throughout the days of me and Clarissa working on the project, we have chosen to stick to the initial plan and idea, dividing the poem into 4 parts and shooting the scenes for each one: me for the second and fourth part, Clarissa for the first and third one. our storyboard was developed to reflect the overall atmosphere, and, of course, reflect our idea of visual metaphor.
in this blogpost, i won’t be talking much about the concept as we have described it in the proposal (it has not changed), however there are few things i believe i want to summarize.
our concept revolved around body dysmorphia experienced by men, which is a highly stigmatized topic as of present days. the poem read by 4 men in the background talks about a feeling of being stuck, whereas the visuals introduce a series of scenes that suggest that the depicted men struggle with a feeling of being stuck in their bodies. videos allude to not being able to embrace one’s body, depicting men scratching, rubbing their skin, changing their eating habits and much more.
i believe that the choice to include 4 men has played out quite decently as that signifies that this issue is what a lot of the males are facing, however still feeling alone and isolated when facing it, sometimes not being able to express their feelings. it as well allowed us to use the split screen and convey this looping composition.
throughout the process of recording the videos and sharing them, we have encountered quite a lot of issues. some of the videos that I shared turned out to be overexposed when opened via Clarissa’s computer, whereas the files on my computer and phone were completely fine. moreover, even though on my computer the files were not overexposed, the fact that the scenes were shot in different locations, they were inevitably different in terms of lighting. both of these problems we have tried to overcome by adjusting the exposure and black points in Premier Pro. in addition, I had to retake couple of scenes so that the quality and lighting would look a bit better (we have not agreed on how bright our scenes should be, along with whether we turn the video in black&white colors on our phones or in the app, the significance of which we have learned in the process). on the bright side, me and Clarissa have the same phone, which helped us in achieving a continuous quality throughout the video.
in terms of editing, we have decided to share with each other the way each part is put together from the raw footage. we didn’t intend to do that at the beginning, however later realized that it would be better to do that as the sequence created by a person who had a certain idea in mind when shooting the raw footage, would make much more sense, opposing to the sequence that is put together by someone who had no idea what the raw footage might mean.
as for the audio recording, the scheme was pretty much the same as the video. we had to do the de-noise effect as my audios had background noise and i could not find a place to record that would avoid that. nevertheless, i believe we could have rerecorded the audio one more time or add the background noise for Clarissa’s audios to make the audio throughout the video more consistent, however I believe that the slight change has only helped us in highlighting the difference between the depicted characters, however uniting them together visually.
i am very happy how split screens have worked with out idea. i believe that they have enhanced the delivery of our concept, highlighting the significance of the issue we are touching upon in the film, creating the loop that adds to this idea of being “stuck”.
i believe that we have done a great job collaborating. our plan and workflow went smoothly as we managed to communicate on time and share our footage and audio. i believe the fact that at the very beginning we have divided our work in halves has helped both of us put considerable effort into developing and improving the parts we were accountable for.
i can surely say that it was one of my favorite projects in this course, i have improved my skills in communication, video and audio recording, video and audio editing. it was quite a wholesome experience and i am very happy i have learned quite a lot throughout not only this project, but this course overall.
the link to the video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z84fy3UOHQwqtjAd3J-wuN9ucEetP1x8/view?usp=sharing