I was working with Annie and Xin. Our final video can also be found here in addition to our submission (The original file is 593,116 KB.):

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YAliZcZT35XVYfh235tcyz5S5zKChrip/view?usp=sharing

The proposal is here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DMXjeTKpg5KbayI6Ds6v1Tf8ilABUpXnTpsaDANeEFc/edit?usp=sharing

The transcript notes are here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1t-0rXl0MFlPrGitL5YZjzCRUgVlyqegxNl_WmikKxeA/edit?usp=sharing

We want to depict three different classes/layers of society: the top, the middle, and the bottom. With the narration, we want to describe the contrast implicitly because while we hear fancy description/promotion/… of a decision/policy/… created by the “higher” people, it often comes with an underlying contrast where the “lower” people are neglected. We have been inspired by the idea of the folding city in the sci-fi novel Folding Beijing and want to apply it to the Shanghai city landscape. Later, we have also been inspired by another novel Brave New World, where people are divided into classes. We first searched for locations in Shanghai with the sense of “folding” and cyberpunk (because we want the general aesthetics to be cyberpunk) on the Internet. We also specifically looked for scenes with skyscrapers and old residences. After we narrowed down some locations, I created a Google Mymap so that we knew where we should go.

Therefore, we went to Tianzifang (田子坊) in Xuhui District, Tiantong Road (天潼路) in Hongkou District, and Lujiazui (陆家嘴). At Tianzifang, we shot some footage of the “third layer”. However, when we were shooting at a zebra crossing on a public road, a guard came from the opposite of the road to us and threatened us to delete all the footages we took, saying we would be in trouble if we dare to use them, because they are a procuratorate (something like that) and no shooting was allowed, although there is no law or sign prohibiting it. There was also a female person walking from that place, standing behind us, and swearing at us, but I will not put down the exact words. We were about to call campus safety, but we did not have enough time to deal with random people, and we had to continue to shoot our footage at some other places. Anyway, when we arrived at Lujiazui at night, we were excited to accidentally find not only the same location where the footage of our rough cut was taken but also a balcony on top of the IFC Center perfect for cyberpunk city views.

I was mainly shooting with a GoPro. After we shot everything together, we shared them via Google Drive and roughly edited them respectively, since Google Drive compressed them. After cleaning up the clips, I stabilized them (because the tripod we borrowed was kind of broken, and edited their color temperature, color tone, contrast, shadow, color wheel, and brought up the numbers of orange, cyan, purple, to make them appear cyberpunk. However, it was a challenge to send all the edited footage to one place and combine them because of compression and the size of a Premiere project folder, but I happened to bring my portable disk, so we send footage via it after export, instead of sending the entire project. As for the audio, we explored the robot-like voice at https://www.narakeet.com/. I tried to classify everything into their respective folders, but they still ended up everywhere.

Although I tried to create one of the effects of folding city, it was not working well with our footage, so we decided to go with split screens.

We did not have any finalized storyboards before we went to shoot, but I think it was enjoyable how we figure out some composition ideas as we were shooting.

We mainly used long-shot and time lapse throughout the piece. I think we achieved the aesthetics of cyberpunk, but for future improvement, maybe we could add some close-ups or non-time-lapsed clips and slower narration to slow down the pace a bit.

Lastly, I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Chen for all the help he has provided not only for this project but also everything else. I would also like to appreciate my teammates Annie and Xin for doing this project together. During the busy finals, we overcame the difficulties and finally nailed it. Both the project and the class will be one of my most precious memories at NYU Shanghai.

🌞

Evaine Sun

5.12