Jessie Nie-  Loneliness in the city

Concept

I got the inspiration one day I was walking on the street with my friends, and the street was very crowded. Suddenly, inexplicable loneliness swept me, and I felt as though so many friends were with me, I was alone anyway.

So the first picture I took is at a low angle and there is a man who is riding a bike, and another man walking very fast. I made the shutter speed very slow, so the figure of the man is blurred. We can see from this picture that people are very busy and have no time to stop their steps. 

And for the second picture, I decided to take a picture and edit it to show this kind of loneliness in city life. I invited my friend to be the actor, and I took a picture of her walking in the crowds. I edited it, and I made the whole picture black and white except the actor. And I insert another picture of her taking a photo. I also let this picture be colorful. So it seems that it’s she who takes the picture of her walking in the crowds. I want to use this picture to show that in the crowded street, in the busy city, everyone is so busy to care about others, because the one who took the picture of the girl is herself, so you will feel lonely in the city from the two photos together.

And the relationship between the two photos is very close but it’s hard to tell the loneliness merely from one picture, only you put the two pictures together, you suddenly realize that it’s a story about a girl lonelily walking in the city street. Because the first picture shows that the city life is busy and indifferent, and the second edited photo shows that every individual is lonely and drowned in the busy city.

Process

When I was taking the first photo, I chose a night around 10 p.m in Lujiazui, because it’s the time some people finished a whole-day work and go back home very late. It was getting darker and darker, and the street was not that crowded but there were still some people hurrying. 

I lowered the ISO, but it cannot be very low since the outside environment was not that bright, and I adjusted the white balance to have a warm yellow tone. And then, I caught this moment and the photo was successfully taken. 

And for the second picture, I first made a filter to decrease the brightness of other colors and let the picture be black-and-white. Then I got a copy of the original picture and separated the girl (actor), and I put the girl in the colorful picture at the same place. So the picture was generally black-and-white but the girl was bright and colorful. Then, I cut her image of taking pictures from another photo, and I put that image of her at the bottom right corner. And I adjusted the color of those two bright images, and then it was done.

And in regard to the problems I encountered, I want to mention it’s hard to take a high-quality photo if the actor and photographer are both moving, so I just stopped moving and adjusted the focus. Only by this, I could take a photo of high quality.

Conclusion

If I have more time, I would like to make more variations of the second image, probably add some black cubes or some other images besides the existing ones to show the loneliness. 

And also if the quality can be better, it would be fantastic, though I think the quality of the photo now is better than the previous ones.

Image od Diptych 

Project Title

Are you real to yourself?

Team Members:

Miranda Jessie

 Concept | Storyline:

 1). Who are you going to interview? Or What is the piece (article, poem, story) for the narrative voice over? 

• Psychological activities of the protagonist
• The real sound
• The comments of the social media
• Text of the Voice-over“What is the real self in the virtual internet world?Social media shortens the distance between people on the Internet, people often feel lost in the carefully designed system, and have the illusion of being noticed all the time.

  This illusion makes people ignore their inner feelings, constrain themselves with others’ evaluation, and desire to create a perfect image to gain external recognition.

  “Morning”

  “A healthy diet”

  “It’s time to hit the road”

  “Nice dinner with my girls”

  Character settings and labels make people have no time to breathe. As a result, “social media anxiety” has become an inescapable dilemma in modern life. On social media, it’s easier to be someone else than to be yourself.”

   2). What’s the story about? 

 Theme:

People are always dying to post glamorous daily on social media and thus make character settings mainly for gratifying their vanity. It has become a medical condition to post enviable fake lives on social media. But the fact is that people’s real life is kinda messy and not that glamorous.

example: 

1. Mess room /tidy corner 
2. busy studying on the computer/ playing game on the phone                     3.Having a selfie together to pretend a harmonious atmosphere/ everyone is busy playing with their phone, not enjoying the gathering.

 3). Which part of the story are you going to focus on?

Using an apple as the metaphor object and to manifest the theme

4). What kind of style/aesthetics are you going to pursue?

Having a contrast of social media life and real life

Execution Plan:

  1). What equipment are you going to use when shooting the movie? (cell phone, SLR camera, sound recorder, stabilizer..)

• Camera for the video
• mobile phone  for the sound     

2). Which locations will it be shot at? When is it? Day time/night/unknown? Why?

1. a room
2. Starbucks
3. restaurant

3). What are some challenges you might  encounter and how will you prepare?

1.The lighting of an apple probably will be a problem, since it’s hard to film an object decently. So we will borrow a lighting equipment to film the apple.

