The concept of our project is telling others to live in the moment, do not dwell in the past. In our story, we created a figure who always thought about the past and think those are the good days, but after a sudden transition, he understood that there is no meaning in dwelling in the past, only living in the moment can make every second matter and live happily and beautifully. We were inspired by a video clip and we decided to use this as our main idea. When processing this video, we had many changes about the constitution of it, for we are not sure how to make this concept not heavy to represent and how to make the transition naturally. After many times of discussions, we decided to use a projector to represent the good old days in the character’s mind, and this really differs from the latter part of living in the moment. I want to explore this topic is because I think many of us are suffering from the nowadays life. They aren’t things like that we don’t know how to do coding, how to write essays, how to make money for a living, etc. It is some of us eat for life, sleep for life. They suffer from the pain and don’t create happiness for themselves. I’m a person who studies hard to get a good grade, but I’m not a person who only cares about grades. It is more important for me to learn things through study and life, and this includes finding happiness through small things like eating something I like and spending some time playing. Base on the idea of living in the moment, we extend our topic to do not dwell in the past.
The storyboard matters in the first part of our project. At first, we shoot according to the storyboard so we can get some basic acquaintance about the things we made, but I think we didn’t use storyboard in the final shooting so much because we can feel free to extend something outside the storyboard. For example, the feature of the projector. My partner is the leading character of this project and his girlfriend is another character. I am the person in charge of directing and shooting. The first half of the video requires a bedroom and someplace similar, so we chose a common room in the dormitory because this place is much cleaner and has big windows. In the last half, we just chose some places which can match our narration, so we went to the park, the bench, the sofa. One friend did lighting for us. Thanks a lot. One difficulty we confronted is that we don’t know how to shoot the transition part of the character’s mind change. The best solution we found is using the blow-up of the curtain to indicate the change of the character and using the book to directly inform his change. When I was editing the video, I found the sunlight can also be a transition, so I slowed down that part a little bit and solve that problem. I was mainly in charge of editing. I used some basic functions like changing the brightness, color balance to stimulate the condition between reality and thought in the last part. The biggest challenge for me is to do the editing of those small clips. Although it’s not difficult, it took me a long time to decide to use which moment and did those tiny editing.
My role is director, shooter, and editor, which focus on the content of the video, my partner is mainly in charge of the narration part and acting part, and some of the editing part. In my previous works, finding suitable actors is the most difficult thing for me. My partner solved this problem and I cared nothing about the external affairs, I just need to go to the place and shoot. He really avoided lots of trouble for me. Also, in the former stage of this project, I had a huge essay due, so he almost shouldered all the work. Also, our conversation about the project is very smooth, for he really respects my idea and we never had a conflict. I had experienced groupwork many times before, and I can say that this is the best group I met. One thing I learned from my partner is to shoulder the responsibility actively. So in the latter part, in return for his hard work in the former part, I took the main charge of editing actively.
We used various camera angles and shots. We have close-shots and give the close-up view of the book, medium shots of the main narration, and long-shots while shooting outdoors. Also, I took some special features like the projector and the wind blowing the curtain. We also tried lots of camera angles while shooting his running, but finally used only one angle to pursue the overall aesthetics. The first part of the color tends to be dark, to bring out the sad emotions of the character, so we closed the curtain and only lit the character. The last part is colorful and because the ending is a white blank page, I adjusted the color to let it become whiter and whiter, to make it more natural and create a feeling between reality and mind. Similar to the color, the first part of the video is in a long tone and the last part became faster and faster, and the background music also changed. The faster pace of the change of different video clips also shows the increasing pace of the video, which can catch audiences’ hearts in our opinion.
The last word, I love communications lab!