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Final Project Write Up

Final Project Link:

Artist Statement:

"Eulogy for My Spanish" is an animated poem that presents itself like an old heart monitor, exploring themes of death and individual loss of language. I was influenced by Young Hae Chang Heavy Industry's work and their use of simple but effective animation for narration and poetry. Like them, I wanted to have a minimalist feel to my work. However, I experimented with more animation on individual words, as well as used heartbeat and heart monitor sound effects instead of music to go along with the theme of death in the poem. I also used a dark background with white font to give it a more foreboding feeling. The poem is meant to reflect the experience of being Latinx-American and dealing with backlash from Americans for speaking Spanish.

Documentation:

When I first had the idea for the video, I decided to use a poem inspired by another work I had written. Originally, the poem read:

You were every lullaby, every story. You savored the taste of everything you said. You were a song. Melodic. Soft then loud, slow then swift. But still always melodic. Still always continuous. Like crashing waves that fed into each other. Your lilts and rolls were the wind. It was through you that I saw the world. Colorful. Bright
Outside of home, you weren’t welcome.
And it was because of this that I learned to hate you. Because at school I used your lilts and rolls to talk and that was bad. Bad according to my classmates. Bad according to my teachers. I hated them. I hated you.
I tried erasing you from me until I finally built up the audacity to cut you out of my life. To end everything I ever had with you. Pretend like you were never there in the first place even though I could never really have forgotten you completely and, God, how I hated you--
And then you left. Gradually. And I thought I was free. But I could still feel your presence. Ghosts that no matter how much I tried to exorcise never really stopped haunting me.
Now, years later, is when the guilt’s got a hold of me. Not that it matters now, anyway. It’s not like I can just dig you out of my head now that you’re gone.

But I realized the poem would be too long for me to be able to animate it with the limited amount of time and background I had to make the video. So I had to reduce it to:

You were every lullaby, every story. You savored the taste of everything you said. You were a song. Melodic. Soft then loud, slow then swift. But still always melodic. Still always continuous.
It was through you that I learned to see the world. Colorful. Bright
Outside of home, you weren’t welcome.
So I learned to hate you. I hated you.
I tried erasing you from me but I never really forgot you completely and, God, how I hated you--
And then you left. Gradually. And I thought I was free. But I could still feel your presence. Ghosts that no matter how much I tried to exorcise never really stopped haunting me.
And now all I am left with is guilt. Not that it matters now, anyway. It’s not like I can just dig you out of my head now that you’re gone.

When I first started the process of making the video, I decided to use Photoshop to be able to make a glitch effect on the first few frames. As such, moving forward I had to individually animate the words frame by frame, which took me a few days before I could figure out how to do it effectively. It went too fast, was very off-rhythm, and was too subtle in certain parts.


So I went back and fix the timing of the frames, fix some of the animation, and add the rest of the frames. For the animation of the words, animated the ones that I wanted to put the most emphasis on with animations that fit their nature. I then exported the file from Photoshop to an mp4 file.


After I exported the mp4 file, I imported it into Adobe Premiere. I found out later that I should have used After Effects because Premiere is better for video than After Effects. I downloaded some sound files that I imported as well: radio static, heartbeats, and heart monitor beats.


I tried to align the video with the heartbeats and the heart monitor. I also had to split up some of the video in order to get better pacing in the video. I had to quicken the pace of the heartbeat and heart monitor sounds when the pace of the animation got quicker. However, when I did so within Premiere, the pitch got much higher than I wanted it to. So I had to go into Adobe Audition to make sure that the pitches would sound even among the sound bits and imported those into Premiere. I then had to make sure that they matched the pacing of the animation and each other's pacing. Once that was done, I exported the Premiere file to the final mp4 file and uploaded it to Google Drive.

Discussion:

Overall, the experience making this animation was stressful but also rewarding in that after I put weeks' worth of time and effort into it I was taken aback at how much better the video came out than I thought it would. Though at times trying, I did enjoy learning how to do different effects on Photoshop and learning how to use and integrate the three programs. By making so many (and I do mean so many) mistakes while making this project, I learned ways to more effectively use these three Adobe programs which could carry in to my interest in production.

I did enjoy the theme of the work and how well it tied in to the aesthetics of the video. I think that it is interesting for me as a writer to be able to more creatively put stress on words and control at what pace and how the reader is reading the poem. It was a new shift in dynamics that I was unused to and it was fun to explore.

In general, I think it would have been better to use Adobe After Effects rather than Premiere. Also I think it would have been better to upload the frames from Photoshop or make the frames within After Effects so that it would be more editable. I also think that the animation could be done more smoothly if I had more time, so that it wouldn't look so choppy.


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