And so here is the final project for this module. I am going to miss you Erwin. Please come back to sg to hold workshops or something.
And here is the final video:
FINAL VIDEO
ABOUT
This self portrait video is about how my family influence me, and my personality.
So firstly: My mum being contradictory in what she says and do. I am also contradictory in some ways, according to my friends. And one aspect is that I hate sugary food and drinks, like carbonated drinks, for instance, but I love desserts, especially those cream-based ones.
And next: My sister giving very frank comments on how she feel about my art. Which encourages me to work harder and improve on my drawing skills. It is partly thanks to her, and my admiration of her, that my art has improved so much.
And lastly: my cats. Well the cat face mask says it all. They give me comfort and security. Especially my cat Cuddles, as he has been with me through the dark periods of my life.
I decided to do a sketchy style as this is a style that I usually uses when doodling, so it is quite personal. I also decided to use a simple flat colour tone that only highlights certain parts for emphasis. The flat colour tone also make it easier to handle colours, as I am not very good with it.
The parts where I show me interacting with my family are in a darker shade, as they are part of my past. While the present is brighter.
I also use an image of my home’s concrete wall for texture as I have been staying there for almost my whole life, so it holds many precious memories.
As for the sound, I use the same kitchen ambience sound at the start and end of the video to link back to the start, to show how all of these shape who I am.
The colours I use also have a meaning to them:
Pink- one of my favourite colours. And it represent weakness. I always feel that people see me as weak and naive.
Blue: represent the emo side of me.
Purple- represent the luxury of food. The luxury of having food on the table everyday.
I put in subtitles partly for those who don’t understand chinese, and also it to look like a film scene, since the audience is looking from my eyes.
Green: to contrast with the orange chicken, and it also represent growth, which is what food is usually associated with.
By the way, I didn’t colour the table because I want the audience to focus on my mum. And her food.
I also tried to use framing here though it is very subtle. It is so that the audience attention will be directed to the character’s upper body.
Green: a darker shade, a more disgusting colour. To represent disgust.
Pink: Represent sweetness. The more saturated pink as contrasted with the orange pink colour of my mask is to show the intense sweetness.
Green: also represent disgust, and to create emphasis on the pink tones of the candy water.
Purple: Represent luxury as well, because well, having cakes is a luxury. I usually have them when I want to treat myself.
Yellow-orange: to contrast with the purple. And it also shows my love for cakes. And also represent the happiness I feel when eating them.
Pink: represent sweetness as well. Shows how contradictory I am lol.
Blue: represent fear because well, like many others, I do get nervous when getting critiques.
Yellow: to show how much I admire my sister. The bottom up perspective also emphasise that.
Blue: Well, I used to be scared of her. So yup.
Yellow-orange: to contrast with the background, and to represent my love for drawing, hence the pencil is yellowish in colour.
Pink: the same shade as my mask, and it shows how this scene represents me.
Blue-green: or peacock green. It is also another of my favourite colour. I actually don’t like green, but this is an exception. So this is a representation of me accepting who I am, because well blue = emo me, green = things I don’t like, but when combined it becomes something that I like and hence accept.
And here is how I do it:
PROCESS
Step 1: coming up with ideas
For this project, I decided that I want the final video to be a more light hearted one, as compared to all the other projects I did. So that is how I go on with this project. And here is what I thought of when thinking about the topic:
And then I thought about the moments I spent with my mum, and I thought of a really funny thing she always say, which basically goes like this:
子莹啊，你不觉得我们人类很残忍吗？我们杀了那么多动物，把它们吃掉，都是为了让我们生存，好可怕哦。and then she will say this while eating some meat，like chicken or pork or whatever. And continue to eat her chicken or whatnot. And say how delicious it is.
She is too cute.
Well, and so I decided to put this part into my video, because it is so funny, and I feel that interactions with family shapes who we are. And here it is:
Step 2: coming up with storyboards
Here is the first one I did:
For my sister, I initially want to show how much I admire her, and look up to her. But I feel that it will make the video too long and I am also unsure on how to end it. So I changed my idea to show her telling me to take photos of her ( which is what I always do). But I realised that there isn’t a link to how this influencing my personality, and well I used to hate taking photos. Now I do though, and it has nothing to do with this.
And so I decided to come up with another idea. I try to think of what my sister always say, and I thought about how she is always so frank when critiquing my drawings. And then I thought of how her harsh comments encourage me to draw more, and improve on my drawing skills. And also on how I am very frank when I come to critiquing my friend’s drawings. But the latter is really hard to show. And so I decided to use the former for my video.
