Final project

When I determined to make a narrative about homesickness, several possible scenes that I might capture came into my mind. It was a broad and thought-provoking topic and what I first need to do was to narrow it’s possibilities. I chose making videos to document the narrative and I think one minute was enough for me. I started to thinking about specific details that can be easily recorded and visualized. I think the most obvious feature of being in different nations is the time difference, and then I asked my mother to take a picture of the sky outside the window in China and I took a picture of sky here. I manipulated these two images by turning down their initial color and brightness so that two images taken in daylight became night scenes. At that time, I got an idea that I could make my video by comparing the same scene and objects in different places.

After figuring out the core concept of comparison to reveal the topic of homesickness, I asked my mother again to help me take a video of taking elevator home and some images of my bed and working desk. At the same time, I recorded the same objects here. At a sudden, I got an idea that I could create a feeling of these two places, my dorm and my home are linked by the same elevator. I could shuttle back and forth between two places, just like time-traveling. And I was so excited to find that imovie can make motions much slower or faster. It helps me to create the scene that I could travel between two places in two different nations through an elevator.

Then, the job left was just to combine everything together with some transition effects and texts. I chose two pieces of music and cut part of them by Garageband to become the background music or sound effect of the video. One of them is kind of funny, to make the video more interesting, the other is soft in order to create the atmosphere of homesickness. After everything was done, I think I lost the most important content! Then I put the picture of my family and the facetime screenshot of my mother into the video and ended up the video with smiling faces of my families. I think it is enough to make my video piece showing the homesick emotion. Eventually I made it! But what still makes me unsatisfied is that the video clips of traveling through elevators are a little bit confusing, I am afraid that viewers cannot understand what I meant to express.