A. Concept
For the entire semester, one of my biggest concerns was when will I be able to return to Shanghai. After days of pulling the required documents together, applying for the visa, I finally received my visa in my hands at the end of November. For the project, I thought it would be memorable and meaningful if I chose to focus on this topic. Unlike others, I chose a slightly tedious route to get back. I chose to fly to Korea from my home—Guam—and continue my trip to Shanghai. I will not be out of quarantine before the course ends. So I chose to record my way to Korea and stop the scene at the quarantine hotel. The journey beyond that, I leave that for everyone to imagine.
B. Process
I recorded the first scene driving around the island. I asked my mom to drive the car while I was sitting in the passenger seat, holding my iPhone on a tripod. It was quite hard to record a stable scene, even with the tripod. But later in the editing process, I cut out some of the shaking parts and tried to make the scene look as less shaking as possible. Same for the other settings, I cut out some parts that don’t look very pleasing to me. The voice recording part took me a longer time than the editing process. I wrote my script after I finished recording. I had a rough idea of what to put on the hand, so I did not write it down before making the films. However, after I finished writing the script, I found out that the voice cover process is more challenging than expected. I had to be exact to seconds. I got suggestions from the class on my rough cut that my voice cover sounded matching to the scenes. However, I need to have metaphors and not to match up the voice with the settings. With the limited time and resources to start over the filming process, I decided to write another script that will sound relevant to the scenes but does not match them as my first script. After I finished writing the script, I then checked my voice with the scenes’ flow. I want to spend reading the entire script while not go overtime or suddenly increase my speed toward the end of the video. Therefore, I had to make sure my voice had a steady pace and cut off at a precise time.
C. Conclusion
For me, having an idea for the topic was not hard. However, drafting out the explicit scenes to record and writing down the scripts took quite a bit of time. The actual video editing process did not take much time. After several video editing practices in class, I also tried to edit videos out of the class, so I think I now have a good grasp of the editing techniques. If I had more time, I think I would take the other route. Include scenes that look relevant but do not look as literal as those I have in my video.
D. video (My original video exceeds the maximum size the Blog allows, so the attachment below is the compressed version. If needed, I can show my original video with another platform)