Project title:
“When we all fall asleep, where do we go?” A Billie Eilish Inspired Documentary
Project description:
Our project is a short, interactive documentary film that investigates the question of “Where do you go when you fall asleep?” by probing the brains of different people on campus. The goal of this project was to uncover how people interpret this question and to discover the differences between peoples’ responses. The documentary cuts between shots where different people talk about where they physically go when they sleep and where they go in their dreams.
Process:
For this project, we divided up the work according to our strengths, but we all started by walking around campus and gathering initial footage. I put together the rough cut of the initial footage, which we shared in class. Then, Abdullah and I worked on creating the website and Kyra worked on getting more, improved footage. Kyra put together the rough cut v2 and then I worked with her rough cut to add the image and text effects as well as creating the “dream” variation of the cut. Abdullah helped by gathering image assets and wrote the code for the toggle between normal and dream view on the site.
For the dream cut, I explored a few different video effects, such as turbulent displace, lens distortion, blur, and glow. I finally settled on the blur and glow because I found the displacement and distortion to be a bit too jarring.
I also added some audio effects, including a scientific filter and reverb. Personally, I felt like this was an accurate representation of me trying to remember my dreams: can’t really remember anything I see or hear, it’s kind of just a blur…
Issues:
Technical issues
I had some issues with importing the large file into Premier Pro. When Kyra exported her file it was 5GB+. This ended up freezing my computer several times. Once she exported a smaller file, I was able to import it into Premier with no problems and proceeded with the editing. However, as I got around to adding video and audio effects in order to create the dream effect, I ran into some more issues. Some effects really slowed down my computer, requiring too much processing power. When it came to exporting the dream cut, it took 40 minutes! Hence, why our submission was a bit late, as I did not expect that. (The normal cut only took max. 5 mins to export.)
Concept issues
While I genuinely enjoyed investigating the question “Where do you go when you fall asleep?”, I personally struggled with ideating around the concept of an interactive video. In my opinion, video is more immersive and enjoyable when it’s not interactive, so this was definitely a huge barrier to entry into ideation for this project. Ideally, if we had planned our time better (I must admit my time has been consumed by capstone), then we would have recorded some scenes where we (or someone else) would have attempted to act out what the interviewee was describing. I think this would have been more interesting to toggle between. Another idea I had was creating like an archive of stories that the user could watch in any order, but we decided to not pursue this idea because we didn’t have any immediate solutions to the problem of “but how do we encourage the user to explore?”. To be honest in my reflection, I found this project prompt to be uninspiring mostly because I prefer to consume videos and films passively, as opposed to interactively.
Post mortem:
I don’t think we met all the goals we set for ourselves, although we did successfully gather footage about people’s opinion on Billie Eilish’s question “When we all fall asleep, where do we go?”. It was fun to engage in such a strange question with different people. As for our other goals, we should have spent some more time editing the final cut to make it look more professional, especially since our interactivity is pretty basic. Overall, I wish we would have felt more inspired to take this concept further.
This project taught me that using Premier Pro will always take longer than expected, not necessarily because you don’t know how to do something (which of course I found myself googling “how to…”), but because it takes time to process and export(!). In hindsight, we should have started editing sooner, which would have given us more time to adjust and polish. This project also revealed to me that interactive video is challenging and has, what I believe, a high barrier to entry. Not everyone is going to like or appreciate it, as the typical behavior of consuming film is passive.