Video Reenactment- Not I

Reenactment

Original

 

For this video reenactment I chose Samuel Beckett's "Not I" video from 1973.  Reenacting this video wasn't hard but trying to get the same lighting and angle of the video the same as the original was.  In the original video the actress is wearing black makeup around her mouth and a black cloth with a hole is covering the rest of her face so that only her mouth is highlighted in the video.  I don't have and didn't want to use black makeup by putting it around my mouth, instead I taped my video in a dark room with a flash light highlighting my mouth.  It didn't quite work as I had hoped it would, but with the added affects I feel that it did a pretty good job.  In order to get the correct angle from the original video I would have had more of my own chin showing because I didn't wear any sort of makeup, so I felt that I should just keep the camera at a straight shot on my mouth.  Because I'm not wearing any makeup I had to create my own mask in Photoshop to put over the video.  Creating it wasn't hard but putting it on the video and making sure that my mouth still shows was a little hard because it took a lot of adjustments to get it where I wanted it in order to show my entire mouth throughout the entire video.

This Person by Miranda July

I chose to create a video based on Miranda July's story This Person because it seemed a little more simpler in creating the story and it wasn't too long.  I made multiple women the main character because in the story all you know about the person is that they are a girl, but you don't know if the author is actually telling you a story about herself or a friend or if it is meant to be anyone in the world.  I can also relate to this on an emotional level because there have been times when I am excited to go somewhere or do something but then I might see or hear something that makes me not as excited about that thing as I was before.  So when she no longer feels like returning to the party after not receiving any mail I can really relate to that sort of quick switching of moods.  Making this video was pretty difficult at times because of the images that I had found online and by using stop motion and having to bring each photo into Photoshop separately in order to change it to the way that I wanted it to be in the video.  Most of the images I found online had some sort of white background to them that I had to get rid of, some of them I had to alter a bit in order to fit in the video the way that i wanted it to.

Audio Choices 

The audio that I chose for this story is that of a happier more uplifting sort of sounding music which then changes to a more kind of depressed sounding music.  I did this because in the story, This Person, there is a change in mood by the person in the story when she checks her mail and sees that there isn't any mail for her. At this point she isn't in any sort of a partying mood anymore so she goes home and does what she wants until she goes to bed.  I created this video in premiere elements and it came with its own audio that could be downloaded.

Photoshop Animation w/Sound

Audio and Animation 

Audio Choices

I couldn't upload the audio on it's own so the animation with sound and without sound are uploaded.  The sounds that I chose for this animation are a spooky ambience sound, scary forest sounds, and I added in some owls hooting.  I chose these sounds because when I created the triptychs I was going for what scary animals or things you would find in a dark and scary forest.  Some of the noises include a wolf howling, someone whispering stuff, and other more abstract sounds.  All of these sounds are on top of the chalk sound that was given to us for everyone to use.  Finding these sounds weren't too difficult to find, it was more of the matter of finding the right kind of creepy sounds that I wanted to be portrayed in my animation.  Once I had my compilation of sounds, I had no trouble putting them together with the animation in premiere elements.

Triptych Animation

For the animation of this triptych I simply made most of the animals fade out slowly or almost right away throughout the animation while others moved across the screen at a moderate pace for the length of the animation.  There are a few that seem to pulsate by fading in and out.  I chose to make everything disappear except for the main background images and I made the quote as one of the last images to fade.  Using Photoshop's animation tool was pretty simple once I got the hang of it because that was a tool in Photoshop that I had never used before.

Triptych

This triptych is meant to represent anything that can or may be found in a dark forest, actual or mythical, cute or scary.  For the quotes I found online, I felt that they went along really well with my theme of a dark scary forest.  Finding images was probably the most difficult part of this project because I didn't exactly know all that could be found in a dark forest and finding a good image of a certain animal or creature was hard at times as well.  Once I did have all of my images it was only a matter of where to place them on the canvas.  This became especially difficult when I had to create the other two panels but use the same twenty five images.  Working in Photoshop was pretty simple for me because I have used it for other projects in the past, so I am familiar with the program and had hardly any trouble with moving images or cropping or copying and pasting images as needed.

These Heels Were Made for Walking..... Well Sort of

This shoe was created from Styrofoam, felt, and faux flowers from the craft store.  The flowers and felt are glued onto the Styrofoam with a hot glue gun, and the ribbon for the heel strap is being held on by placing two long pins through the ribbon and into the Styrofoam.