Arroz Con Gandules (Puerto Rican Rice with Pigeon Peas)
I always get excited when my husband is about to make this Puerto Rican rice, it makes the whole house smell so good, and is packed with so many flavors. The best part about him making it this time, is that I got to use it for my final project!
I had fun recording this, and putting the video together, which also made me realize how much work goes into editing to make these type of videos.
In the future I would like to record more than what I think I need, I feel like I could’ve been more creative with some of my shots, and explored more animations to implement in this video. Other than that, I think everything is pretty straight forward, and I’m looking forward to making more short videos like these.
I really enjoyed taking this class, I learned a lot from Teresa as well as other classmates. I hope to see everyone next term!
For this project, I decided to make another song/video mostly because it’s just what I enjoy doing, but also explore a different side musically and incorporate a narrative into the visual aspect. First off, I want to provide some context to what themes I’m portraying as well as the overall structure. The song mainly covers feeling embarrassed and resentful about the struggles of one’s condition, but reflecting back on the expression of said emotions. The instrumental also is different from what I normally go for. The absence of percussion and the layered parallel mixing of the vocals I think has an interesting effect on the soundscape.
Visually, I wanted to go for a lo-fi, textured, and gritty aesthetic. I think that this compliments not only the narrative provided, but also the themes of the music. Narratively, I aimed to tell a story of someone unhappy with their condition, but feels helpless to fix anything about it, so they go out and indulge in substances to alleviate that pain. I tell this story through first-person-type angles and add various cuts, and cuts to black as if they are trying to remember a certain day. The text displayed throughout the video serves to act like hypothetical questions to distract from the reality that they don’t want to hear. Lastly, the white circle represents a sense of being “drawn” into coping mechanisms that are ultimately harmful.
My final project is a video on how to take beautiful autumn leaves photos on iPhone. I love the fall scenery in Eugene and wanted to take pictures to commemorate the beautiful autumn leaves around town. And I like to post beautiful pictures on my Instagram stories, so I made the pictures in portrait orientation so that I can post them. I edited this video using the “InShot” app, which I also used in my previous project. The background music is from the app. There were many songs to choose from, but I think the song I chose for this video is very suitable.
I took so many pictures of autumn leaves for this project that it was very difficult to decide which ones to use for the video. I used the iPhone’s screen recording function to show how I often make settings when taking pictures, and included that in the video as well. I also included some bad examples of photos that didn’t look good, so I think it’s easier to understand. If you like what you see in this video, I hope you will imitate me and take not only photos of autumn leaves, but also various other kinds of photos.
Here’s my final project! It was quite exciting to use different mediums of animation in order to tell one story, as it’s not something that I’ve done before. It turned out quite different from the script that I wrote for it, as I made quite a few changes to the plot while I worked on the visuals, which made planning more difficult for myself. Because of this, I decided to focus only on the beginning part of Harmonica-Man’s story, where he struggles to be accepted by the people around him. I’m hoping to continue with this character, as I don’t feel that I’ve actually completed his story (even though my ironic inclusion of the “The End” tag would tell you otherwise).
When it comes to visuals, the subway station scene was the most interesting thing to work on. At first, I actually tried to do it through paper animation, but it was a nightmare to manage. So, I figured that I’d take a photo of each object that I knew was going to have to be moved, and animate it digitally through a photo editing software. This turned out great, as I feel that I was able to replicate the look of paper animation fairly well. Now I understand why South Park moved to digital paper animation so quickly!
If I were going to keep working on this project, I’d probably try to give more focus to the audio. I got really carried away with the story and visuals, so audio ended up on the editing back-burner. Opposing that, I’d like to work with even more visual mediums in this story. I left out flat, baked, and 3D claymation, as well as live-action footage due to my lack of experience in those areas. As I worked, I found that using multiple visual mediums makes consistent storytelling pretty difficult, which is why I went with visual styles that are similar to each other.
Since I did the visuals, voices, and quite a bit of the audio, I didn’t feel like credits were a necessary inclusion to the video. The music at the end is from Mixkit (I highly recommend it, as it’s one of the better free audio resources in my opinion), and the staircase image used in the Subway Station scene was taken by Andreas Levers.
When I first started production on this project, it was going to be something completely different. Originally it was going to be about stray cats doing stray cat things, with a song I wrote playing in the background, but that didn’t work out. All that’s left from this scrapped concept is a singular cat GIF titled: “Unused Cat. Poor cat.
I ended up doing little gifs following little people doing little things instead of the stray cat idea. As the title implies, it gets a bit odd, especially after the plane flies by. The reason for that was because I started using drawings/paintings of mine as inspiration to help make the process go a bit faster. Such drawings/paintings include an octopus, hummingbird, Wiggly Trees, a human sitting on a chair, a cat with a Christmas hat, etc. Fun fact! Hummingbirds represent hope and good luck, while octopuses represent the ability to overcome challenging situations with creativity and intelligence. That’s pretty neat! If I had more time, I would’ve loved to do something more complex.
Freno sulle Corde gave me permission to use their music for this video. The song is called “Leyla Theme.” Freno sulle Corde has a lot of other music that’s pretty snazzy as well. I recommend checking them out since they have a variety of music that explores many different genres. You can find them on youtube.