And I also took out the part about me and my aspirations as I have 13 different jobs I want to do during my whole lifespan so far ( 7 jobs in primary school lol). So that will be too tedious. And Erwin told me to focus on just one idea, one aspect.
And so that is what I did.
Here are the few versions of storyboards I did, and as per always I revised them quite a few times.
Erwin also told me to take photos for reference, so I got my mum to be my model:
My mum is so cute.
And here is the final one, with all the colour scheme.
I decided not to give a face for my sister as I want her to look faded. Like the light is dazzling her. To show how much I admire her, I still do haha. But now we are more like partners. ( I am still a bit scared of her cos she is so cool. But not as much as before.)
For the first scene, I actually did it this way, with the cat mask and all, because for one of my previous project, I actually did this image to represent myself:
and I really feel that this represent me? So I am making this image/icon my own now.
And yeah the cat mask is because I love cats so much. And I am born in the year of the tiger.
And here is my column script:
And here is a picture of me and my family. Under filters. For your reference.
Step 3: creating the music
And so like the previous project, I decided to make my own music. Initially I tried to make it from scratch, but after like almost half a day doing it, I gave up. So I decided to get a song from the Youtube Audio Library and edit it.
And this is the original music:
Well part of it. Cos oss can’t let me upload the whole song.
And then I edited it on GarageBand.
I tried.
Step 4: Foley
I am interested in doing sounds next time so I feel that I should try making them from scratch for this project.
So here is the list of sounds I need to get:
- Kitchen ambience sound.
- Cutting the chicken.
- Poking the chicken.
- Vomiting sound (which I didn’t do in the end)
- Sound of drawing on paper
- Putting on mask ( which I realised that I need to add later one)
- Sound made when camera zooms into the mask.
For the poking sound, I tried to use various items:
But I ended up recording the sound of me squishing my wet hands.
For the cutting of the chicken I tried all these materials:
And I ended up using a metal spoon and rubbing it against a pen.
For the mask I used this because it makes the perfect sound that I want:
As for the sound when camera zooms into the mask, I just use the sound of me blowing into the recorder.
I ended up using these sounds I recorded for some other parts, for instance: the sound for putting on my mask is also used when the knife cuts the chicken.
All these sounds are edited on audacity.
Step 5: recording the sound
I didn’t really give my family a script as I want it to be very natural. For my mum, it took quite a lot of takes. Because I kept laughing. In the end I had to sit far away from her while she recorded her voice.
For my sister, initially she didn’t want to record it. But I managed to persuade her to do so. I love you Jie.
Step 5: creating assets and making the video
I am glad Erwin told me to take reference pictures. It really help me nail the different angles I have to draw. which is nice. It took me about the 2 days with breaks to do the assets. Yup.
I also decided to use real images for my drawings. Here is a pile of some of my old drawings.
And here are some of the drawings I chose.
And I trimmed it down. To the stuff I draw from my imagination ( kinda) as I feel that it is more personal. And I also chose drawings of animals and people as that is what I usually ( always) prefer to draw. I guess this shows my love towards anatomy and biology and wildlife.
I ended up using photoshop to animate some parts, because I didn’t know how to use the puppet tool for some parts, and some parts requires the change in angle (like the hands and the paper).
For the hair, I only animate mine because I guess I want to show that the focus is on me? Since it is on self-portrait.
I also changed some parts of my video as I edit so the final product is actually slightly different from what I planned out initially.
And here is the editing part of the video.
I use a lot of scaling, and positioning, and rotating.And ease in ease out. I used some warp function for the candy water part. And also a bit of puppet tool as I realised that I didn’t draw enough of the hand (for the cake scene). And for the transition of the cake scene to my sister scene, I use some twister transition. I also try to make the whole thing neat enough to work at by adding lost of compositions.
And I tried to do this smoothing keyframes thing?
And I took pictures of stuff in my home to create the texture.
I ended up using the picture of my concrete wall.
I guess that is all.
CONCLUSION
And so here it is. My conclusion. Erwin says that I should transit better from my mum’s part to my part. Maybe I should add in a reply from me, or extend it out to an instant post, or something. Well, I don’t think I will be able to edit it and post it in time for submission. Ah wells.Overall, I really enjoy this module? It is really siong but all is well. I am happy with how this film came out, the music sucks though. But it is fine. I think I got to use the skills on transitioning and what what not that I learnt from assignment 3, and then add in all the symbolic stuff that I enjoy adding. I think this is a start? So yay. Overall, I think I really learn so much in this module; not only the different softwares, but also on how to do composition, transition and colours. I feel like every project that we did is all out of my comfort zone, and I really learn so so much. I will miss you Erwin.