Animation:

The main character in my animation is a duck and the story is about how the duck gets on an adventure, experiences failure, and then succeed. My video is inspired by the quotation “Life is dear to every living thing; the worm that crawls upon the ground will struggle for it” from “Twelve Years of Slave”. Making animation is something that I have never experienced before, so I really learned a lot from this project. For the animation, I wanted it to have a cartoonish and simple style with strong color contrast. I tried using hand drawings on paper then scan them to my computer, and make a video on Premier. However, the drawing did not come out as I was expected so I changed from hand drawings to drawing on drawing board. The drawings I did from drawing board met my expectation. They had strong, contrasting colors, and simple cartoonish feeling. I drew my frames in Photoshop, export it, then put it in Premier to edit it as a video. I added multiple realistic sound effects to my video; I wanted to add realistic sound to my unrealistic animation story.

 

Video Essay:

For my video, I went through a long brainstorming process. I experienced different angles with different things, I film in the dorm, outside the dorm, and I led my friends to do different things for me. After experiencing the different takes, I first wanted to do memory so I thought about the idea of filming one location but focus on different parts of the location. But then I thought that the video will be too bland so I changed my mind and wanted to do body language. I decided to do an interview with my friend. I wanted my video to have a simple and clean style. So I picked an all-white space and started interviewing my friend. When interviewing her, I videoed her from different angles and focused on different parts of her face. I wanted to focus on her facial expression and body language instead of what she actually says in the video. I wanted to deliver the message that sometimes words do not speak for everything, your movements do.