My idea for this project was a pill that turns you gay (temporarily). I wanted the video to be funny and entertaining - the beginning and end were normal reality, while the middle portion was supposed to be a look through the eyes of how a gay woman views the world around her.
I had a lot of inspiration for this project, including the song I ended up using for the backtrack - “Girls” by the Beastie Boys, and a lot of other phonic imagery and pop culture references. In my brainstorming I had 50 images, from flowers and fruit, to beanies and Sarah Paulson.
I think I had some trouble, because I could see exactly how I wanted certain things to look in my head, but translating that onto the screen was difficult. The video portion of the project came out mostly how I wanted it. But I struggled a lot with the animation. I had a vision of the main character looking at the posters around my house, and the poster characters jumping off the wall & moving/interacting in some way. I am a perfectionist, and I think I invested too much time on some small details that did not translate well into the final product, because it was not on the screen for long enough, or was too small.
I also struggled with animating, because after effects was wayyyyy too CPU intensive to run on my laptop, and there were certain features that were not available on my laptop. Like being able to export a clip with a transparent background (RGB + Alpha) - I could do this on the school computer, but not on my laptop. This made it very difficult to work on this project off campus. For example, the animation of the flower poster - even on the school computer, the file was so big eventually after effects kept crashing, so I had to stop adding elements.
Another annoying problem I had was file storage and file size. I worked really hard to keep my file management organized, but the school google drive only has 5 GB on it, which was like 1 or 2 clips max. I got a flashdrive, but it still was not big enough to fit all my project clips on it, which made editing a pain, because I spent a good hour every day I went into the lap just transferring files individually, one by one, from my personal to the the lab computer.
If I were to do this project over, I would have utilized the animated clips that I made in after effects better. I wish I spent more time editing the video in premiere. I definitely could have used the animated characters and symbols MUCH more throughout the video. For example, the feminist girl who blows a kiss at the beginning - I easily could have put her in other places in the video, maybe whispering something to the main character. Same thing with Marilyn Monroe and Frida Kahlo. Or I could have rendered the individual moving flower petals separately and made them pop up throughout the video.
I also wish I had only used the first 2 verses of the song, because there are some sound effects I used in the video that no one could hear. My issue was I didn't want there to be silence during the middle, “gay pill” sequence, but it sounded weird to me transitioning to another song randomly.
Overall, I think my message came through pretty clearly. I wish I had spent more time on the editing so that it highlighted the actual animations that I created more effectively. But I think that most of the problems I have with this piece can be chalked up to me being a beginner who has never used any of this software before.
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