How often do we stop and realise the love and effort of our loved ones?
In this story, the tortoise is an imagery of the main character’s mother. We see how her mother is always doing things for the main character without making herself known- when the mother is doing things for her child, we will not see the tortoise and vice versa, when the main character is around, we only see the tortoise and not her mother. With the picking up of the tortoise on her way home, this suggests the start of the main character’s realisation of all the things that her mother has done for her. This proceeds on to one point where her mother isn’t at home one day, that she finally realised the importance and real existence of her mother.
For this project, our group has decided to keep the originality of the story as much as possible. With the initial thought to create a spinoff of Train to Busan, we wanted to film our whole video on the train. However, after putting in much thought, we thought that it will be infeasible to film the video on the train as we will be facing alot of unprecedented and unaccounted scenerios like peak hours, filming techniques and the lighting in the train itself, hence, we decided to rechoose another story plot.
In the midst of finding another story plot, we wanted to go for a story with more originality and unusual which is less heard of. We chanced upon this Chinese ancient folklore, The Snail Girl (田螺姑娘), and decided to settle for this story. However, instead of a snail, we changed the animal to be a tortoise to suit our ‘homey feel’ better.
The Snail Girl
There lived a young farmer named Xie Duan whose parents had died years before. One evening, on his way back from tending his field, Xie Duan spied a giant river snail lying on the side of the road. He picked up the snail and took it home.
The very next night, when Xie Duan came back home, he discovered the floor swept and that several bowls of delicious food were awaiting him on his table! Strangely, the same thing happened on the second day, then on the third, forth and fifth day. At last, Xie Duan decided to find out who was his benefactor. It turns out that his benefactor was an angel sent by god to bring him out of his plight, on the condition that Xie Duan would not find out the identity of the angel. However, after finding out, Xie Duan grew more greedy and wanted the angel to be his bride. As such, this led to the angel leaving in the end.
How often do we stop and realise the love and effort of our loved ones?
In this story, the tortoise is an imagery of the main character’s mother. We see how the main character’s mother is always doing things for her, subtly. When the mother is doing things for her child, we will not see the tortoise and vice versa, when the main character is around, we only see the tortoise and not her mother. With the picking up of the tortoise on her way home, this suggests the start of the main character’s realisation of all the things that her mother has done for her. This proceeds on to one point where her mother isn’t at home one day, that she finally realised the importance and real existence of her mother.
Dilemma
Our story revolves mainly about how people today do not cherish their loved ones today which is different from the original story which revolves around greed. Hence, we have two different way of obtaining the tortoise- one which follows closely to the original story of picking up the animal on the way home and the other in which the tortoise is the house pet since when the main character was young. Ultimately, we decided to follow the original plot as we wanted to keep the main essence of the original story.
Filming Process
As our scenes were mostly based at home, we thought that this will make the whole video mundane and repetitive. To counter this, we decided to add in several school and outside scenes. Also, the storyline spans over a few days hence we found it to be quite difficult to suggest this in our video too.
To ensure consistent volume and try to eliminate any background noise, we did a voice over (shaking bags, stepping with slipper etc.) of the actions shown in the video.
Editing Process
Picking up video editing is a new skill for us in our group as all of us do not have any background in video editing and we were all using Premiere for the first time. We have to google how to edit the video step by step and this took up a lot of time for us. As such, the editing of the video took us 2 full days to finish.
Overall Experience
Ultimately, this project really exposed us to the essence of filming ( or probably just the tip of the iceberg in the real industry ). We really learned that planning the storyboard is very important and also every member involved in the filmmaking has to fully grasp the story as well as the director. In addition, as much as we would like to fancify our video to our imagination, we faced many limitations especially in our knowledge in the technical aspect of this field. Nevertheless, we managed to overcome it by always planning in a practical manner. Needless to say, we had so much fun ( and tears, bloodshed, sleepless nights and many more ) doing this project!
