For our video project, we plan to focus on the square dance, depicting a story of a girl passing the Century avenue at dusk and saw a group of elders dancing. This is a very simple storyline for now, but we want to create different settings with this starting, making it into a comedy, a documentary, a horror film, and an action film at the same time. The development of this film would be different according to its genres, for instance, for a comedy setting, we can have the girl joining the elders’ group and make friends with some of them.
We plan to present the story from first-person prospective, not showing the face of the main character, and instead presenting what he/she sees with the camera. We will also show the mind activities of the main character by changing her eyesight and showing surroundings in different directions, making her staring at some directions for a while occasionally. We will also make use of sound such as the sound of breathing or heart beating, so as to represent her emotions.
As for creating films of different genres and story settings, we plan to achieve this design by attaching different css filters to the video and changing the background music. We will also adapt the tempo and color tone of the video, fitting it into different settings. For instance, we can creating a horror movie with the video by attaching a dark yellow or grey filter for its base color, stretching the images of certain frames and adding some special effects, such as shaking the current frame violently or adding some splash of red dots on some frames. We can also strengthen the horror feeling by setting its background musics to be some horror musics, or adding sounds of rapid breath and heart beats.
For the website, we plan to design its layout as a professional Video playlist website such as YouTube and Netflix, in which the users can search for their desired video by inputing key words or selecting from the filter settings. The only corresponding video will then be available to the users. However, this will be a fake searching or filtering, as all the videos on this website begin in an identical way and are composed of same elements, with different color tone, background music, tempo, and etc., and develop into different endings. Users can experience how the similar video content would be able to present both a “horror movie in the 1920s” and a “comic in today’s setting” by changing the features mentioned above.
Of course, to gather such video element, we would need to get the consent from the elders dancing. If this does not work out, we plan to shoot a group of students practicing dancing in the dance studio at school, and present the perspective of the person came in last.