Assignment 2: Storytime!

Introduction

Hello, my cousin's been wanting to make a video together for a while so I thought of this random idea. The main flow of the story is about this girl carrying heavy big bags while walking down a narrow path, but then she meets an obstacle: this boy on a bicycle. Just when she thinks they're about to clash, he offers to help her and they both continue down the path.


Developmental process

Storyboard sketches
  1. I imagined this to be a pan up fish-eye shot from the path to the girl.
  2. To communicate tension, I wanted a close-up shot of the girl's eyes.
  3. Then to the boy's eyes. I maintained the coupling of photos cos I imagined this with editing with music also.
  4. To continue the tension, I did a close-up of the girl's hands.
  5. And then a close-up of the boy's hands. The focus on the hands was because I wanted it to transition to him lifting his hand to offer help.
  6. But I also wanted a wide shot. 
  7. I was thinking of breaking the wide shot into two parts to continue the tension.
  8. Then back to the hand for the twist.
  9. And then finally the two walking down the path together.


In the end, I:
  • Removed the shot of the boy's eyes
  • Merged the wide shot and 
  • Included a sequence of the two clashing at the path instead because the story was not very clear (they just looked like two random strangers fighting then suddenly not fighting).
  • Since the photo is static, I also just used a lower body shot instead for the first image.

Collection of curated photographs not included in the final
  • A shot of the path from the boy's perspective. Decided to just use the girl's one since the fight is what she imagined.
  • Also removed a close-up of the boy's eyes cos I ran out of frames + the fight, again, is what the girl imagined + it didn't make sense that he looked angry since he didn't even want to fight.
  • Removed cos he looks like he's begging here.
  • Didn't have enough frames to do a close-up of shoes also. Hands seemed like a better transition than feet.
  • Again not enough frames and hands were a better transition.
  • Even though this shot was clearer that they're friends, cannot see the plastic bags.

Photo editing
  • For the sequence where she imagines them clashing, I decided to make it grayscale and added some motion blur. I felt like this was important as in the original storyboards, they just looked like they were fighting and then had a sudden resolution.


original
grayscale + motion blur

  • For the other shots, I just increased the saturation slightly so that the shots would look more dramatic (almost like flames). Initially, I tried using the auto colour feature but the colours turned out too cool.
original
auto colour
manually adjusted saturation

Final prototype

Learning points

  • Comments from peers:
    • The second photo looks like the bag is too heavy
    • The boy looks like he's being forced to carry the bags - maybe can show more emotion of the boy
  • Comments from tutor:
    • Like the variety of shots, especially the first three
    • Improve the last shot because it looks too casual

How the work has been improved since the critique

Thereafter I went back to take a few more wide shots. But the looking down photos just looked sad and reinforced the idea that the girl was forcing the boy to carry things.


In another photo where I looked up, I felt the original photo still looked more carefree.


The shot was even weirder when I tried to crop it to make it vertical so as to remove unnecessary details, especially since the other photos were all horizontal. Plus, it was starting to get grainy with the crop.


So, finally just decided to go with a cropped version of the original photo, but I put them to the side so as to apply the rule of thirds, with the focus being on the boy's face. Cropping also meant one would be able to see more of the happy expressions on both faces as well.

Final work

Here is the final storyboard.
Just for fun, thereafter I also made the storyboard into a short video.


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