It’s just a website!!

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For this assignment, I needed to create a short story with a video to tell it with! I decided to make up a very silly short story about a flower creature. Like my last assignment, I used a power point slide show to animate my story and played music in the background while recording.

My short story is about a flower man who keeps to himself and lives in a town with humans. Everyone thinks he’s sad and wants to be a human too, but really, his dream is to be some kind of sea creature.

I was able to draw the frames for this assignment myself, and I used stock images to add other elements like backgrounds and realistic people. Since the main character is a silly creature, I wanted the other things in the video to be realistic looking to contrast his appearance. A real human and a real fish are very different from our little cartoon character.

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I wanted to do an introduction, but with a video this time! This assignment required me to make a video introducing myself while using photos, videos, and music to do it. I used google slides to make my images and sort my introduction out, and then I used OBS to record it.

I’m not that I even have Windows Movie Maker on my computer right now, so instead of editing the video I played music in the background in another window while I recorded my video. That way the song and the video are layered together easily! I included images to show the things I liked and a video clip at the end to combine mediums together.

It’s kind of difficult to put together videos by myself like this, I’m more used to editing pictures myself. It was fun though, I think using a slideshow to make the video was a good workaround for video editing.

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For this assignment I needed to create an animatic set to music about a character.

I wanted to use characters I’ve already developed myself for it. The main character, with the shorter hair, is a college dropout that got pulled into a cult. In a twisted way, they fell in love with the cult leader, and so after leaving they feel like they see him everywhere.

They feel like he’s haunting them as a ghost, and they can’t move on. I used Clip Studio Paint to draw the frames and stitch them together, and the program allows audio as well so it was easy to finish it up by adding music! I tried to use some of the framing techniques I learned about in the articles I read this week.

I’d like to make more animatics after this, they’re fun to make and not super difficult. Hopefully the video conveys the feeling of the story well enough.

The movie clip I chose to look at for this assignment was this scene from the Matrix:

Look

The first step was to turn the volume all the way down, and make observations about only the visual parts of the scene.

The first shot is an uncut zoom from the main character Neo to the other character in the scene, Morpheus. It then cuts to Morpheus standing tall in the frame, on the left side. Neo however, stands confused, on the right side of the frame. The surroundings are completely empty and white, putting all the focus and pressure on the characters themselves. The TV turns on, and we slowly zoom closer in to the screen. Shots of the characters also become closer and more boxed in. The surroundings change, and now both characters are in the TV scene. The relative positions of each character doesn’t change, with Morpheus still on the right and Neo on the left. The chair behind Morpheus makes him appear larger in the frame, he takes up more of the screen. Neo is by himself, alone on the left, and this could visually represent his confusion. The ominous and gritty shots of a fog and wire filled world as the world of the construct is explained fade away as we’re taken back out of the tv, where the zoom-ins on the characters get even closer and more tense. Finally, Neo runs away, and gets the furthest from the camera we’ve seen him yet, and wakes up.

Listen

The second step was to not look at the screen, and only observe the audio elements of the movie clip.

The scene opens with a jarring sound. Morpheus talks in a calm and knowing way to explain the construct to Neo. Neo’s voice is weaker and more timid here. He talks as if he’s in complete disbelief of whats happening. There’s a very quiet white noise in the room as they talk. Ambient music plays quietly when they first turn the TV on. Once the TV cuts to the construct, scary sounding violin music picks up along with thunder and lightning outside. The music builds as Morpheus continues to talk. The high pitched string instruments create an anxious feeling. Even after we leave the TV, the music comes with us. It finally builds to its peak when Neo wakes up at the end of the scene.

Put it all together

While watching, I thought about the article I read earlier for this weeks assignments too.

The way that Neo is always small and talks timidly emphasizes that the information he’s learning is totally unbelievable for him. He’s unsure of the world around him and can’t process what he’s learning properly. Morpheus is sure of the truth, and is always on the left-hand side of the screen and is large in the frame. From the article beforehand, we learned that the sides of the screen and the size of the character can be interpreted in a certain way. The left can usually symbolize the good side, the truth, and that’s where we see Morpheus. The slow building of the music goes with the information Morpheus relays to Neo, and as each piece is explained the music gets louder. The zoom out at the end is a lot like what I saw in the last assignment where zooms are used for realizations or waking up.

After reading Roger Ebert’s article about film language, I felt a lot like I did when I took an art history class in my first semester. It’s important to remember that you don’t really need to be an expert in film or art to deconstruct artistic language. He says “the audience, and the film itself, are your most helpful collaborators” and it’s very true. When I sat in that history class, it was full of different kinds of people, and of course those who are artists and those who aren’t. But through simple visual observations we can make meaningful analyses of film scenes and frames even if we don’t know anything about the technicalities of the medium. Observations like “one character is larger in the frame” or “the colors are cold here” can be expounded upon to dig into the deeper meaning of the choice.

I liked the video compilation of Kubrick’s one-point shots. Compositions that focus on a single point can do a few different things I think, and it depends a lot on what’s happening in the shot. They can be used to show desolation with wide open space, they can put the pressure on a single character in the center of the shot, they can be used to show how alone a character is. It’s a very versatile composition.

The zooms in the next video also seemed versatile to me, but less so. I feel that kind of shot is mostly used to show a realization or a waking up. Zooming out and showing more of the world around the character allows them (and the audience by extension) to ‘realize’ and see what’s really going on. A zoom in can be used for realizing too, but it feels more like the character is being boxed in by what they know now. A crushing camera angle makes us feel tense and anxious.