2. Since we can’t film in dorm or ab, it’s hard to find a place to film the first scene. We have to find another place or change a situation for the first scene.

4). How will you collaborate? How will you divide work? (Gantt Chart)

1.   Storyboard Draft
2. Gantt Chart*

 

Task	Owner	Start Date	Due Date	Duration	PCT of Task Complete
storyboard	Miranda	11.22	11.26	Four days
shooting	Jessie	11.26	11.29	About 2days
lighting	Miranda	11.26	11.29	About 2days
Sound recording	Miranda&Jessie	11.26	11.29	About 2days
Find actors	Jessie	11.22	11.26	About 4 days
Find location	Miranda	11.22	11.26	About 4days

start from 00:16-00:57 link:BV1Bh411h7Wx

concept

When I looked back, thinking of which memory left deep impression to me, a day when I travelled to Greece came to my mind. Since COVID stopped us from traveling abroad, I really missed the time while traveling around the world.

That was a day when I traveled to Greece, we lived in a hotel near the seaside. And in the morning, I picked up and went out with my family. After we arrived the seaside, I set on a big stone by the sea, and put my feet in the sea to stir the water. My eyes were looking at the waves of the sea and my body was entirely exposed to the sunshine, and I felt unprecedented joy and peace. But suddenly, it started to rain, and the rain was getting heavier and heavier. So we had no choice but go home, but the rain could only stopped us from going out but not having fun. So after going back to hotel and closing the door, a guitar sound started, which means another kind of happy day started. So I use some real sounds to create a real scene.

Process

The sounds I recorded belong to different categories. I recorded the sound of shaking glasses, touching the plastic, walking steps… And the biggest problem I met when I was recording is that there was so much noise while I was recording, since I couldn’t guarantee that the environment was 100 percent quiet. So I applied another machine to record the sound which can make the sound more clear and less noisy. Also, while I was editing the sound, I applied an effect to decrease the noise.

During the editing process, I divided the scene into three parts. The first was the picking up process, and I spent 10 seconds using the sounds of walking steps, typing, and touching plastic to create this scene. And then, the main part is after arriving the seaside, I started to playing with water and then it started to rain which even went heavier and heavier. And I used the sounds of shaking the bottle at different frequencies to create the stirring water sound, and I use the sound of water from the water tap to create the sound of raining, especially heavy rain. And last, there is a sound contrast, after closing the door, the whole area became a quiet place suddenly.   And the guitar sound appeared to be the ending part.

I met quite a few challenges when I was editing the sound, the biggest of which is that while I was creating the water sound, I was too hard to use the shaking bottle sound to make the stirring water sound by the sea. I tried a lot of effects, but it always seemed to be missing something. At last, I chose to apply a little bit echo and delay,  and gave up applying FFT which would make the sound weird to solve the problem.

Conclusion

If I have more time, I would like to have more variation of the sounds and also make the story and the scene easier to let the listeners understand. Also, it’s essential to make the water sound more clear which can remind people of the scene I create very quickly.

For the feedback from others, my classmates pointed out that the sound sounded great but it was a little bit hard to distinguish and think of what I meant to create.

Image of Audition

• Steyerl talks about how the “unbroken belief” of the documentary form is challenged. What does Steyerl mean by this? Certain movies and films are based on a true story.  How does truth inform the fiction? How might fiction inform the truth?

Originally, documentary form can only be the real images and videos, but the fact is that the real images still can convey very subjective feelings. Just as Steyerl said, “documentary forms convey, regulate, and administrate huge emotional potentials that they both keep in check and unleash explosively. They bring distant events close enough to get under our skin, and alienate what is closest to us. They heighten a general sense of fear that increasingly being used as a political instrument. “

The writer of the fiction always catch some specific point from a real story, and to present the truth in his/her way and to express the feeling and the point he/she wants to let people know from his/her perspective. So fiction can partly represent the truth and let people know part of the truth, but fictions are always created by humans, so  they always represent the purpose of the creators.

• What is the significance of the authenticity and representation of the truth in the media that you consume on a daily basis? What is the role of a live broadcast?

The authenticity and representation of the truth in the media let people know what is happening or what is the trend in the society. Different representations have different usages.

For the live broadcast, it has a variety of meanings. If it’s a news live broadcast, it enables people to know what is happening in the city, in the country, and in the world; if it’s a shopping live broadcast, it is a platform to let people shop online. Anyway, a live broadcast is always in a true scene, but it always express and convey what the broadcaster wants people to see, so the purpose is always affected by people.