Sarah Chambers SBS 350 | fall 2024

Proposal

Video

Reflection

After watching the interview with the video game archivists on campus, I decided to do an interview. Something short and informal that paid homage to the subject. I asked a few people if they were interested and everyone suggested I interview Susan.

As you can see in my video, Susan is a very cheerful person with many different passions. I wanted to show, not just some of her projects, but the light that she is.

I got a phone tripod from the library since I couldn’t rent a video camera in time. I didn’t have a microphone either, so I asked my dad if I could record with his iPhone and I would use mine to get voice memos.

I set up in her living room and just recorded her responses from one angle. I sent her a handful of questions beforehand so she could think about them. Thankfully, she was able to keep things conversational and relaxed.

Since we shot things from the comfort of her living room, the lighting wasn’t particularly great. There’s a clip of a bench she worked on that’s edited differently colorwise, simply because the lighting was so drastically yellow as opposed to the couch. I regret not getting better lighting, but she practically built the living room. It was only fitting to have it as a backdrop. That said, I had to fiddle around a bit to add more vibrancy to each frame but avoid over-saturation. I was able to set a preset for the project, which allowed for easy application throughout.

Susan has a few dogs; one of which was in the video. There was a bark here and there and more than a little white noise that I had to filter out. Learning how to separate audio changed everything. Because of that, I didn’t have to use my voice memos. When I was adding b-roll footage or stills from her Instagram, I separated the audio and moved the visual clip to another layer. After adding a filler clip and making the original one invisible, I determined whether or not I wanted to keep things as they were.

I relied heavily on the reduce echo and reduce background noise switches. After much tampering, I realized that too much noise canceling would make her voice metallic, which was the last thing I wanted. I also struggled to add a backing track that didn’t overpower her or transition too awkwardly between clips. I’m not too happy with the one I chose, simply because it has a beat that’s somewhat jarring when running under her voice. I attempted to use the auto-drop setting on the music, but it didn’t respond to her speaking clips as consistently as I would have liked. Eventually, I just spliced the background music, changed the volume, and added transitions accordingly.

The only transition I used throughout was dissolve. It applied to audio and images, but I mainly used it for the former. I found that transitioning between her talking and b-roll was better when she took natural breaks in her response. A short breath here or there made it easier to follow a clip change, especially since she punctuated her speech with gestures.

I struggled a lot to find headers for each section break. At first, I wanted to add close captions, but that proved too difficult. Then, the format of some didn’t work as I’d hoped. After much deliberation, I eventually settled on one. To make that section header work, I had to incorporate pitch-black stills. I also had to scroll through her Instagram for some images, format them on my iPad, add credit manually to the bottom of each picture, and add them in Rush.

As far as b-roll footage, I took two clips of my own, (one of her wedding decoration storage and another of a built-in TV element she made), and two from Adobe Stock. I took far more videos than I included, but thankfully was able to meet the length requirements with what I landed on.

It was a 12+ hour long process to make what I hope is a pretty good first video.

Proposal

Website

Reflection

For my project, I decided to make a faux celebrity website for one of my oldest original characters, Evie. I’ve had her in the back of my mind, making up book ideas in my head, for years. She fades in and out of my consciousness, as do my other characters. I chose her specifically because I felt she would be easiest to make into a celebrity. Set in the 1800s, Evie writes lyrics and composes extra parts to existing classical music (i.e. Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”). Her love interest plays piano and sings a bit, too. Using that as inspiration, I made the contemporary, celebrity version of her a renowned classical musician.

I took inspiration from Ariana Grande and Lindsey Stirling’s websites. Stirling was my primary influence since she’s classically inclined. The top bar and homepage for my prototype is very closely modeled after hers, with Evie’s name centered in the middle and tabs to the sides of it. The tour date section was also inspired by her.

Something I had to learn to position things easily was the repeat grid feature. I used this on the tour date section and the tracklists on my album tab. Having equal spacing with the same basic components really helped. I wasn’t able to figure out how to perfectly space things from the borders of the webpage, so I did a lot of eyeballing there.

For my images, I exclusively used Creative Commons. I had a Google Doc where I would copy and paste the suggested citations from CC so I could copy the attached hyperlinks and attribute credit on my prototype. I saved the images to my MacBook and edited all of them to be greyscale. Initially, I just had a few pictures that were greyscale, but I eventually decided to just make it a theme. In some cases, I thought that desaturating the images would make it less noticeable that the models were vastly different people. After all, my character is fictitious, so I don’t have a photoshoot to pull from.

Doing greyscale for the fonts and backgrounds was tricky. I know that I could have made an artboard with specific fonts and colors on it, but I foolishly decided against it. As a result, some of my font conventions for titles and such aren’t super neat. I had to debate over and over again if I should use font x, y, or z and if it should be bold, light, italicized, or underlined. To get the right colors going, I would use the dropper to find specific shades of grey. Some of my layers weren’t the same opacity, which was a trial in and of itself.

The biggest challenge of all, besides spacing, image searching, and formatting, was the user interface. I designed my whole prototype assuming that I could link one component on an artboard to a specific component on another one. Only after I had spent the longest time formatting everything and filling the page up did I realize I couldn’t do that. I could link one specific thing on an artboard to another one, sure, but I couldn’t connect, say, a block of text on my home page to a picture on my bio page. At least, not that I could figure out. So, I ended up making copies of two of my artboards so I could edit them to fit a specific link. By this, I mean that I made a copy of my album tab to make a page solely for the album “Behind the Mask” because my home page is meant to have a link to that content, specifically, rather than the top of the whole album page.

Because of this mix-up, I kept things simple with basic tap transitions. If I had to do this assignment again, I would make sure to plan for it to take a while but also to design things with their interactive purpose in mind. Hover states are something that I’d like to try, along with adding more negative space. I would also make a fake ticket-purchasing webpage, just to pull everything together.

In conclusion, I almost lost my mind making this prototype but I’m proud to have finished it with a guided theme and purpose. There are a lot of places to improve upon, but it’s not the worst foray into Adobe XD.