This “hurt” video is my favorite one out of all four videos from Assessment 2. Not only because it is the closest to my shooting style but also gave me a lot of space to be creative with abstraction and lighting. Hurt could be represented in many different ways, it can be physical, mental or even be easily presented in a certain atmosphere created by lighting and sound. I chose the theme of suicide, which is both physical and mental.

 

Since the topic is hurt, I want to take it as far as I can, record the process of suicide is one of the darkest scene I could think of and I think it perfectly represent the concept of hurt because people will only choose to suicide when they are hurting and they can’t take it anymore, even when they are doing something else, when they actually kill themselves, they must be hurting. So I used a very dark and unstable lighting to create the depressing atmosphere to collaborate with the “hurt” theme. The first scene of finger tapping not only shows stress to explain the reason of what is about the happen but also worked well as the soundtrack of this video. I also used the blood and hand to give the video a little horror elements but in a relatively abstract way. This fake blood also took me a long time to make it look real enough. I used sugar powder, red and green food coloring, cocoa powder and water to achieve the exact color I want. The final scene of the fingers moving is where I want to make my audience think if the person is really dead. Instead of a still hand telling the audience someone died of cutting his own wrist, I prefer an open ending to give room for my audience to use their imagination. This scene was inspired by the movie “Batman VS Superman”. At the end of the movie, there was a close-up scene on Superman’s coffin, and at the last second the dirt on the coffin vibrated and floated. This scene got the audience curious and gave them room for imagination. This technique was used in a lot of movie and I personally like it a lot.

 

I am very satisfied with this video, however I still think there is room for improvement. I think the color of the blood could be more real and the liquid should be a little thicker, I tried twice but it was still too liquidly, so I just used this one to avoid wasting too much material. I think the scene of the knives can be more smooth, at the moment it looks a little pushed out from the video, I think it should be more blended in. The composition of the second last scene of the video can also changed in order to get a better look, but due to the limited space I had, I wasn’t able to get a better shot. These problems can all be solved if I did more preparation. This assessment have been a really valuable experience to me, I challenged myself to make different styles of videos in a short period of time and learned how to work in a crew. Next time I will try harder to make a video closer to perfection, using the knowledge and experience I got from this assessment, I believe I can improve a lot.