My final project is a short film, “A Day in the Life of Xander.” Xander is my two-year-old tabby, who I rescued from a home with animals that were aggressive toward him when he was just a few months old. Over the last couple of years, I’ve realized that I have one of the most mellow, easy cats I have ever met. He doesn’t get into much mischief, and he is a big cuddle bug that desires to be in the same room as someone else- all of the time. Xander is my first pet and has become an essential part of my family. Before having this sweet loaf of a cat, I was honestly a dog person, haha. After having complications and setback after setback with my original project idea- I realized I had a perfect project partner sitting in my lap the entire time I struggled with my original idea.
My original idea was to do a claymation stop motion film, but this project was more challenging to my experience. Most of the videos I have done with multimedia have been stop-motion, and they don’t always need a lot of transitional or effect editing. With stop-motion videos that I have done in the past, I have either sped up the frame rate, deleted unappealing shots, and added music over the top. With this short film, I was able to experiment with different transitions, editing sequences, and screenplay additives with clip art files. I am proud of how this project turned out; and was fun to create. I hope everyone enjoys watching it as much as I enjoyed spending this time filming with my Xandy boy.
When I began brainstorming what to do for my final project, I went through many different ideas. Most of my ideas were lighthearted and simple, like the projects I had done in the past. It wasn’t until I realized that I could create something based off of one of my roommate’s poems and use it to create a project with more meaning and depth. After talking to Jaidyn for some time, we realized that not only have we both experienced trauma caused by our fathers but we know plenty of other people who have gone through similar experiences. I decided to do my project on what it’s like growing up without a father figure and how it can affect one’s mental health. For me, I was raised half my life with a dad who was my knight in shining armor, it wasn’t until later on that he began losing himself and taking his anger out on his children. To this day I still reminisce about the days when he was a happy person. For many others, they never got the chance to experience a life with a father figure and instead had to go through the turmoil of trying to figure out who the other half of themselves are or what could have been.
Once Jaidyn finished revising the poem, I was able to start recording videos. My main goal while recording was to capture moments in life that felt vulnerable and raw. I wanted my final project to feel like a home video, like the ones that make you look back on the good times. I used my Nikon D5600 while recording the videos, and the two clips from when I was a child were videos my dad recorded. I found the music off of freesounds.org and recorded my audio with a snowball microphone.
While editing I knew I wanted to keep it simple and sweet. For the text I used keyframes and changed the opacity and placement of the titles.
For this project I wasn’t 100% sure what I wanted to do, but I remembered about the song Flamingo by Kero Kero Bonito and thought “Hey maybe I can make an animation for this song”. So thats what I did. I chose to do an animation because I want to get some more practice animating and also just drawing in general. I’m not 100% happy with the project as a whole, but I think I did well for knowing little to nothing about editing in Premier Pro.
For the music I used a remix, because the remixer allows their music to be used as long as they get credited, and because it was groovy. For the first scene, I wanted to Rotoscope myself, but ran out of time so I just left it in as is. For the rest of the video, I animated the scenes in Photoshop along with some extra touches & movements using keyframes/sfx in Premier. Most of it was just simple hand-drawn animations, but I did do Rotoscoping for the dancing part. I added shrimp all throughout the video to add to the theme of the song more, and because I thought it was kind of funny in a dumb way. For some of the text, I wanted it to look like it was shiny, so I used Lighting Effects in Premier and made a rectangular mask that I keyframed to move from left to right over the text to give it that shine effect.
Overall I had a lot of fun with this project and I definitely want to try to make something like this again.
For the sources that were not mine, here is what I used:
My roommate writes short stories sometimes, and I decided to bring this one to life. I wanted a very minimal approach to this one, which was tough for me. I love adding music in my videos, and since I decided I didn’t want this one to have any, it feels almost unfinished. I am very happy with the final product, and will definitely consider redoing it in the future when I have better equipment and skill. I had an extra fun time making this one because I didn’t have to worry about the story aspect so much since it was already written in a short story format. I really enjoy putting all my focus into making someone else’s story come alive. I will probably use this technique again in the future and just find short stories online and turn them into short films. Sometimes I have my own ideas for a story, but there’s something really special to me about redoing someone else’s work using a different medium, and I end to do better work this way.
The hardest part for me was the technical stuff that comes along with using the Adobe Suite. I am decently familiar with the suite, but I’ve been pushing myself lately to explore and challenge myself in the special effects realm of After Effects. I animated the title and credit sequences, the fly, and some of the blood using After Effects and I feel like I learned so much that I wouldn’t even know where to start, putting it into a paragraph. I made so many mistakes and had to fix so many things, and I cannot wait until I am good with these programs. Once I finally get really good at them, I’m going to fake another moon landing.
Big thank you to my family, girlfriend and friends for bearing with me over the last week and a half. And Teresa, I can’t wait for the next class with you.
When I say that This project was difficult to put together, I mean it with my whole heart. I really liked how this video turned out at the end with the music and everything else. When I was looking for music I used the website https://freesound.org/browse/. I did have to play with it to make it fit with how long it needed to be. I also used that same website to find the audio of the typing and the heartbeat. I am really thankful that I was able to find those audio’s there and would recommend using that site.
I would like to take the time to thank my mom for letting me use some of her pictures to make this come to how it is now. It really means a lot that I was able to use these to really bring the emotion to the video using pictures. Thank you for all the help with finding the pictures you really mean a lot to me. <3
This class has been really fun and I have really enjoyed learning in this class. Thank you so much for making this the best first term here in person.
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