Final Project

The Soundscapes of Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

This final project took me a great deal of time to complete. In the end, I am proud that I was able to put in so much time, as the final product reflects that exact effort. I remember my first time watching this film and being in awe of the soundscapes used. I wanted to simulate that same feeling and questioning that I had when considering why the director had decided to create such a noticeable soundscape. The same soundscapes are interwove n with the visuals and impact our perception of the world around Riggan. I create a more explorative first half of the video, introducing the audience to the key soundscape of The City, showing various clips of the film, and comparing and contrasting these clips to gain some insight into their significance. Towards the end, I describe the exact feeling of Riggan’s reality becoming a fantasy, where he then dictates what is diegetic.

Epigraph

I am presenting this exercise first, as it was the video I am most proud of, apart from my final project. Initially, I was somewhat dreading the idea of being forced to use captions in my video for an assignment; However, to my surprise, this exercise opened my eyes to a multitude of possibilities to communicate and convey messages to audiences in a creative medium beyond narration. In fact, this exercise enabled me to succeed with my final project in allowing the composition of the video to speak for itself while communicating through captions sparingly. At large, I am extremely pleased with how this video turned out, and I believe its minimalist style enables it to stand out.

Desktop

I was excited to complete this desktop assignment, as I had previously created desktop videos but had yet to be in an academic context. I wanted to imitate the feeling of discovery and simulate this by asking quite broad questions a viewer would wonder about, knowing little about the movie. In fact, the video itself was an attempt to replicate the authentic surprise I experienced learning more about Miles Teller and his past experience that has an uncanny relationship with the car crash sequence of Whiplash. Ultimately, I am quite satisfied with how my attempt to recount my initial discovery turned out.

Multiscreen

Although quite chaotic, I decided to include this video, as I spent a great deal of time sifting through many different films on our Google Drive to think of a film or even a single scene to splice with Whiplash. Then, I came across a scene in The Matrix where Trinity smashes through a glass window. That sound of the glass shattering immediately put the pieces together for me. I would create a Multiscreen between the two sequences, creating a chase sequence spliced together. In the end, this video achieves its purpose of being quite entertaining, which also serves as a good training exercise to improve my multiscreen and masking skills.

Response

This videographic response essay was quite interesting to make, as quite enjoyed thinking of interesting ways to interconnect books with movies. I like the comparisons of history and the liberties taken in film, but obviously this film experiences a number of adaptations. I still think it is fascinating to compare to the source material in order to see how truths have been lost for the sake of dramatisation. The narration for this video was quite fun to do; However, I do believe I am able to be more creative with captions. Although, captions do take a far longer time to complete. It was quite fun to create the highlighter and 3D book effects on Adobe After Effects, but it also took far longer than I expected. Overall, I enjoyed making this response essay to history and how they are depicted in films.