Heart-warming words

Proposal:

I absolutely love watching animation films, especially the ones made my Disney or Pixar. And whenever I do, I always love discovering memorable quotes within the lines of a character from the movies. They're mostly heart-warming, and for some of them, I actually print them out and hang them on my wall. If you look closely enough, you'll be able to find words that melt your heart; they give you an epiphany, and sometimes they teach you a life lesson that you can never learn from other parts of media.

So what I intend to do here in this module's creative project is to gather up my favorite quotes from famous animation films, and put them together in an interesting fashion. My goal here is to let viewers get goosebumps or even make them cry by looking at my video collage. I have a secondary goal too, which is to enlighten people and make them realize how much you can learn from paying close attention to animation films, which most people think are designed solely for children.

After I'm finished, I'll post this on Youtube and Facebook, where most people are looking for contents like this: something that can heal or give power to them.

Outcome

The final digital remix that you have created. Include a video or audio embed.

Intention

Write about the big ideas behind your project? What are the goals? Why did you make it? What are your motivations?

I absolutely love watching animation films, especially the ones made my Disney or Pixar. And whenever I do, I always love discovering memorable quotes or scenes within the lines of a character from the movies. They're mostly heart-warming, and for some of them, I actually print them out and hang them on my wall. If you look closely enough, you'll be able to find words that melt your heart; they give you an epiphany, and sometimes they teach you a life lesson that you can never learn from other parts of media.

What I intended to do here in this module's creative project is to gather up my favorite quotes from famous animation films, and put them together in an interesting fashion. My goal here is to let viewers get goosebumps, or even make them cry by looking at my video collage. I have a secondary goal too, which is to enlighten people and make them realize how much you can learn from paying close attention to animation films, which most people think are designed solely for children.

Context

Include references and discussion of artists, artworks, movements or aesthetic frameworks/techniques/approaches that inspired your outcome, process or approach. What has informed your outcome? How does your outcome relate to other artists and their work? What ideas, styles, or themes did you draw on any why?

I enjoy watching compilations of “Top saddest moments of Disney films” or “Most memorable scenes from Dreamworks films.” While watching hundreds of them, I noticed that since most of them are meant to move the viewers, the clips tend to be longer than the average time most people are willing to stay focused. I wanted to do improve on this part when I create my outcome of the compilation; I tried to make the clips as short as possible while still delivering the same message to the audience.

Process

Describe how you translated your concept into the outcome. How did you approach the exercise? What were the design choices? What challenges were encountered and how did you resolve them? What ideas did you generate and how did you refine or reject them? What approaches did you reject?

Considering that there are so many famous and great scenes within Disney or Dreaamworks films, it was so difficult to choose the best scenes out of them, since I had only two to four minutes. And even after I chose the best cuts, I had to think of the best way to present these. At first I came up with a bunch of ways and techniques that I’ve seen in many movies or drama. First was to mix in the scenes into a Disney song, and let the audio disappear from the scenes. I’ve seen this technique in a lot of introductory parts of dramas, where the movements of characters are matches with the beat from a single music. Another was to simply line up the best cuts without any music or words. Both approaches seemed very simple and easy to watch for the audience, but I thought this wouldn’t deliver the message, which is to move the audience and impart them with some epiphany in the end.

    So, I chose to incorporate both methods and mix them together.    

Product

Describe the outcome. What did you create, how, etc.? How did you compose your remix? What styles, methods or techniques did you use? What tools and technologies were involved?

I used both iMovies and Premiere Pro to remix the scenes, quotes, images, and a song. I used both because I’ve been using iMovies for a long time so it was fast and easy to deal with simple mixes with it, but I needed Premiere for more complicated and sophisticated implementations and some of the techniques learned from class, like changing volumes of specific parts of scenes to emphasize the quotes, or changing colors within each scene. For most of the simple effects like transitions between two different scenes, adding music, texts, and images in between scenes, fade in and out, or cutting and pasting parts of scenes were taken care of my iMovies.

Instead of simply lining up the scenes I’ve chosen, I inserted an important quote that I thought was worth looking at for 5 seconds, with an image that I thought would best represent each scene, along with an OST from Mulan, “Reflection,” right before each scene. I thought this would let the viewers look at the quote, wonder what it’s about, then watch the actual scene and learn what’s behind those words. I thought this would make them remember the lines more clearly after each scene.

Critique

Critically evaluate the success of your own work. What does your inner critic say about this work? Did you match intent and outcome effectively? (note: use the framing questions to guide your response!)

 I think my final goal for my project, which was to move and heal the audience is fairly well achieved, since a lot of my friends who watched my final work told me it certainly made them almost cry. I also said I had a smaller goal which was to make each scene shorter than most of the videos out there, and I think I’ve achieved that on some level, but not entirely. In order to deliver the message, I needed more than the message itself, so I only managed to fit in 4 scenes, which is a smaller number than what I had planned. I also unconsciously chose the scenes that include babies in them, which might be a subjective criterion for choosing the best scenes. However, as a whole, my video matches what I had intended initially.

Reflection

Briefly outline what you took away from this project. What did you learn? What would you do differently?

I had already created a video in my head that I only needed to implement using the tools I learned in class and online. However it wasn’t as easy as I imagined. Even though my project mostly involves cutting up, mixing and matching, it took a lot of effort to make the whole thing flow. I needed to count how many seconds the viewers would need to read the quote. I also had to give a lot of thought on where exactly I should cut the scenes, especially since most Disney scenes are so well made it’s usually pretty difficult to cut off even a couple of seconds out of them.

These processes made me realize that the remix is not just a remix; it’s an art. Everything depends on how you format things, including where you place the scenes, which parts you cutoff and which you include, what music you choose as a background and such. Depending on your intention, you can make the same video instructional, scary, or funny. This really was a valuable lesson for me, because I always thought remixing is just a waste of time, and only creating from scratch is real production and real art. But after this project, where I spend a lot of time trying to decide on these small points, I learned that that wasn’t true. 

References

Reference and attribute any texts, concepts, ideas or related material that informed but wasn't directly used in the creation of the outcome. 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/azafar/the-definitive-ranking-of-the-102-best-animated-disney-songs?utm_term=.ioOmMp566A#.aszX3BMvve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lC_Xsd2ekkw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzQUKIdBIjU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFmLdk9XQrg

Sources

Cite and attribute any sources you used directly in your project. Document this carefully: be very clear about what media you worked with, where you found it and how/where it was incorporated. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPaTaEN2wxY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mzas1vgcIo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwlwBR1XFB8

Finding Dory Movie Clips - Pixar Animation 2016

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu3qVmBdeZo

https://sacredmargins.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/tumblr_mag5h0o56s1rzjr0zo3_400.jpg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5Cbi_u_aLQ

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120623/quotes