4D – I’m Waiting III

Idea

Following up from the previous 4D projects, I decided that I wanted to re-emphasise the idea of adopting dogs. During my visits to SPCA, (around 3-4 times in 4 months, I constantly saw the same few dogs remaining at SPCA, because no one wants to adopt them. Hence this time, I decided to show that by integrating the usage of the name cards found outside of the enclosed space in SPCA.

The name cards had some acronyms on it which I didn’t understand so I went to ask one of the volunteers about it.

“Dated” represents the date of birth, while “AA”meant the date of arrival to SPCA, while “As of” is the date the animal was put up for adoption.

This dog, Viking has been at the SPCA since 2011, which made me imagine how lonely it must have felt 🙁

Originally, I wanted to include the background story of some of the dogs but I eventually I did not because I felt that it would have been too much information.

Sketches

Space chosen

The reason why I chose this space was because I need a dark enclosed space to project the video as well as somewhat imitate the dim lighting I experienced there.

initial sketch

Robert told me that the fence was not necessary.

Making of the cards

There were 3 types of cards with different colours. The colour allocated to the dog depends on the dog’s personality.

I used photoshop to replicate the name cards and tried to follow them as closely as possible.

After printing and laminating it, I used a permanent marker to write every dog’s detail that I found on the day I visited SPCA.

Video

pw: qwerty

I decided to change my video for this installation as I felt one dog at a time looks nicer and suited the environment better.

Final Installation

Old Dog Toy

Old dog toys that I borrowed from my classmate Alvin.

Video position

I decided to place the video low because that is how you view the dogs as well as making the video small makes it seem as if the dogs are a little more vulnerable.

Feedback

Robert said that my final installation could have been better if I had considered to place the name cards at the same height of the video. If I did so, the relationship between the name cards and the video would have been better. The set up made it seem as if both were from two separate exhibits.

It was also mentioned that maybe the dogs walking around in circles could be a sign of mental distress to the dogs,

March 23, 2017March 23, 2017

4D – I’m Waiting II

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.

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

Lousy laptop processor 🙁
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.

November 17, 2016November 19, 2016

4D – Assignment 3 Video

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 😀

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