Brainstorming during class – a few notes taken around Week 3 

During the pre-production process, we had initially decided that we were to play around with lights and colours as I had expressed my interest in colour schemes and colour correcting. My vision for the Joy and Hurt video was that we were going to display a yellow colour scheme during joy, expressing details of happiness, bliss, contentment – essentially, feelings that categorise under “joy”. As for hurt, it was the same process – we were to emanate colours of sadness such as blue and other elements like the shadows that are created by the studio lighting. That was the idea that my group and I had in mind. In fact, we were all inspired by this video I showed them, experimenting around with how a person’s expressions can change depending on how the lights hits their face:

The original source was actually from a music video called “Sparkles and Wine” by the artist known as Opale. I had initially heard about this from a Tumblr post and I read an interesting comment where lighting can change the way someone looks – it’s why we come across unappealing photos of our face and other photos where we look great. It all depends on the perspective and the direction of the lighting source.

That was basically the source of our inspiration for Joy and Hurt. It can be clearly seen in some aspects of the video where the root of our vision was from.

Day of the production: 

IMG_3917.TRIM-2939wyn

On the day of the production, we still followed the initial plan for Joy and Hurt, but of course, there were moments where we went on a tangent or had to compromise the production because of technical difficulties. As I have previously mentioned, it was hard to deal with the H4N and the lights (the most important component!) – this had significantly affected the quality of our video and left us no choice but to fix it in post-production.

Presentation: 

Unfortunately, I was unable to make it to the presentation but we had all agreed as a group that we were to present the rough draft, as James had told us that it was okay to present something that was a work in progress. During the presentation, we showcased the video that Pat and I had worked on together during our group meeting – it was not necessarily something that we were too proud of (it is a rough draft after all) – the audio, the sequencing of the scene and the overall quality was still in the works for more editing and improvement.

Rough Draft for Joy and Hurt 

The Final video 

Finally satisfied with the final product, there are a few major key changes between the rough draft and the final video:

• The joy audio – I changed it to a much more upbeat soundtrack because I thought that would fit the image of joy better than the annoying, giggly laugh track. The original audio is from the website FreeMusicPublicDomain.com, with the song title of “…and your love” by the Shepherd Lemmings – it can be used under the Creative Commons License and is Royalty-free.
• The structure of Hurt – it was initially a random sequence of close-ups for the rough cut but I had decided that it needed a structure so it was easier to watch; the first part is on normal speed but after the loud bang and the blackout, I’ve edited it to be a sequence of slow motions.
• Green screen – the purpose of a green screen is to essentially change it a different/background colour other than green (unless, of course, green was the original aim of your video). I actually found it quite difficult to change it to the intended colour without having to alter the actual image and aesthetic of the video. I guess that after all, that is part of the process of changing the green screen to a different background. After going through the tedious procedure of digitally altering the look of the video, this result from,

BEFORE

and

AFTER

Screenshot from Joy

To sum it up, our attempt of showing joy and hurt through colours of yellow and blue was a successful attempt thanks to the inspiration of Sparkles and Wine music video – the whole details of the cinematography and editing was amazing and I aspire to be on that level a video production just like that.