Category: Research

Final Video

I’m Waiting II

Continuing on the subject of sheltered animals, I wish to further explore the loneliness dogs feel in SPCA, especially since the dogs are isolated.

I’ve separated the video into 2 parts, to show 2 contrasting expressions from the dogs, where the first half was filmed with the presence of a particular human while the other half was the opposite.

Through this video, I wish to convey the importance for the dogs to have a personal owner in order for them to feel less lonely.

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Process

From the video itself, you can see that the first half of the dogs kept jumping/ standing/ moving around in circles, as if they really wanted to go outside.

They were doing so because there was a particular volunteer that would take the dogs out for short walks once in a while. However, she can only take one dog out at a time, hence the dogs could only helplessly wait in the enclosed area.

The other half seemed bored/ staring outside/ sitting on the floor doing nothing. So in a sense, I wanted to let the audience see what the dogs do with and without a human owner.

Original Idea

Initially, I wanted to just split the video into 9 screens, where each box will show 1 dog in one enclosed space in SPCA. However, my laptop was not powerful with enough RAM to handle the process. 🙁 I could not even preview the video properly without lagging even after tweaking the video preview settings. 🙁 So, because the video preview kept lagging and caused me to not edit properly, I needed to change the number of split screens. 🙁

Layout

Since it was my first time trying out split screens, I had to google for YouTube tutorials 😀

So under the effects controls tab at the top left corner, under motions, you can scale down the size of the video. I did some try and error before arriving at the right ratio/ size I wanted.

For 9 split screens I used the scale of 3o. I tried out with borders and no borders and realised the borders actually looks more aesthetically pleasing.

For a vertical layout of 6 screens I also used the 30 for the scale. However, even with 6 split screens, it was still too laggy to edit properly.  >:(

Final layout with 4 split screens 🙂 The video preview was still lagging but muchhhhhhhhhhh better than the previous 2 >:(

Sound Arrangement

The sound was not just an unedited overlay of each other. If I did not edit the arrangement it would have been extremely noisy which was not the intended effect.

So it starts out with a bit of barking and then gradually I added more barks/ whines and it dies down again before moving on to the other set of dogs.

For the second half, I just used one audio clip from one of the videos. Unintentionally, there was classical music playing in the background which somehow suited the mood of bored dogs being shown.

Colour Scheme

Part I

Part II

Problems faced

1. Lousy laptop processor 🙁
2. Filming dogs.
   • While filming one of the dogs there at SPCA, I just placed the cameras in front of the dog and walked away where the dog could not see me. However, one of the volunteers came over and told me that I should not film that dog because it was getting irritated as it kept barking. I was taken aback as I was not aware that dogs would be agitated by cameras too.
   • After explaining my project idea to the volunteer, I asked her whether it was just that particular dog that I could not film. She directed me to another section where the dogs are not as anxious and also suggested that I should place the camera further away.