Project Name: Adam’s Big Day
Created by Adam, Kai, and Kimmy
Our link: http://imanas.shanghai.nyu.edu/~ac6596/Adam’s_Big_Day/
Description: The original idea of our video project was to take three characters’ morning routines and to juxtapose the different character’s attitudes to waking up for their day (if they woke up at all). We had Adam as the early bird who is really thrilled for his big day which revolved around opening an exhibit at an art gallery. Then, Kimmy was to be his friend who woke up too late, has a hectic morning, but makes it to the Adam’s exhibit opening just in time. In the video, I was Adam’s girlfriend who forgets to wake up, but dreams of making it partway to the event. This means you will at least seem me beginning a frantic morning in my dream and making my way to the bus. The story is supposed to have a tragic ending, because Adam realizes that his girlfriend overslept his very important event, even though his friend, played by Kimmy manages to get there in time. The purpose of the story was to firstly display how people have different urgencies in the beginnings of their days. However, the second part, tying the character’s narratives together to form one story was a little bit more difficult for us. We ended up using the art gallery as the connecting reason that linked the characters together so that our story actually had a plot.
Process: We began with writing a script, that included lists of what we needed to film. For example, Kimmy would need to wake up groggy and snoozes the alarm on her phone before beginning her day. Adam filmed Kimmy’s scenes, my in-dream scenes, and also his own scenes. He did great work at giving precise direction about how the video was supposed to be shot. I also got a friend to film some of my sleeping scenes, because it was just more convenient that way for us to work individually. Our coding process began with Adam’s version of the code, which laid out a template for how we were to go from video to video by clicking buttons. Later, these buttons will be turned into clocks that Kimmy draws so that people would notice that button looked animated and therefore enticed them to interact with it. For my video’s code, I also worked mostly on the html and javascript so that when you hovered over my head, you’d be able to see the dream video.
Other forms of interactions, as mentioned before, are the animated buttons in the form of alarm clock, phone clock, or wall clock that give you this pathway to transition to another character’s point of view, their story. This way, the viewer can see the video as a structured story and in an efficient way. Kimmy and Adam both worked on the code for their respective videos, which I really respect. That way, when we merge the videos into the final project, everyone already has a good understanding of coding with videos.
Issues: Some of the issues involved how the audio that was being recorded from the video camera. We combatted this issue by muting most of the audio in our videos and replacing it with music or recording more sound effects with a shotgun audio recorder. Another issue came from me not having the best time understanding direction as an actress. Therefore, we solved the issue by giving Kimmy a bigger part in the video. However, I didn’t let the footage Adam recorded go to waste, because I used that in my dream clips. Truly, from this process, I understand how hard film days are for actors, not to mention, amateur actresses like myself.
Post Mortem: The video project showed me how much easier coding can be when the video acts as the main source of entertainment on the browser webpage. There wasn’t as many fussy things to worry about like font or other css styling enhancements. I simply needed an onmouseover and onmouseout for my code to function desirably. I think we really did our best in trying to achieve what our original proposal was, plus more. At that stage, we didn’t even know how to tie the 3 characters together in a structured plot narrative, but we managed to figure that out later. For improvements, we should think of more interactive functions. I know Adam originally wanted to add a text box, but that didn’t make the story progress in a logical sense. Thus, our interactivity relied greatly on Kimmy’s text messages, illustrations for the clock buttons, and my dream twist plot. Overall, I’m satisfied with the product of our project and I’m really glad that I could make a film for a communications lab project.