Idea

To begin my project I had to think about the best way to express my ideas.

I first thought of doing a flash animation. However, there were various problems with that approach. My knowledge of flash animation is ery limited, and thus I wouldn't be able to fully utilize the tool. Additionaly, animation would make it harder to involve actual pictures or footage of myself and my living enviorment, which would affect my ability to personalize the project, and one of my priorities was to make the project has perosonal as possible.

I then thought of doing a monologue, and having a slide show behind me. I nearly set that up, but again I was worried that I would not be able to appropriatly present the material. I am a comedian by trade and my first instict would be to get the audience to laugh, which while being one of the goals, was not supposed to be the unifying theme of the project.

I settled on making a brief film presentation. I have worked with Imovie before and I felt that I would be more comfortable using it, and able to make a more definitive statement.

Process

After I had decided to make a film project. I rented a series of documentries narrated by Carl Sagan. After watching 12 episodes starting at the big bang, and ending with a animation of the end of the world, I set about filming my surroundings.

I checked out a camera and spent two weekends filming my friends, my housemates, and my life in general. I had no way to warn anyone so I comprised a list of various social functions that would be occuring over the course of the time period, and just showed up with the camera.

I watched the tapes on my equipment at home. I logged my footage, keeping a list of what happened at what time.

Tape log 1

Tape log 2

Afterwords I took the tapes to the lab, and began capturing onto the computer.

Once I had captured the footage onto the computer, I again turned to the documentries done by Carl Sagan to look for some sort of correlation between the two.

I spent a few days replaying various scenes and listening to the narration. I tried to pull it out of the context of astronomy and think about how it could apply to the average person.

Once I had a fair idea of how the two were connected, I set about writing the narration for my peice. I wrote one version, and read it to my room mates as I played the some of the footage I had taped. After gauging their reaction I decided to revise it. I taped my self reading the poem, captured it onto the computer, and then divorced the audio from the footage.

I took some of the episodes of the documentry and captured them on the computer. I then split the scenes up, and extrated some of the audio. I then interlaced scenes from the documentry, with footage from my day to day life. I switched the audio from the documentry with some of my own for added affect.

Monologue 1

Monologue 2

Monologue 3

Monologue 4

At the point I hit a wall. I realized that I needed to conclude the work with a scene symbolizing the end of time, and the depletion of energy. However, all the scenes I had where of people alive and well. At that point I enlisted a friends aid, and had her film me. I put on various make-up and costume connections in an effort to appear dead on screen, but they all looked contrived. So, I decided to ignore my intense modesty for an hour, and we experimented with filming me nude. We settled on shooting it outside, and the overall affect gives the viewer the message I was going for.

I put the final scene into the project and set about editing the sound. I decided to add a music track to the background in order to preserve continuity. I used a tecno-beat that I found at a local music store, and with that the project was complete.

Presentation

The presentation consisted of a short presentation explaining the principals behind the video, and then a debut of the video itself.