[ please refer to the previous post for more information about the project ]
Miss You [LQ] from Claudine Lamothe on Vimeo.
[ A HQ FILE WILL BE ADDED SOON ]
OVERVIEW
This piece, Miss You, is about my own experience going though a long-distance relationship. All the words used were taken from emails exchanged between me and my boyfriend while he was in Mexico and I was in Montreal through the course of the summer.
SIGNIFICATIONS
The text begins in English and fades through the video to French and Spanish. This causes stress between the two parties, as they cannot understand each other. It is as if they aren’t talking to each other anymore (my boyfriend doesn’t understand French very much, and I understand little to no Spanish), but are only talking to themselves. The video starts with sweet words exchanged, and end with words expressing loneliness, anger and fright.
The video in the background expresses how communication goes back and forth, in and out of focus and are still very vague.
TECHNICALITIES [ SCREENSHOTS TO BE UPLOADED SOON ]
The video was made with my longboard (a long skateboard), an empty room in my apartment, tons of cardboard, lamps, and aluminum foil. I made “filters” for each lamp so that they would reflect differently on the wall. I mounted the video camera and tripod unto my longboard, turned off the lights and played around with the skateboard and lamps. I edited all the footage in Final Cut Pro and made it in-sync with the music. Very few transition filters were used (fade in/out – dip to color) and the only real alteration made to the footage, aside from cutting sequences, was that I desaturated everything so it would be completely black and white.
The text was made with Mr. Softie and then exported to Final Cut Pro. First I made each animation in Mr. Softie and saved everything as PDFs. Mostly, I played with random effects and noted what they did and how I could use them. I then imported the folders containing each animation screenshot into Final Cut Pro, created a new sequence, and placed the PDFs unto the timeline. Afterward I had to change the duration of each PDF files to 00:00:01 second each to make a seamless animation. When this was all completed I moved the individual sequences containing the word unto the main timeline with the music and video. The effects used were in hopes to demonstrate fright and anger. The Font used is Times because I felt it represented the idea of letters well.
COMMENTS
I am satisfied with the effects with the lamps and camera, but much less with the text. I love Mr. Softie but my inexperience with Final Cut Pro made the whole process of importing text very strenuous and long. Therefore I wasn’t able to put as much effort and time into the finished product as I had hoped to. If I had to redo it all, I would make the text animations more seamless and more significant to the words they represent. I also wish I could have played around with the text more to make it more dimensional.
CREDITS
Thanks to my boyfriend who helped me with the Spanish parts of the video. The song used is Miss You from Trentmoller.