4D II Project 1- Alter Ego Process

Inspired by: Spirited Away

To use Chiihiro in Spirited Away as my Alter Ego was actually inspired by one of my classmate’s 10sec video whereby she used japanese anime to create in it. Immediately, I thought of using Spirited Away as it is one of my favourite animated film of all time and I really like the character- Chiihiro in the film.

I went to watch the whole film again to refresh my memory about Spirited Away and took some notes about Chii with what I get from watching the film. I guess I felt there’s an affinity between Chii and I was because we were very similar in terms of being very adamant to changes and we value friendship alot and I really want to develop these characteristics through my short film.

After mapping out Chii’s personality after the film, I quickly jot down the things that I want to include in my video as shown below.

Character Development

Chii refusing to accept that she’s thrown into a deep mess. Ambience is dark and heavy.

Chii refused to accept that she’s moving into a new town and has to adapt to new changes.

She made a friend during her adventure to save her parents

This film shows alot of scenery scenes to curate the whole atmosphere and tone.

Other Inspirations

I was always a fan of wongfu’s videos and always wanted to create a video that is something similar to theirs. Hence, given this opportunity, I tried to create my version of wongfu.

These videos emphasizes alot on speeches and sceneries which is my underlying motive when I thought of creating my video.

Spirited Away also revolves around the theme of seen and unseen literally (between humans and spirits). I decided to take upon this idea and create my version of seen and unseen of intangible force of refusing to accept new changes in terms of friendships and friends.

Storyboard

I cant draw for nut (xD) so stickman is my go to.

Film Direction

The story will be narrated in the form of monologue.

Lighting– High Saturation which is common in many anime film (keeping the essence of the inspiration film)

Monologue– Highlight character’s state of mind

Music– One Summer’s Day- Joe Hiraishi

This is the ost for Spirited Away and I found the transitions in the music really suits the directions and tone of my video alot.

Story

My story will start out with a scene to set the atmosphere of the video. With it being dark and gloomy initially to highlight the loneliness and current state of mind of the character. As the story proceeds, we see people asking the main character to sit with them but she

We see people asking the main character to sit with them but she didnt. We hear her train of thoughts through the monologue and how she is adamant to changes and how she missed her friends in her old town. We can see here that she value her existing friendships alot and refused to move on because of this which is quite similar to how Chii refused to accept her new town as she likes her old life and refused to accept the new changes.

However, through the process, the character starts to reflect her own actions and realised that if this keeps going on she will be lonely and sad forever. She wants to make a change but she doesnt know how and dont have the courage.

As she is once again asked by her friends to eat with them, she picks up her courage and decided that its time to move on.

Script

But life is just boring for me. i can’t remember the last time i was excited for something.

I missed all my friends in my old town. How long has it been since i moved here? 195 days or so it seems.

I missed all my friends in my old town. Making friends here is so hard. How do I strike a decent conversation with them or even gather some courage to speak out?

And then I realised, for the longest time, I was so rugged out for change that this secluded me from making any new friends.

Maybe, I should give myself a chance and a chance for these people, whom have been nice to me all the while.

Challenges

I speak to my friends in Mandarin normally so to narrate monologues with English is a huge feat!!! Omg I dont know how many times I burst into laughing while recording as my English sounded very very broken and very very Singlish.

Editing the film was another problem for me too as this is my second time using Premiere other than my last 4D project. I had to google how to do everything in the end. But im glad it turned out how I wanted it to be so all’s good.

Character development was also quite tough as I had to set the personality and characteristics and also the changing process all under one minute.

Final video in next post.

4D Project 3 Final

GROUP MEMBERS: FELICIA, ZHENG FEI, YI JIE

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.

4D Project 3 Process

GROUP MEMBERS: FELICIA, ZHENG FEI, YI JIE

Thinking Process

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.

http://www.best4future.com/chinese-folktale-the-peacock-princess-the-snail-girl-with-vcd-p-169

Our Version of The Snail Girl

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!

DONE