The video is about the situations and things that make Shirley feel uncomfortable and annoyed. As I got to know her deeper, I found that she has a temper. She gets easily annoyed and angry about small things happening in her daily life. The video integrates series of clips that illustrate her getting annoyed by certain activity or motion. I documented them in the video like pet peeves. First, it starts off from a first person perspective showing her playing a Chinese number one video game on her phone. She often enjoys her free time by playing video games, but she gets annoyed when text messages continue to cover part of her phone screen and disturb her. The second part shows a situation where she shares a picture with her friend, but her friend keeps slide the photos to see other pictures that she doesn’t want to share. The third part pictures her waiting on a bathroom line, and a person suddenly cuts the line in front of her without asking. The fourth part exaggerates the sound of eating that disgusts her mood. Loud and repeating sound of eating distracts her ears and makes her bothered. The fifth part playfully shows her friend using her stuff without permission. Although she warns her friend about it through certain motions, her friend doesn’t stop her rude actions. The sixth part captures her annoyance of others invading her personal space. While Shirley is doing her homework, her friend keeps putting her stuff into Shirley’s desk. This action disturbs her concentration as well as her feeling. The second to the last part of the video illustrates her uncomfortable feeling of walking at night with a notice of someone behind her. She feels less uncomfortable during the day, but at night she is scared and anxious when someone is behind her. The last part displays her emotion of annoyance from having traffic when in hurry. In New York, she realized that there are so many people on the street that she can’t accelerate her speed of walking; she gets blocked by a group of people on a narrow street.
In between different activities, I added short cuts of a boiling hotpot, steam, and a red light on the road. These symbolize the madness, anger, and annoyance of her inner self. She doesn’t really express her feelings outside, but as these short cuts come after the activities, they can visualize her inside emotion about them. Also, I added additional sound tracks that are similar to asmr to the cuts in order to bring in sensory details. By doing so, the audience would feel what she feels about the activities: annoyance, anger, and disturbance. Moreover, these metaphors portrayed in the video are motivated by one of Shirley’s personalities. Although the footages were clear to shoot, I wanted to shoot them in a more exaggerated and hilarious way. That is to say, I believed exaggerated expressions of a certain movement or a situation would result a better interaction with the audience. The audience can empathize her stories and laugh while watching because these activities are pretty common that the audience might have experienced or have heard of. Overall videos and audios involve a sense of humor, but contain important symbolisms. For example, Shirley’s emotion is portrayed through various musics and soundtracks. Also, her emotion is visually represented by her reactions and closeup shots of other objects. Even though it was struggling to complete this assignment with the use of Premiere Pro, as it was my first time using it, I learned many effective tools and methods to document my storyline. Also, I was able to get to know deeper about my partner by doing this assignment. I was proud to produce a video portrait of Shirley that focused on one of her characteristics, temper, and satisfactorily illustrate it through diverse footages and editing.
