For my final project I was a little unsure of the direction I wanted to take at the start. It would have been easy for me to instinctively create something “safe”, but I really wanted to stray from my comfort zone for this task as this was the perfect opportunity to take risks and experiment with things that I am unfamiliar with.
I was investigating online archives of historical audio where I found this site. After listening to a few pieces of audio, I stumbled upon this speech by Robert Oppenheimer, and found it really intriguing. I liked the fact that the audio was a short snippet of a bigger discussion and you’re not aware of the context at all unless you read into it further. I decided to use this audio as inspiration, considering it as narration coming from the perspective of nature. Often as humans, we consider ourselves to be the greatest beings to roam the earth, but we forget that the planet around us has such power that we will never fully be able to predict or control. My aim in the creation of my video was to act as some kind of reminder from the earth’s perspective that the planet is capable of total destruction at any moment in time.
For the remainder of the audio, I used the intro from It Was Blue by Angus Stone as I thought that it had a really dramatic and suspenseful vibe to it. I only wanted to include the part of the song before the vocals started at the beginning. However this worked out to only being about 30 seconds worth of audio so I played around with the speed of it whilst editing in Premier. I slowed it down by 50% so that it would fill the minute’s worth of video and was really pleased with the result that I got. I liked the fact that you could hear each strum of the guitar and the even more intense feel that it gave my visuals. I duplicated and layered the audio to increase the drama around the ‘climax’ of my video and then faded off each layer toward the end.
In terms of the visuals that I used, I filmed all the footage myself on a DSLR, except the last shot of the moon, simply because I didn’t have any of my own footage of the same subject at the time of editing. Data moshing the footage using Avidemux was definitely an experience! I feel as though I definitely got lucky with a couple of the glitches as I got some really effective results in some of the videos. On the other hand however, there were some pieces of footage that I really wanted to include in my project that just wouldn’t glitch at all, or not enough to be considered worthwhile to include, which was a bit frustrating. However, this was a really interesting experience to attempt because you are never certain of the results that you’re going to get which made the entire process really interesting and SO satisfying when you actually achieved something awesome.
When finally putting everything together in Premier Pro, I just edited the footage slightly, mostly adjusting the contrast and brightness to give it a slightly more darker and eerie tone. I also added some fading transitions between the shots and faded the audio in and then out at the beginning and end of the video.
I am pretty pleased with the end result the more I view it. At first I wasn’t too sure how I felt about it as it was so far from anything I’ve done before and would usually do, and kind of made me a bit uncomfortable in a way because it wasn’t clean or precise in any way. However, I really feel pretty accomplished after this project as I’ve definitely proved to myself that I am capable of more than I thought I was. This unit has been so freaking awesome to take part in and I’ve just learnt so much throughout this semester. I feel like along with new skills and knowledge, I’ve also come out of this class with a new mindset. CIC has taught me to break the norms, leave my comfort zone and consider doing things that you wouldn’t usually expect. Thank you so much Andy and Karen Ann!