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Week 8 – Video Project Proposal- Milly, Oona & Vincent

For our video project, we think up a really interesting idea that we would like to make a few short scenes about “a world that you can only speak the truth”. This inspiration comes from our daily life, for many times we choose not to say what we truly think to avoid loss. However, what if we are “setting” to speak the truth?
Initially, we would like to take the comparison of scenes to make the result of “speaking the truth” funnier. But as our discussion going on, we are thinking about more alternations of interactivity, for example, let the viewer choose what to say in a situation (though this may not truly fit the original idea, more like an RPG game). Or, three people take three different actions.
As for the labor division, though not settling down yet, I think we will write the script and create the storyline together and film it together.  Later on, we will manage the task of editing and web page development.
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Week 8 – Response to “The Danger of a Single Story” – Milly Cai

In the TED talk, Novelist Chimamanda Adichie demonstrated the impressive idea that a single story can mislead our perception from a single person to a whole country or race. She used several examples from her childhood——white characters only in the novels she read and Fide’s family without any other features but poverty. After she went to America for college study, she suddenly realized that her initial imagination of Fide’s family was exactly what others have to her, an African.

Though people may not naturally bring a negative attitude after hearing such stories, the kindness they take, as Adichie says is “a kind of patronizing, well-meaning pity”. As a result, the difference between these groups is emphasized rather than the features in common. This just reminds me of the philosophical definition of “self” and “other”, while “other” just represent everything else different to the “self”, which is abject and secondary.

Adiche then elaborated another important factor of the storytelling—— the power, which is “to make it the definitive story”.  The way that we tell a story can entirely change the final version of the people received. Thus,  no matter telling a story or demonstrating a concept, the form to deliver the information is as important as the information itself.  This point somehow also relates to McLuhan’s idea of the medium we’ve read before. The container is also important comparing to the content.

At the end of the talk, Adichie shares a lot of examples around her to describe a real Nigeria instead of what we usually hear from the public media. From where we could truly figure out the importance of thorough and accurate comprehension and for a culture and its dignity. Writing a story has never been a small thing, as the power of word could influence countries and nations impression for centuries.

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Week 7 – Audio Project: Comm 42’s Last Message – Milly Cai & Laura Huang

Here is the link:

https://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~yc2966/comm42/index.html

Description:

In this project, Laura and I try to narrate a story from the little robot Comm 42 ‘ view at the end of human history, which is about four important scenes in his life: the day it was finished and turned on for the first time;  his first job – kids caring and housekeeping; his time with his human family; the end of human’s world due to the disaster, war, pollution and resource running out.  The name Comm 42 is formed up by Comm lab and “42”, which comes from Douglas Adams ‘s scientific fiction The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy——42: The answer to life, the universe and everything.

As for the timeline and interaction design,  we set the end of the world as the current time, while comm 42 is about to run out of his power and tries to leave his last message. Users could click on the turn on button to wake up Comm 42 and listen to his last message and choose the piece of the story they want to hear. After listening to all the 4 records, Comm 42 will shut down in the noises.

Process:

In this project, I’m mainly responsible for visual assets and web design, while Laura is in charge of editing the audio part. Though it’s said that we divided our duty, we still did much work together. For example, we developed the storyline together, performed the human’s lines in the story, and also search for the sound effect together. And Laura helped me a lot for debugging and editing the sound wave pictures.

As we would like to make the view more realistic, I created a 3D Model for our little Comm 42 and rendered out its front view.  And I also edited the view of the robot to make it look rusting and dirty. To collaborate with the audio part as well as enhance the expression of the sound, I added some glitch views, loading messages and sound waves.

The original model for Comm 42 

Edited Look for Comm 42 

Glitch

 

Showing scenes

All View Assets

 

Screenshot for audio files

Screenshots for the web page: turn on

 

Screenshots for the web page: main page

 

Screenshots for the web page: back & reload

Screenshots for part of the code

   

Post-mortem: 

Due to my weak knowledge of javascript, I mainly used the setTimeout function to control the pace of pictures and animations collaborating with the sound. However, this finally results in great manual work and many weird bugs…As for the audio part, since the human voice in the project is acted by Laura and me, not only the actors’ emotion and after-editing does not approach our initial expectation (But it was still a lot of fun to act hh). In addition, the robot voice we chose the voice from the ios system, however, the problem we’ve met with this is that it can not change its pace and tone to be more humanistic, for example, when Comm 42 is calling the kids to watch out, it sounds too natural and calm… Probably next time, it’s still better to have a human voice perform it first and then add machine-like effect to it.