Director’s
Commentary
The “experience”…
The experience I was trying to create with my multimedia
project is a strong sense of hectic chaos and suspense. Five days a week, this is my world of
frantic craziness, and it is always a suspenseful game of beat the clock as
inevitably one of the kids doesn’t cooperate, little things happen along the
way, and we are rushing. Actually, on the day I shot this video, as soon as we
got in the car, there was a fight between two of the boys. I didn’t leave that
footage in, as it wasn’t as compelling as it was annoying!
In terms of using something from this module that we learned
about to create the kind of experience I was going for, I chose to create
tension as discussed in Percussive Editing
by inserting clocks that I had shot after the fact. The example they used in
the reading was from the movie High Noon. I was able to play on the audience’s sense of time elapsing against
the specified deadline of 7:50 a.m. By doing this, the anticipation of the
dreaded events were heightened by the introduction of periodic cuts to the
clock showing the time getting closer and closer to 7:50 a.m.
The things I worked on to create my experience…
To begin with, I shot a video of getting my four kids ready
for school and out the door. Later
that afternoon, I shot all the clocks we typically glance at to gage our
progress getting ready. I changed
the times on the clocks to reflect the timeframes of our mornings, and shot in
five-minute increments not knowing how many clocks I would use in my
video. Once I had all the video, I
was able to begin creating my experience. I did not warn the children ahead of
time that I would be shooting them getting ready for school as I wanted them to
act as naturally as possible when I woke them.
Additionally, I manipulated the following:
v Arranging scenes in an order that made
sense
v Adding
“Breakheat” musical jingle from iMovie as my footage on its own was boring
v Adding
overlapping graphics in the beginning to help set up the story
v Since
the original footage consisted of 10 minutes and 25 seconds without the clocks,
I had to do some serious cutting.
v After
retaining the best clips and putting them together, I did clip adjustments to
speed up the video from 100% to 800%. This change, I felt, added to the chaotic
feeling.
v I
went into sound effects and overlaid the school bell sound at the end of the
video.
v I also added overlap graphics at the end
in case it was unclear what Mandy said when we arrived at her school. She knew we were rushing, and she ran
down the hall and screamed, “I win!!” when she reached the end. It was a total impromptu reaction and I
left the sound in on that one clip because it said it all. I also timed the bell sound so that she
beat the bell (there isn’t really a bell that rings in her school).
v I
chose to darken the clock shots as they were all shot later in the afternoon
when it was pretty bright in the house (which wasn’t consistent with how dark
it was when the kids were actually getting up to go to school).
v Audio
adjustments were made to fade out at the end of the movie and also to remove
all audio from all the clips except the last one. Audio adjustments were also
made to the clock footage, as there was too much background noise with those.
v When
I shot the video, I did a lot of long tracking shots that were meant to go well
with speed as I was planning on speeding up the video in an effort to make it
chaotic.
v I
brightened the clock at 7:40 so it flickers right on beat with the suspense
sound effect one time at the end.
v I
added suspenseful sound effects over the clocks to give it a greater feeling of
suspense.
Evaluation of how the experience turned out, and
lessons learned about NDCE…
In my opinion, the
overall video turned out quite well. I felt that by speeding it up, it gave it
a great pace and energy and was successful creating suspense with the clock.
The music matched the pace of the visuals very well. I think it does a great
job conveying the daily frantic experience of getting kids out the door, but in
the end I found it to be more 'funny' in terms of how it made me feel… and
humor wasn’t really what I was going for. It is hard for me to be
objective when answering the question as to whether or not my project gave the
sense of chaos and suspense; after viewing it so many times, I’m too close to
it. I would have liked to increase the tension by having the clocks show more
frequently toward the end, but it would have been difficult to keep the video
"around a minute" in length. In the end, I do think the video
supplies the most important storytelling element in that it has a humorous,
happy "Emotional Punchline".
The lesson I learned about the nature and design of
compelling experiences is that there is so much more involved in creating a
compelling experience than just the video, it is more a collaborative effort of
people manipulating forms to create the compelling experience. The person
editing the footage shot has endless power to manipulate the forms (i.e., pace,
light, music, sound effects, graphics, etc.) and can change the whole meaning
of the any shots given to them.
