Client: Educational Design for Media Environments course
Time frame: 1 week
Date: October 2014
Problem: Create a short (30 seconds-2 minutes) film that evokes an emotion
Solution design:
Music credits:
“Poker Face” by Lady Gaga
“Despair and Triumph” by Kevin MacLeod, via Incompetech. Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
Process statement: I was first thinking I’d do something using stop motion, because I enjoy that process. I was thinking about using Lego or Lego Technic figures, since they pose well for stop motion. I wanted to portray some kind of struggle because that felt more interesting to me than portraying something more positive. As I was gathering them and brainstorming more, I came across my hexbugs. Their naturally jerky movements felt oddly suited to stop motion. As I set them all running together, they immediately made me think of some kind of party. So I thought I could do a kind of (silly) struggle of one lonely hexbug trying to join a party, and despair as the hexbug didn’t succeed. I also thought it’d be interesting to combine using the hexbugs in both live motion and stop motion.
Future directions/uncompleted elements:
- Film the ramp sequences with a horizontal shot instead of vertical
- Use shifts in lighting to accentuate different moods, e.g., darker lighting on lonely green hexbug shots
- Get rid of stretched effect on final green hexbug shots- it was an experiment to try to give more weight, “despair” feeling to those final shots, but it seems mostly to make those shots feel less cohesive with the rest of the film
- Improve blending of audio
- fix the skip between shots around 0:16
- bring in the “despair” theme more subtly, it comes in too strong