4D II Project 1: Alter Ego

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password: buckets

Storyline:

A frustrated girl is seen doing her work in her room when she chances upon a bucket list that she wrote a long time ago. She then starts to have visions of various scenarios written in the list, of her trekking up mountains or travelling the world. The visions end with an empty, unchecked list and she realises that it’s all in her head.

Theme:

about regrets and having the courage to take chances in life.

Process/ Research/ Inspiration:

After writing down and analysing my character traits, I found that a common theme of affinity amongst all of them is the idea of courage. The courage to stand up for oneself, seize opportunities and to be confident in ones abilities. I idolise strong female characters that break out of society’s stereotype of them. Hence with this recurring theme in mind i start to draft out my story and what I wanted to portray.

Out of all of the characters, I decided on Walter Mitty because he embodied the idea of someone stuck in his fantasies to escape reality. I wanted to do a self confessional letter type of video with an essence of regret and remorse for ones own reality of life. After consultation, it was suggested that I could do a self confessional bucket list.  I then listed down a few of the things that I have always wanted to do into the bucket list.

https://vimeo.com/108839994

While researching, I got inspired by Vodafone commercial titled bucket list ( how apt). I love the cinematography which was like handheld and shaky with the cuts of scene in between her travelling and her video calling her grandpa as she travels around the world completing her bucket list. I thought the song used ( Tom Odell – Can’t Pretend ) also really played up the mood portrayed in the video. I thought this was also a perfect way of portraying Walter Mitty since most of his “ travels” were in his head, so I could do like a reality vs expectations kind of thing.   

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Storyboard: 

4d-alter-ego-storyboard1 4d-alter-ego-storyboard1

Challenges:

One of the first challenge was definitely how am I going to show the “travelling” portion considering time and budget constraint. Then I had the idea of using my past travel GoPro footages. Of course because of the difference in frame size, I had to scale the GoPro inserts to fit the larger frame which resulted in a slightly lower resolution. It was also hard fitting the appropriate visuals to those listed in the bucket list because of lack of resources, so I just had to tweak the list to fit the visuals instead. 

Another challenge would be inserting the monologue portion. I was a little unsure of how to insert it without it feeling too forced. It was also hard emulating the emotion through the monologue ( poor acting skills on my part). In the end, I decided to keep the monologue short and sweet.

“ Dear future self, I hope that you are well and that you’re out there, seeing the world, conquering mountains, and chasing your dreams. Love, Your past”

The last challenge would be color grading the video to differentiate between “reality” and “fantasy”. It was my first time really color grading and after many tutorials later, I used cooler tones for the “reality” portion and brighter, more vibrancy in the “fantasy” portion. I was also afraid that my message wouldn’t come through but after asking a few people they seem to be able to get the gist of the story so hopefully the message did come through.

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Reflection:

Filming has never been my forte and I struggled with the technical camera aspect a little as well as coming up with the storyline while keeping my constraints in mind. But I did have fun in the end color grading the film and stitching the clips together was more enjoyable than expected. Moving on I hope to learn from this experience and improve myself for future projects. 🙂