Final Project

Before I start working on this project, the professor told us that this project could be anything we want, it could be anything we think of. I was confused at that moment because there were too many ideas in my mind and I don’t know which one I should pick. But then, professor told me to put 2 things side by side and see if there were any inspirations. At that point, the Mac in front of me was showing a baseball game and next to it there were a piece of news talking about stress. I immediately got an idea about this project, “why don’t we add this two component into a story?” Different ideas came into my mind and I start working on this project.

At the beginning of time, I want to make a video showing the stress batter feel while they are trying to hit the ball and get points for their team. But no matter how hard I had tried, I couldn’t express the excitement of a baseball game with a video of batter hitting the ball, because the impact wasn’t large enough to show by a video. Then I decided to convert the style of this video to separate pictures. And this idea works perfectly fine! As the professor said, if we were wondering if we should try our new idea, the answer is probably yes. But after I change the video to separate pictures, the second problem had come. How could I show the feeling of the batter? No matter pictures or videos, the batter won’t speak or talk about their feeling. Then there were two choices came into my mind, either I record my own voice and paste it to the video, or express the batter’s feeling by words. I struggle between these two ideas for a while and I decided to pick the second choice. It is because I am not a baseball player, things I say might be a slightly different to a real baseball player. Besides, I think words can also leave some space for viewer to imagine, people could apply what their own definition of “stress” into my video. After I decided using words to express the batter’s feeling, I want to enlarge the feeling of stress to viewers. I tried to zoom the word every time the screen changed. So the word “stress” is getting bigger and bigger every second. This also reflects the stress the batter feeling.

After I had done all the works with this video, I review it again and I think it had shown what I want to express with it. The ending might seem unexpectedly to a lot of people but this is what I want to show in this video. In a real baseball game, anything could happened, you might be winning in the first half of the game, but in the second half, the score could be totally different. No one can predict the flow of a baseball game, this is also why baseball is so exciting to watch and to play. For the process of making this video, since I was still learning how to make a video, there may be still some feature lacking in my video, but I really learn a lot from it. Such as the how important the background music is. Through the process, I had changed the background music a few times. Every time I change the music, the feeling of the whole video changed. For example, if we use a soft background music, the phase of the video will slow down, similarly, if use a fast background, the phase of the video will become too fast, which won’t be able to show the mood of a baseball game. Last but not least, by comparing this video to the video I had done in MP5, I feel the improvement of my skills on editing the video, which I really appreciated because I could continue aiming a higher level when I make my next video!