14 March 2017
For this assignment, a lot of planning, thinking, scheduling and piecing are involved. As the main videographer for this assignment, I had to plan my vision beforehand, as a lot of shots were involved. It helped to save time and ensure nothing was missed out. This is the process of my Assignment 2…
By: Gabrielle, Natalie, Yulin and Jia Qi
The story is about a girl named Emily Tan Hui Hui, facing cyber-bullying and isolation from her friends. As the bullying intensifies, she finds it hard to live and decided to commit suicide. Before her suicide, Emily faces an internal conflict on the reasons of living.
Brainstorming
At the start, my group reference on the above video, and we liked the concept of the multiple personalities. Then we decided on the idea of having 2 internal characters, a Harm and a Heal character, to show internal conflict. Follow-up, we decided to do on a main subject: Cyber-bullying, to give the conflict a purpose. The parallel storytelling will be shown through the display of current struggle of Emily, and the flashback of Emily’s memories. The use of chronological storytelling shows the current state of mind of Emily, and reverse chronological shows that Emily is slowly losing herself psychologically.
Production
During the shoot, we mainly faced difficulties with noisy background and for me, syncing the shots for dialogue, as I wasn’t working with a tripod. On set, we just grabbed a chair and few boxes to make a temporary tripod.
For the fake blood, I actually referenced from this video.
Editing
In my video, I added a comment speech bubble animation, to introduce to the audience that, the story is about cyber-bullying.
I added the day of happening, in reverse chronological order, to show subtle hints of the flashback dating earlier and earlier. Then eventually leading to her childhood times. I added a keyboard typing sound when the day is revealed, to blend with the entire theme of cyber-bullying.
For my edit, I used split screen effect to show the internal conflict more directly. I wanted my video to be depressing yet still hopeful. Therefore, I added a flashback dialogue of Emily’s parents, to give the ending a nostalgic feel, and also a reason for Emily to live on. I did not add any visuals to it, as I wanted it to be a reminiscence of Emily’s childhood when she’s dying.
I faced difficulty with the white noise of my dialogue audio. I tried my best to silence it, but it’s still too distracting. In the end, I asked my main actress for a favor, to re-record her dialogue.
For my dialogue, I added single-band compressor, vocal enhancer and denoiser, to reduce the noise and create a richer sound. By setting single-band compressor to voice over, my dialogue sounds closer, as though the vocal was drawn nearer. I added dynamics to one of my sound track, to limit the peaking of the audio. I also used Echo effect (reference video 01:11) as a bridge to the next video.
Overall, I learnt a few tactics on sound through the journey of editing, and also from my fellow classmates. The possibilities of sound creation through various elements, really broaden my perspective on sound.
Till next post! Ciao!