Beneath
Day by day, people think it is alright to say something hurtful and expect the victim to take those words with a pinch of salt. However, every single word you say will leave a heavy impact on the person and no matter how much you regret saying it, the scar will remain there permanently which is portrayed using hammer and nails.
Original Idea
Initially, I just thought of working with plain text on a plain background without any visuals. The text would endlessly be going from left to right, up and down, diagonally, etc. However, visuals are compulsory for this assignment hence I needed to think about another idea.
Inspiration
My classmate, Zoe, told me about a story where her teacher made her class write down thoughts they feel about themselves, and afterwards they would crush the paper. This made me remember about the story of a boy and a father where the kid was instructed to hammer a nail onto the fence each time he made a mistake. After the boy realised his mistakes, the father made him pull out each nail hammered. However, the holes on the fence remains there forever, like a scar. Which gives a very good visual as to how words can wound people’s hearts.
Development
Before starting to film, I planned out the shots using a story board and tried to imagine what kind of sounds I would hear from filming and how I can work them together with text.
As you can see most shots that I planned out were closeups with varied angles.
I did not follow everything that I originally planned out as I realised some scenes did not really work out well.
Originally I planned to film at home, but the lighting was really dim which led me to filmed in the 4D studio instead where the lights were pretty bright. However, I still had to film it with ISO 800 and above with the lowest aperture.
I used by own hands as the person hammering the nails, while the camera was rolling on a tripod. I tried to film as many angles as I could so that I did not need to re-film anything. I tried panning the camera, having still-shots and so on.
Post Editing
Process of adjusting the brightness and contrast as well as the colour balance. I made the colour scheme more dark blueish because it creates a more damp and sad mood.
More colour correction examples.
Text
After editing the effects I went on to search on the internet what kind of words/ sentences people say and I’ve founds tons of it. There were also lots of cyber-bullying cases which eventually led on to the victims committing suicide.
I’ve copied some of the comments from here and added them to the video and tried to play around with the layout.
The layout that works well the most was the last one which was like a subtitle.
After creating all the text files, I arranged them in a way that it lines up with the loud hammering sound. The text appears and disappear quickly as it is not meant to be read. It is to show that these kind of comments are quick to be said/ appear.
From this project, I learnt the importance of planing and lighting throughout the whole filming process. Without planing, I might have missed out on some shots which will be very time consuming. It was also my first time filming a video alone and using Adobe Premier Pro.
Although I met up with some difficulties with editing the videos using the software, I have to thank my friends for giving me advice as to how to edit them 😀 I really appreciated their helpfulness 😀