Author: Vivian

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Video Project (Seb, April and Vivian)

Title: Survive the Night
Here is the Link to our project.
Partner: Sebastian Lau, April Qiu
Conception & Design:
In designing this video project, we initially want to base our story on the historical text, but it then turns out to be too complicated to build up our story. Therefore, we decided to make it into a detective story instead. The story goes that a girl woke up in the darkness and found she could not remember anything. There seem to be monster chasing her. With last hope she dialed her friend Vivian to help her out. Will she finally escape?… The name of our project is decided at the last minute: Survive the Night. 
Process: 
We allocated the work at the very beginning, I took care of the video editing, Seb was responsible for the coding, and April the website layout. April also designed the script and we three spent two nights shooting them. The process is a tough but rewarding journey. We don’t have much experience of shooting the movie, or acting, or coding, but we learned about all these during the process. We learned some tricks like keeping a consistent direction of light of two clips if we want them to combine, the sound shall be louder when the character approaching the source of sound… I took off shoes to record the character’s voices, in order to avoid my footsteps being recorded. I used Premiere Pro and iMovie to edit the movies. Because we intended to make it as a Wechat video call, the link will be unstable from time to time. So I set frame hold to certain scenes and make them look as if they stuck. But because we don’t have good communication after the filming, I had much back-and-forth remaking the videos as they either failed to meet the correct sequence of the storyline, or other issues like  the sound volume or the embedded effect. I believed Seb also had a hard time figuring out the interactivity given the edited videos were not handed over till very late, so part of his work was guessing and re-embedding videos into the website. But fortunately we finished them before the deadline. 
Documentation:
The project’s documentation follows the previous rules. We established folders for audio, css, images, javascript and videos separately. 
Conclusion:
Generally, the video still meets our goal of a detective story. We successfully designed the multiple story lines, as well as the effect of the wechat call on the computer. Though we failed to take care of the small issues like the backgrounds of video, or the buttons for choice-making, it is still a good project. And I feel fortunate to team up with Seb and April.
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Week 09: Video project storyboard – Sebastian, April and Vivian

We reframed out storyline into a detective story instead. A man woke up in an unfamiliar place with last memory in head about walking towards a dorm. With the fear of bumping into monster, he explored around and tried to seek the truth. According to different responses to the friend’s call, the story goes into different endings. Please see our storyboard below.

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Response to “The danger of a single story” (Vivian Zhu)

When I watched this video, the most impressive thing is that how stories form one’s impression towards a thing, and how limited could a story describe this thing hence resulting in prejudice and misunderstanding.

In the talk, the speaker illustrates how she was affected by American and English literature that once she believed books by nature shall have foreign characters and things. During that time, she enjoyed the pride when she wrote things exotic to others. But on the other, she was frustrated by the stereotype the westerners think of Africans. From which she realized the story can only be a tool that reflects partiality of a thing.

This reminds me of the “Five Obstructions” we watched last week, where the film markers tried to measure the limits of the creation. In this Ted talk, the speaker experienced a measurement to the limitation of a story passively. At last she points out the danger of reading a single story—like the story only about the Africans being sympathized, being assisted, and being tortured by wars and commotions. I think that’s also the warning for our story-telling in the video project.

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Week 09: Video Project Proposal (April, Sebastian and Vivian)

Story Line: We wanted to base our story on the Shanghai Ghetto ( 1930s during WWII). The story is about an old man retrospecting his youth life where he fell in love with a Jewish girl during that time. The girl died because of a commotion inside the Ghetto, leaving behind a golden necklace for the old man to cherish. But the truth is, the girl actually accidentally survived during the commotion, and tried to find the old man during rest of her life. Whether they will meet eventually or not…? 

Website interactivity: we have two ideas that would be adopted for our project.

  1. Adding different kinds of filters to the video according to audience’s choice. Hence, the audience will choose their own adventure in a video format, like Black Mirror’s bandersnatch.
  2. Let the audience to freely arrange the sequence of the clips, in order to combine them into different story lines, thus resulting in different endings.
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Audio Project – Winny & Vivian

Here is the link to our project.

Title: Type Your Xmas Song
Partner: Winny Wang
Conception & Design: Thinking about what can be made into our audio project, I came about the idea of composing an existed song using voices we heard in our daily life. Winny and I in the first place wanted to use slow song, but quickly we found it difficult to form the canto. Hence instead, we used “All I want for Christmas is you” as our blueprint. It is featured for the percussions in the background music. And the Xmas topic is also a common topic that make us easier to introduce our project to the audience. Ultimately, we’d want to make an interactive website where you type in the lyrics and the piano tones came out. After you typed all the characters, the whole made-up song would show up and invite you to listen.
Process: Basically, Winny was in charge of making the interaction between the music and the typing. I was in charge of the background design and the synthesis of the song. Learning from the previous project’s collaboration, we allocated our work and the story of our project in the first place. Then I used Photoshop to craft out the stage we need, including the cute characters with snow on them (I’m quite proud of making them by myself!). I recorded the sound we need such as bell ringing, hand clapping, walking on wet floor, and water flowing. The synthesize is a little troublesome than I expected. I failed to output the .mp3 file from the Audacity because of some functional issue. Hence I had to change to use Adobe Audition in making the song. I learned how to change the amplification, adjust the tones, mixture etc. It was quite fun.
 
Documentation: The documentation format follows what we did in the previous comic project, except an additional Audio folder that stores all our music, and an additional Ps folder storing all the background design.
Conclusion: We meet our goal for this project. Winny and I had quite a smooth collaboration and the whole process turned out to be a great one. We are both reliable and do our work in an efficient way. During the process I learned a lot about music composing and processing, as well as background design.. Winny saved much time for the team as she solved the typing with sound effect speedy, I am quite grateful to have her for my second project.