The Proposal: Using the set of photoshop images, make a three minute narrative in Adobe After-Effects. The movie should have sound.

The Process: Before I worked in After-effects, I arranged my pictures in numerous ways, and studied the relationships between them. Several of my pictures resembled clusters of skyscrapers. As I looked at them, I imagined moving through a city alone: I imagined walking inside of buildings empty of people. I imagined the colors and shapes present in my pictures as the "life" within the city and its buildings.

The next think I did was play with audio and experimented with a possible soundtrack. I hoped to create a rather slow piece of music with lots of sci-fi sounds to correspond with my imagined "journey through space in the living city." I layered sound in a disorientating manner but I ended up losing the session. I decided to go ahead and work with the visual part of the movie. I hadn't worked on After-effects before so I spent a lot of time experimenting with effects and considering possible ways of moving between pictures. I constructed a narrative that begins with a light entering the "city"; the light could be interepreted as many things. From there, the video explores the spot where the light landed and there is a continuous movement through layers of colors and shapes. The narratve reads in a circle and ends with the light flying back out of the city. When I completed the visual set of movement, I inserted a track of audio with a really lovely pace that grows toward the end. I would like to go back and add my own audio; I feel that the visual that I have now will lead me through the process of adding sound better than creating sound from an imagined narrative.

See my movie