My group divided the work that each person finished one video and the audio part of that video and the last video and audio would be finished together. The four moods that my group decided to do was anxiety, horror, relaxing and romantic. The theme that we chose to do was “a girl in different moods”. The girl would be the connection point for our videos as my group wanted to make the four different videos have something in common. So the perspective of the girl in the videos of horror, romantic and relaxing was from the first perspective of a girl. The perspective turned to be the mixing of first and second perspectives in the video of anxiety as to show the inner world of the character and the pressure from the external world. According to Xu, Chia and Jin (2005), video/audio segments contents which are affective are able to cause an audience’s strong reactions and appropriate use of audio can trigger the effect of the visual content. In this case, I started to think about the ways that I could try to manipulate the videos and audios.
To start with, I would talk about the mood of horror which I mainly took response for. During the shooting, I went out and shot at different time periods to get the best version, using the way of vertical shooting to make audience feel the visual defect of the surroundings. I made the scene getting darker and darker which was not clear enough and made the camera a bit shaky. The perspective was from a girl’s view so that I added the girl’s breath into my audio to simulate the scene. A black filter was added to the video to create the atmosphere of fear. There were lots of cuts of black intervals in the video in my video that I would like to create the effect of sudden interruptions to the audience to expand the horror mood. The audio part in this video I recorded myself singing and played the piano. My piano is a digital one so I adjusted the different sounds of the piano to record the melodies that I wrote for this mood. I did not choose to use logics X in horror mood to produce the music as what I did to the other moods. Pitch shift was used a lot here. I adjusted my voice to become a hight pitch tone which was very creepy and made my voice be more like a little girl’s voice. I sang the song in Chinese which the content said about ‘open the door and I will tell you my secret’. Hopefully it would make it more mysterious. I also recorded the sound of whispering. And lots of reverb to produce the echoing sounds.
Secondly, I would illustrate the mood of relaxing. In this video, there was a girl who draws a picture of the city and what coming next was the view of city in the camera. I really like the idea of the pulling the thoughts from urban to suburban and into the natural views. The pace of the shots was slow and the views were refreshing which could make people feel calm and relax. I create the music in this piece in logics X using the instruments of daylight piano and violas. Jenna helped to adjust the different pieces that I made into one whole music. From my point of view, I would suggest that Jenna could try to include more sounds in detail to enrich the sounds in this piece as the pace was really slow.
Thirdly, I would introduce the mood of romantic which showed a day about a girl on Valentine’s day. I helped to produce the music in the first 7 seconds and from 40 seconds till the last. Cindy created the music from 7 to 40 seconds which she put lots of efforts on. I used pop piano & strings, classic electric piano, grand piano and romantic strings. The master track was the sound of grand piano and the other tracks were adding on to it. Romantic strings was put in the end. Although it was the first time for my group mates to use logics and I helped them to produce the majority of the music, they still tried their best. There was reverse speed being used in the editing process of the video of the mood romantic. My suggestion was that I thought it should be more reverse speed being applied to the video in the last half of the video.
Last but not least, my group worked together to produce the mood of anxiety. The inspiration of the video came from the daily life frustration. We covered three topics which were about study, friendship and money in this video. In this video, what our group wanted to achieve was a soundscape. I created a background music which used the sound of African drums as the master sound. Our group simulated the soundscape of the girl’s movement. Lots of fades were used when editing the anxiety audio and we adjusted the volume to ensure they sounded good.
“ Sounds play a… subtle role in animation and interaction, conveying … a sense of presence, realism, and quality”(Pocock, 2001). In this project, we got chance to practise both real and abstract ways to express the theme. I still get lots to learn.
Reference List
Xu,M. Chia, L. and Jin, J. (2005) “Affective content analysis in comedy and horror videos by audio emotional event detection” , IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo. Amsterdam.
Pocock, L. (2001). Proceedings of the 28th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniques. New York, NY: ACM.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=18ryJKnQH8ILVrWJ8PBox5T0fybDFfd0D