Title: The End
Artist Statement:
My final project for CyberARTs was to create a video
self-portrait that expresses myself. The basic idea of the video is that I am a
creative and artistic person, not a scientific or mathematical one. In the
beginning I am waking up and looking tiredly at the clock, and then getting out
of bed. I included this to tell viewers that it is the beginning of the day,
and how I am feeling. I show the extreme opposite of enthusiasm towards my math
work when I sit down to do it and almost immediately pass out from frustration.
I continue to show this frustration by showing that I am sleeping on my desk in
all of my classes throughout the day. For the music, I wrote it so it matched
the stressed feeling I had while going through my day. This gives the viewer
the overall idea that school is just something that I have to survive everyday.
After that I show myself going home so there is a bit of a transition from the
setting going from school to home. If I didn’t put this in, it would take the
viewers off guard because they wouldn’t be ready for a scene change, which
would make them have to adjust quickly to the new setting. When I go inside and
am doing artistic activities, the music immediately changes so it is much more
pleasant and relaxed, the same mood that I am feeling in the video. A measure
before the change in setting I made the music quickly buildup in volume and
change from a minor to major key so the audience isn’t taken off guard by the
sudden change in music, just like how I added a transition between me being at
school and home. For the scene when I am doing artistic things, I do multiple
things like reading, writing, and playing instruments. I wanted to include
myself doing art, but I couldn’t use an easel because it was broken, and I
couldn’t film myself drawing while staying within the same camera shot, so I
left that out. After that, I am reading in my bed at night in my pajamas and
look at the clock to see it is late at night. This is supposed to tell the
audience that I have been reading, writing, drawing, making music, etc., all
night. At this part I made the music slow down, and the melodic phrasing in a
way so it matched the idea that I was winding down for the night and getting
ready to go to bed. I turned off the
light and kept it off for a few seconds to represent the time I spend sleeping,
except obviously I didn’t film the darkness for 7 hours while I slept. Instead,
I kept the light off for a few seconds and then switched to the exact same shot
as in the beginning, which is of me lying in bed. I did this to make the
audience realize that the whole video is just my daily routine. At the
beginning and end I wrote, “The End,” because waking up in the morning is the
end of the day for me, and the beginning is when I get home from school to do
art, music, and writing. Also, throughout the film I made the music not only
match the video by mood, but I also timed it so it corresponded with shot
changes to create more of a connection between the two. Because it is easier to
edit the video to match the music than the other way around, I wrote the music
so it went with the video as close as I could, and then did the fine-tuning in
the video editor. For the technical part of the assignment, I wrote the music
using Cubase 7.5 and Komplete 9 Ultimate. For the video editing, I used Corel
Video Studio Pro. I used different video and audio software because they are
both much easier to use, and also have more features. I exported the audio as a
WAV file from Cubase and then converted it to an MP3 because WAV files are too
large to use in Corel, and they also increase the file size of the project,
making it harder to move across devices. I exported the video file as an HDV
1080i (PC) because the visual and audio quality are the highest they can get,
and also because they file is meant to be viewed on the computer, which is the
main platform that the video will be viewed on.
